Some of you sensitive and lively idlers seem to feel that teachers have a mysterious ability to understand poetry and that students don't have it. You may feel that poetry is beyond you (or beneath you), and that you don't know where to begin in trying to understand it. Certainly, poetry is complex, multi-layered, and hard to move through at first, and because of this, some of you perhaps have given up trying to understand it yourselves or have simply accepted the teacher's interpretation as the right one. In fact, waiting for teachers to provide answers has probably kept you from developing such skills yourself. The process outlined below will give you enough of those skills to enable you to determine whether you really don't like a poem or whether what you haven't liked is not knowing how to proceed in reading one. These guidelines will help you to understand a poem on your own and to write about it.

I can think of no one who can read a poem for the first time and pick up all the different signals and frequencies emanating from it. Probably no one can accomplish simultaneously all the work necessary for analyzing a poem-- recognizing images, seeing metaphors, deciphering complex words, paying attention to the structure. Those who spend time at it generally need to interpret poems in stages.

The process laid out here will take you through a series of writing exercises that build one on the next. Each writing stage has its own focus, its own work which is used as one means of entry into the complexities of the poem. The purpose of controlling your focus is to keep you from becoming lost in your own bias, in too little attention or in too much attention to detail. Training your eye and your mind in a focused process, through which you gradually accumulate your understanding of the poem, is finally less time-consuming than trying to tackle the whole thing at once. You can arrive at a fuller and more complex understanding of the poem by dealing with it word by word, line by line and fusing your observations gradually into a sense of the whole.

Go through this process carefully, stage by stage. Your success in writing an explication/analysis (and your grade on the paper) will depend in part on how energetically you do these exercises.

EXPLICATION

An explication is an explaining of the poem as you go through it from beginning to end. It is a detailed overview, focusing on specific surface elements: the dictionary definitions of specific words, who the characters are, where and when the poem is taking place. As you're involved in explication, you don't have to worry about what the poem means thematically; that's the domain of analysis.

ANALYSIS

An analysis consists of looking at the poem on the implied level, through its figures of speech. A thorough analysis will look at specific metaphors and images, tracing each strand of the poem's weave as that strand alternatively surfaces and then drops back into the mesh of the poem. Through the act of analysis, you are ultimately attempting to arrive at an overall meaning - a theme. A work of art is something which by its design and inspiration is whole and entire; focusing at the analytical level on metaphors and images always leads you back to the meaning of the complete work.

METAPHOR

A metaphor is a comparison between two things. In the strictest sense of the word, a metaphor is an implicit comparison, an equation which states: A = B, This is that. It is a statement of identity: My love is a red, red rose. In so stating, the author clearly is not making a literal statement. He does not mean, unless he is a flower-fetishist, that his love has petals, a long stem, green leaves, aphids, mildew etc. More likely, he is suggesting that his love has certain qualities common to lovers and flowers: skin soft as petals, breath as sweet as the distillation of a rose's scent, and maybe some thorny qualities as well. When a metaphor is carried out beyond the simple A = B equation, it becomes an extended metaphor.

The second form of metaphor, the simile, is an explicit comparison which uses 'like' or 'as': My love is like a red red rose. With the simile, less is left to the reader's imagination and selectivity. A simile that is extended becomes an analogy: Understanding poetry is very much like learning to play basketball; you have to begin to see the dimensions, the patterns of movement, to read the action, to understand the limits within which it takes place, and you have to be able to dribble to your left.

IMAGE

An image is a descriptive run of words which immediately strikes any or all of the five senses. The reader sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels the object(s) being embodied, described, presented through the language. The reader responds to an image without the intervention of the intellect; that is, the initial response is a 'gut' reaction, an experiential, direct reality, not an intellectually filtered one.

