Poetry analysis is the process of investigating the form of a poem, content, structural semiotics, and history in an informed way, with the aim of heightening one's own and others' understanding and appreciation of the work.
"[3] A reader analyzing a poem is akin to a mechanic taking apart a machine in order to figure out how it works.
[4] A reader might use the tools and techniques of poetry analysis in order to discern all that the work has to offer, and thereby gain a fuller, more rewarding appreciation of the poem.
Some designs have proven so durable and so suited to the English language that they survive for centuries and are renewed with each generation of poets (sonnets, sestinas, limericks, and so forth), while others come into being for the expression of one poem and are then set aside (Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a good example).
The form has proven especially suited to conveying wit and sardonic humor, as in the opening of Pope's An Essay on Criticism.
Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter arranged in a more elaborate rhyme scheme form a sonnet.
Typically, the octave introduces a situation, idea, or problem to which the sestet provides a response or resolution.
[10] Recognizing this, Shakespeare adapted the sonnet form to English by creating an alternate rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.
Most limericks are humorous, and many are ribald, or outright obscene (possible rhymes that could follow an opening like "There once was a man from Nantucket" are left as an exercise for the reader).
The metre of ‘classical’ poetry is replaced in open verse by cadence in rhythm, line indentation, with pauses implied by the syntax, thus the limiting factor of one human breath was naturally incorporated in the poetry, essential to an oral art form, composed to be read aloud.
[14] Walt Whitman was an important innovator of open form, and he demonstrates its merits in "A Noiseless Patient Spider."
The long, rolling lines—unified, held together like strong cords, by alliteration and assonance—partake of the same nature as the spider's filaments and the soul's threads.
Two balanced stanzas, one describing a spider, the other the speaker's soul, perfectly frame the implicit comparison, with neither being privileged over the other.
Just as the spider and the soul quest outward for significance, the two stanzas throw links to each other with subtly paired words: isolated/detached, launched/fling, tirelessly/ceaselessly, surrounding/surrounded.
William Harmon has suggested that starting an analysis with: "This poem dramatizes the conflict between ..." is a key technique.
The poem opens: He was railing against the prevalent enthusiasm for pastoral poetry above all other forms (as becomes apparent in subsequent verses).
It was particularly prevalent in seventeenth century English but a more recent example is Charles Williams' The Masque of the Manuscript, in which the process of publishing is a metaphor for the search for truth.
For example, the word "sheen" in The Destruction of Sennacherib has stronger connotations of polishing, of human industry, than does the similar "shine".
Other tropes that may be used to increase the level of allusion include irony, litotes, simile, and metonymy (particularly synecdoche).
[19] It thus stands in contrast to poetry in other languages, such as French, where syllabic stress is not present or recognized and syllable count is paramount.
This often makes scansion (the analysis of metrical patterns) seem unduly arcane and arbitrary to English students of the craft.
In the final analysis, the terms of scansion are blunt instruments, clumsy ways of describing the infinitely nuanced rhythms of language.
Nonetheless, they provide a tool for discerning and describing the underlying structure of poems (especially those employing closed form).
The terms for line length follow a regular pattern: a Greek prefix denoting the number of feet and the root "meter" (for "measure"): monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, and octameter (lines having more than eight feet are possible but quite rare).
Analyzing diction and connotation—the meanings of words as well as the feelings and associations they carry—is a good place to start for any poem.
To analyze the poem, the reader must first reassemble these into meaningful units: a brief, evocative image—"a leaf falls"—appearing, like an unbidden thought, in the middle of a word, "loneliness".
The vertical line is dominated by the word "one" (an absolutely appropriate expression of loneliness) and by the letter "l" (which, on the page, looks like the numeral 1... it looks like "one").
At various times and places, groups of like-minded readers and scholars have developed, shared, and promoted specific approaches to poetry analysis.
Although reading aloud to oneself raises eyebrows in many circles, few people find it surprising in the case of poetry.
Poems that read aloud well include: This article is focused on poetry written in English and reflects anglophone culture.