English 9 / Unit 4: Figurative Language and Poetry
4.6 Analyzing a Poem
Notes
To analyze a poem, look at who speaks, how they feel and how the poem is built.
- Speaker: the voice in the poem (not always the poet).
- Tone: the speaker's attitude (bitter, joyful, nostalgic).
- Enjambment: a sentence runs past the end of a line without a pause. End-stopped lines end with punctuation.
- A shift (or volta in a sonnet) is a change in tone, idea or speaker, often signaled by "but" or "yet."
- Steps: read twice, paraphrase, mark devices, note shifts, then ask how the devices support the theme.
- Example: Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (1916) opens "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," and the speaker reflects on a choice.
Practice
In "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate," the speaker's tone toward the person addressed is:
The speaker praises the person as lovelier than summer.
"I walked along the shore and found / a shell the sea had left behind" The first line continues into the second without a pause. This is:
The sentence runs over the line break.
A poem describes a gray, lonely winter, then the next stanza begins, "But then the robins came," and turns joyful. This change is called a:
A change in tone or idea is a shift.
Ready for more? Take the Unit 4 test.