Images work by association. In this excerpt from "The Eve of St. Agnes" by John Keats,

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth and lavendered,
While he from forth the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd
With jellies smoother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrups, tinct with cinnamon,

the reader associates the words she is reading with experiences she has had in the past: smooth, cool linens, sweet-tasting fruits, sticky syrups and other viscous substances. In this way, the image transcends analysis, generating a kind of vision, clarity, compression beyond mere understanding. When you begin to think about an image, however, it starts to become a metaphor because it starts taking on implied meanings and making a subterranean comparison.|

SONNET

A sonnet is a poetic form of specific dimension. All sonnets have 14 lines written in iambic pentameter, which is a rhythm that goes like this: du-duh, du-duh, du-duh, du-duh, du-duh. Sonnets written by Shakespeare are called Shakespearean sonnets. Can you say Shakespearean? I knew you could. Shakespearean sonnets are divided into four separate and distinct sections, even though there are no breaks between the lines. The first three sections are called quatrains; each quatrain has four lines. The last section is called a couplet and has two lines. Get it? A couple of lines, a couplet. Don't call it a coupling. That's what trains do. Each of the quatrains develops a specific idea or image, leading up to the couplet, which usually contains a statement of the poem's theme. In Shakespearean sonnets, the two lines of the couplet always rhyme, which is why we in the fast-paced world of poetry criticism call them rhyming couplets.

More about Sonnets:

The composition of sonnet cycles was a European vogue, an imitation of Petrarch's famous cycles to Laura. The fad reached England not long before l 590; it flourished there to such an extent that some twelve hundred sonnets have survived in print from the last decade of the century. Individual sonnets, translated or imitated from Petrarch or his followers, had of course been published in England earlier, from the time of Wyatt and Surrey on. But the cycle, with a thread of story and a named lady, who usually gave her name--Delia, Idea, Diana, Phillis, or the like--to the series itself, was introduced into England by th publication of Sidney's Astropel and Stella. lt had been written as early as 1582, but until its publication it was known only to a small circle of intimates. Many English poets of the nineties composed sonnet cycles: Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, and a host of minor versifiers.

The conventions of the sonnet cycle offered ample opportunity for poets to display their wit and ingenuity. One of the conventions was a disclaimer of conventionality and a pretense of originality. Standard themes were the lady's coldness and the poet's despair, a blazon or catalogue of the lady's beauties, invocations to sleep, and assertions of the immortality of verse. Some of the sonnet cycles reveal in part an autobiographical narrative or situation, and the lady can be identified with a real person-Penelope, Lady Rich, in Sidney's, and the poet's wife, Elizabeth, in Spenser's. In others the lady is the poet's patroness or even a wholly imaginary figure.

Sidney's Astrophel and Stella is distinguished by its vivid dramatization of moods, its colloquial directness, and its energy. Spenser's cycle Amoretti is notable for its musical qualities, its emblematic imagery, and its deep Platonic and Christian feeling. Drayton's Idea's Mirror strives for originality by drawing images from unusual sources-bookkeeping, the alphabet, celestial numbers-and offers the reader a quite bewildering rhetorical and metaphorical variety.

Shakespeare's series, though it is well within the general tradition of Elizabethan sonnet cycles, is nevertheless in several ways unique. The principal person addressed by the poet is not a woman but a young man; the Dark Lady, when she appears, is vastly different from the Delias and Lelias of Petrarchan sonnets.
More important, the depths of esthetic contemplation in Shakespeare's sonnets are far more profound than we find in any other Elizabethan cycle. The best of these poems could only have been written by the man who wrote Romeo and juliet, Macbeth, and King Lear.

With three exceptions (99, 1 26, and l45) Shakespeare uses the sonnet in the popular English form, first fully developed by Surrey, of three quatrains and a couplet.

SUBJECT

The subject is the main topic of the poem. Generally, poems deal with subjects of univeral human concern, timeless issues such as death, war, love, lust. Subjects of poems can be intensely personal - my parakeet that died, my car that I had when I was sixteen, my breakfast last Thursday - but usually they will generalize to the universal and timeless.

THEME

The theme is the underlying message which the author is attempting, consciously or subconsciously, to deliver about the poem's subject. For instance, if the subject of the poem is war, the theme may be that war is brutal and dehumanizing and should be resisted by persons of character. If you are writing an explication/analysis paper about a poem, the theme of the poem will generally be the thesis of your paper, the focal idea of that paper, and you will develop your paper by showing how the elements of the poem - characters, figures of speech, tone, etc. - help develop that poem's theme.

