Poetry is an excellent source of learning for students, but to ensure your students get the most benefit from poetry, check out these top tips on how to analyze a poem.
Education
How to Analyze a Poem
Poetry is an excellent source of learning for students, but to ensure your students get the most benefit from poetry, check out these top tips on how to analyze a poem.
Let’s start with the obvious step. This will help your class engage with the poem’s different elements.
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Tip 1. Read, read, read
Have your students read the poem, but not just once. Allow them to read it once to themselves and then aloud a second time. Have them do this at least twice (perhaps a third time if you’ve got extra time or it’s a difficult poem!) You could also show your students a clip of someone else reading the poem via video or voice recording.
Afterward, discuss the first impressions and immediate responses with your class. These should be both negative and positive. You should also discuss the poem’s rhythm and structure. You could consider whether the poem moves fast and, if so, why? Or are the lines shorter and meant to be read abruptly or slowly?
Tip 2. Does the title have meaning?
The next step is to think deeper about the title and why it was chosen, including how it relates to the poem. Titles usually provide a gateway or clue into the heart of a poem.
Consider these three questions:
- Does the title change how you think about the poem?
- Does the title imply multiple possibilities?
- Does the poem’s title create a picture that gives specifics of the poem: action, setting, or a time frame?
Tip 3. Imagine the speaker
Sometimes a poem can appear more tangible to students when they understand that a speaker is at the center of the poem. It helps them imagine a person behind the text.
Questions to consider for this step include:
- Who is the person telling the poem?
- Does the poem provide any indications or clues about the personality of the speaker, or the gender, age, etc.?
- Does the speaker seem detached or attached to what is being said?
- Who is the speaker addressing?
Tip 4. Set the mood and tone
After you have explored the different elements of the speaker, it’s now important to address the overall mood or attitude of the poem. It could be romantic, grieving, brooding, or some poems may rhyme or even covey a song. Explore the different attitudes given by the characters or speakers within the poem and talk about different areas within the poem when the tone may switch. Discuss why this happens.
During this period, it’s a good time to discuss how certain words can affect us.
Tip 5. Open the poem: break it down into pieces
After discussing tone, speaker, figurative language, and mood – there’s no better time than to apply these elements line by line.
It’s time to break things down into little pieces. Remember, it’s not about condensing or skipping lines. It’s important to lead your students line by line and help translate any unclear areas within the poem. This will help with the overall analysis of the poem at a later stage.
Tip 6. What’s the poem about? Is there a theme?
Finally, the last step we are going to look at when it comes to analyzing a poem is the theme. This is when you get to the poem’s core and consider what it’s actually about.
The overall theme will relate to conflict, universal truth, or issue, and there are a few things to help your students determine this:
- Who is the speaker?
- What is the subject?
- What is the specific situation?
- What is the mood?
Does the poem ring true? (Do you agree or disagree?)
These tips will give your students the best tools for analyzing any poem. Poetry can be expensive, and as a teacher, sometimes all the resources needed for students aren’t readily available.
If you want to raise money for resources in your classroom, try Classful.com. Classful is a fundraising platform for teachers to help improve their students’ education. Sign up today for more information.
