1. Chapter 11 Professor Minnis San Joaquin Delta College
Reading a Poem
Chapter 11
Professor Minnis
San Joaquin Delta College

2. 7 minute write Open your literature book to page 422.
Complete, WRITING ASSIGNMENT ON PARAPHRASING

3. Tips for First Reading a Poem
When you first approach a poem:
Read the poem slowly
Read it at least twice
Read it aloud to yourself
Annotate important words, images, phrases, and sections

4. Tips on How to Read a Poem con’t
If you’re struggling with a poem, try the following:
Examine your beliefs about what poetry should be or do
Rewrite the poem in your own words=paraphrase pg 410
Read with your gut and your brain
Not all poems are logical and/or narrative

5. Close Reading: Step 1 What subject(s) does the poem address?
Who is the speaker of the poem?
What is the poem’s larger context?
What genre or mode of poem are you dealing with?

6. Common Poetic Modes Lyric Narrative Dramatic Lyric Elegy Ars Poetica
associative, vivid language
tells a story
lyric + narrative elements
laments or remembers
explores writing as a subject
Mode can affect our expectations of a poem and the conventions the poet employs (or alters).

7. Close Reading: Step 2 Examine the poem’s form and structure:
Use of closed or nonce form
Stanzaic make-up
Devices like repetition, punctuation, or section divisions
Use of negative vs. positive space
How is the poem put together?

8. Closed Form These forms have set rules for the poet to follow: Sonnets
14 lines
Iambic pentameter
Rhyme scheme:
ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG
Final heroic couplet
Villanelles
5 tercets + 1 quatrain
(19 lines total)
Rhyme scheme:
ABAx5, ABAAx1

9. Closed Form Not sure if the poet used a closed form?
Look for these tell-tale clues:
Number of lines and/or stanzas
Patterns of repetition or regularity
A rhyme scheme
Rhythmic or syllabic patterns (meter)

10. Nonce Form Operate by “rules” the poet creates herself
Nonce form refers to any new form a poet creates for a particular poem.
Nonce forms:
Operate by “rules” the poet creates herself
May seem more irregular at first glance
Can sometimes be highly organic
What does form contribute to content?
Sometimes we can simply say that a poem is in couplets or tercets, etc. However, sometimes, the form a poet employs is more complex and original—perhaps he or she has created a nonce (pronounced nonts) form just for this poem. Try to understand what the “rules” are for the poet’s form. Ultimately, what does the form contribute to the poem, and how does it influence to content?

11. Stanzaic Structure
Stanzaic structures can carry connotations:
Couplets (2) = balance, movement
Tercets (3) = imbalance, religious references
Quatrains (4) = balance, stability
Stanza means room in Italian. Think of each stanza as a room in the house of the poem
When you look at stanzaic structure, be aware that some of these can carry connotations. For example, couplets often facilitate quick leaps from idea to idea and make it easy for the poet to be more associative because there is more white space between stanzas. By comparison, quatrains look heavier on the page and are often, though not always, used for narrative poems or poems that tell a story.

12. More Structural Devices
Repetition
Does the poet use anaphora or refrain?
Is there a repeated word or image?
Are there words/ideas that echo each other?
Example: night, black, dark
Punctuation
Does the poet favor dashes, semi-solons, etc.?
Is there a lack of punctuation?
Here are some other elements of form worth noting in any poem. Examine the poem you’ve chosen for these features. Does the poet employ any of them?
Anaphora: the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of every line.
Refrain: a phrase that is repeated at intervals throughout the poem, as with a song.
If the poet does not use overt repetition, sometimes s/he may use images or words that echo each other. For example, night, black, and dark may all appear in the poem. These words seem to evoke a similar mood, color, and lighting and therefore make echoes across the poem.
As you begin to look more closely at the line level of the poem, pay close attention to punctuation. A poem that has a lot of dashes will have a different tone and rhythm than a poem with semi-solons. Poets like Lucille Clifton often use no punctuation at all. These things can be important clues about the poet’s voice and how s/he wants to reader to read the poem.

13. Positive vs. Negative Space
Both positive space (the text) and negative space (or white space) make meaning in a poem.
White space can:
Emphasize a word or phrase
Give the reader room to pause
Facilitate movement between ideas
White space is unique to poetry, since prose doesn’t use line breaks. White space often creates as much meaning as the text itself, and it can clue the reader in as to how the poet wants the poem to be read, including where s/he wants the reader to pause, etc. Sometimes the poet may break a line in an unexpected place to subvert our expectations.

14. Close Reading: Step 3 Look more closely at line within the poem:
Meter or rhythm within line
Line length and variation
Line break (white space)
Enjambed vs. end-stopped lines
Elements of line can be dictated by form.
Line is an important feature in poetry and bears close examination. You’re probably familiar with meter if you’ve read Shakespeare’s sonnets, which are written in iambic pentameter and have a recognizable rhythm. But line length and variation, as well as whether or not lines are end-stopped or enjambed, influence a poem’s rhythm, speed, and flow a great deal. Let’s consider some of these features in more detail on the next slide.