Poems often have more than one theme, and often many. Your choice of theme sometimes depends on your own areas of interest. For example, if you're a psychology major, you might focus on the message a poem is delivering about the necessity for honest communication between people. If, on the other hand, you are a political science major, you might focus on a sociopolitical message being imparted by the same poem, something about the necessity for people to cooperate on a global scale. Although you have a certain amount of freedom in your choice of theme, it's crucial that the text of the poem support the theme you have posited; if it doesn't, you're imposing upon the poem a meaning which isn't there [and you'll get an F].

GENRE

The genres into which literary works have been classified are numerous, and the criteria for classification have been highly variable; but the most common names still are such ancient ones as tragedy, comedy, epic, satire, and Iyric, plus some relative newcomers like novel, essay, and biography. From the Renaissance through much of the eighteenth century the recognized poetic genres-or poetic "kinds" as they were usually called-were widely thought to be fixed artistic types, somewhat like species in the biological order, and a number of critics applied rules which specified the proper subject matter, structure, style, and effect in each kind. At that time the genres were also commonly ranked in a hierarchy ranging from epic and tragedy at the top to the short Iyric, epigram, and other minor types at the bottom. Shakespeare lampooned pedantic genre-critics in Polonius' catalogue (Hamlet II. ii) of dramatic types: "tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral. . . ."
The development of new literary forms-such as the novel and the miscellaneous poem that combined description, philosophy, and narrative (James Thomson's The Seasons, 1726-1730)-together with the extraordinary rise, in the latter eighteenth century, in the prominence and esteem of the short Iyric poem, and the concurrent shifts in the bases of critical theory, effected a drastic alteration both in the conception and the ranking of the genres. Since the Romantic period, genres have frequently been conceived as convenient but rather arbitrary ways to classify works of literature, and the major criteria for evaluating literature have not been specific to one genre, but applicable to all kinds of works: "sincerity," "intensity," "organic unity," "high seriousness," "maturity," "ironically qualified attitudes," and so on. In much of the recent new criticism, the distinction between the genres has all but ceased to play an essential function in critical analysis and evaluation. [Taken from Abrams GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS]

PERSONA

Persona was the Latin word for the "mask" used by actors in the classical theater, from which was derived the term "dramatis personae" for the characters in a drama, and ultimately, the English word "person," a particular individual. In recent literary discussion "persona" is often applied to the first-person narrator, the "I," of a narrative poem or novel, or the Iyric speaker whose voice we listen to in a Iyric poem. Examples of personae are the visionary first-person narrator of Milton's Paradise Lost (who in the opening passages of various books discourses at some length about himself ); the Gulliver who tells us about his misadventures in Gulliver's Travels; the "I" who carries on most of the conversation in Pope's satiric dialogue Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot; the urbane and genial narrator of Fielding's Tom Jones, who pauses frequently for leisurely discourse with his reader; the speaker who talks first to himself, then to his sister, in Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey"; the speaker who utters Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," from "My heart aches" at the beginning to the ending: "Fled is that music:-Do I wake or sleep?"; and the Duke who tells the emissary about his former wife in Browning's "My Last Duchess." By calling these speakers "personae" (some critics also call them "masks") we stress the fact that they are all part of the fiction, characters invented for a particular artistic purpose. That the "I" in each of these works is not the author as he exists in his everyday life is obvious enough in the case of Swift's Gulliver and Browning's Duke, less obvious in the case of Milton, Pope, and Fielding, and does not seem obvious at all to an unsophisticated reader of the Iyric poems of Wordsworth and Keats, in which we seem invited to identify the speaker with the poet himself. But even these Iyric speakers exist at some remove from the men who wrote the poems, and were devised to play a role in a particular situation and to conduce to a particular effect. In each of the major Iyricists the nature of the persona alters, sometimes subtly and sometimes radically, from one of his Iyrics to the next. The speaker of Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" is very different from that of his "The Flea"; and the "I" in Wordsworth's "We Are Seven" is not identical with that of the "Intimations" ode, and neither of these with the speaker of his "Ode to Duty." [Taken from Abrams GLOSSARY OF LITERARY TERMS]