How to read Poetry Skills Class: Liz Finnigan Accessing Communcations

How can we assess a poem? The Title Always check the title: this is an introduction to the poem. For example, what can we say about Owen’s poem entitled ‘1914’? The title can denote genre/subject/even tone: what about these titles:

Carol Ann Duffy Valentine?

William Wordsworth The Idiot Boy

Edgar Allen Poe The Raven?

Who is the speaker ? The speaker of the poem is very important – why? It delivers perspective; a point of view If you find the speaker it helps you understand what the poem is about Often rendered as pronoun: I, We etc. ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’

The subject ? What is the poem about? – this can be difficult as it may be delivered via metaphor For example, John Keats opens his poem with: Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,/ And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; / Round many western islands have I been / Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Finding the subject How can determine the subject here? – use the title: ‘On First Looking into Chapman's Homer’ Although it can be more obvious: ‘Valentine’ by Duffy: Not a red rose or a satin heart. I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love.

Valentine Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. … Lethal. Its scent will cling to your fingers, cling to your knife.

Aspects of Form Is it traditional? Sonnets for example are typically employed for love. 14 lines broken into an 8 line stanza and then a 6 line (called a Petrarchan sonnet) Think of the rhyme scheme: ab/ ab (heroic couplet) or is it abba/abba etc? What can this mean? This can be for surface features for example: Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred

War broke: and now the Winter of the world With perishing great darkness closes in. The foul tornado, centred at Berlin, Is over all the width of Europe whirled, Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled Are all Art's ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin Famines of thought and feeling. Love's wine's thin. The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled. For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece, And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome, An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home, A slow grand age, and rich with all increase. But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.

Workshop Look at the following poem by and discuss the features we have been looking at today: Title Speaker Subject Form Todays Meet Link:

He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead: W.B. Yeats WERE you but lying cold and dead, And lights were paling out of the West, You would come hither, and bend your head, And I would lay my head on your breast; And you would murmur tender words, Forgiving me, because you were dead: Nor would you rise and hasten away, Though you have the will of wild birds, But know your hair was bound and wound About the stars and moon and sun: O would, beloved, that you lay Under the dock-leaves in the ground, While lights were paling one by one.