15. Analyzing Line What to notice: Meter might indicate a closed form
Line breaks influence flow and speed
End-stopped lines slow our reading down
Shorter lines move more quickly
Look for places where form and line change.
As in the case of a Shakespearean sonnet, as we just mentioned, meter can indicate that there is a closed form at work. But sometimes individual lines or sections in a poem can stand out because they are in a strong meter when the rest of the poem is not. Places where rhythm, line, or language suddenly change are important places to pay attention to in any poem.
End-stopped lines are lines in which the end of a sentence coincides with the end of a poetic line. An enjambed line means that the sentence continues on to the next line (i.e. the line break also break sup the sentence). Lines can be enjambed to varying degrees. The more enjambed a line is, the choppier a poem may sound. End-stopped lines tend to slow the reader down since we pause at the end of every line.
If you’re not sure what effect the lines are having in the poem, trying rewriting the poem as prose, or alter the line breaks and read the new version aloud. What changes?

16. William Butler Yeats, THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE, PG411
As a young man in London in 1887–1891, Yeats found himself hating the city and yearning for the west of Ireland. He recalled: “I was going along the Strand, and passing a shop window where there was a little ball kept dancing by a jet of water, I remembered waters about Sligo and was moved to a sudden emotion that shaped itself into ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’” (Memoirs [New York: Macmillan, 1972] 31).
In London (he recalled in his Autobiography), he sometimes imagined himself “living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill.” The nine bean rows of the poem were evidently inspired by Thoreau’s bean patch.

17. Review of Poem
Yeats’s lines provide rich rows of sound to hoe: assonance (from I arise in the first stanza through the o-sounds in the closing stanza), onomatopoeia
(lapping), initial alliteration, internal alliteration (arise, Innisfree; hear,heart’s core).
Sound images of bees, cricket, linnet, and lake water are predominate.
Whatever noises come from roadway or pavement, however, are left unspecified.

18. Historical Connect…
Perhaps, in London, Yeats thought himself one of Ireland’s prodigal sons. At least, A. Norman Jeffares has noticed in the first line an echo from the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:18): “I will arise and go to my father” (A Commentary on the
Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats [Stanford: Stanford UP, 1968] 35).
In later years, according to John Unterecker, Yeats was shocked that “The Lake Isle” had become his most popular poem. He had taken a dislike to its “biblical opening lines.”

19. Pause Go to MyLiteratureLab http://www.myliteraturelab.com/
1. Kennedy notes that Yeats “found himself hating the city and longing for the peaceful west of Ireland.” In what ways does the poem reveal the feelings of the poet? Can you recall a similar longing for a place that seemed far away? How did your imagination influence your feelings about the place?

20. Robert Hayden, THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS, page 413
It appears that years have intervened between the speaker today and his previous self, the observing child. Now the speaker understands his father better, looks back on himself, and asks, “What did I know?”
The poem states its theme in its wonderful last line.
Austere can mean stern, forbidding, somber, but it can also mean (as it does here) ascetic, disciplined, self-denying.
That the father’s life is built on austerity we get from his labor-worn hands. What is an office? A duty, task, or ceremony that someone assumes (or has conferred on him): the tasks of shining shoes, of stirring banked fires in a furnace

21. Form
When read aloud, the opening stanza reveals strong patterns of sound: the internal alliteration of the k-sound in blueblack, cracked, ached, weekday, banked, thanked (and, in the next stanza, in wake, breaking, chronic)—staccato bursts of hard consonants.
Rather than using exact rime at the ends of lines, Hayden strengthens lines by using it internally: banked/thanked (line 5), wake/breaking (6); perhaps off-rime, too: labor/weather (4), rise/dress (8).
Alliteration and assonance occur in clothes cold (2), weekday weather (4).

22. Adrienne Rich, AUNT JENNIFER’S TIGERS, page 414
Rich explains how an artist can put many things into a poem which he or she is not fully conscious of until much later.
Today Rich is universally recognized as the chief poet of American feminism, but that was neither her public image nor her private identity in 1951.
Yet Rich’s feminist perspective had already begun to emerge intuitively in her early poems such as “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.”

23. Robert Browning, MY LAST DUCHESS, page 418
This poem lends itself most of all to a feminist interpretation, as it so powerfully focuses on gender relations. U. C. Knoepflmacher writes about how this poem and Browning's "Porphyria's Lover" both "render the appropriation of a Female Other who is portrayed as elusive and silent" ("Projection and the Female Other: Romanticism, Browning, and the Victorian Dramatic Monologue." Victorian Poetry, Vol. 22, No. 2, The Dramatic "I" Poem (Summer, 1984), pp ).
He argues that the poet, though depicting the lost females through an entirely male perspective, he "actually maneuvers the reader into becoming that suppressed Other's chief ally."

24. Pause My Literature Lab Robert Browning