1. Poetry Analysis Essay
Introduction

2. Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins
Denotation/Connotation
Voice/Tone
Irony
Imagery
Figurative Language
Simile
Metaphor
Personification
Symbol
Sound/Structure
Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance, Rhyme
Rhyme & Rhythm
Limericks
Haiku
Meter
Monometer
Dimeter
Trimeter
Tetrameter
Pentameter
Hexameter
Heptameter
Octometer
Iambic
Formal Verse
The Sonnet
Blank verse
Free or Open form verse
Theme
Explication
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

3. Connotation/Denotation
Denotation- Dictionary Definition
Connotation- your own definitions for familiar wards are flavored with person associations
Thin
Denotation- with little thickness or depth
Connotation
Positive- slim, slender, lean, trim, slight
Negative- skinny, bean pole, scrawny, bony, emaciated

4. Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins
Denotation/Connotation
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

5. Voice/Tone
Tone- The author’s attitude towards a subject of the poem.

6. Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins
Voice/Tone
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

7. Irony Irony- contrast between appearance/expectation and reality
Verbal irony- sarcasm- contrast between what is said by the speaker and what is meant
Situational irony- contrast between what is expected and what actually happens.

8. War is Kind by Stephen Crane
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
Denotation/Connotation
Voice/Tone
Irony
War is Kind by Stephen Crane

9. The Word ‘Plum’ by Helen Chasin
Imagery
The Word ‘Plum’ by Helen Chasin
The word plum is delicious
pout and push, luxury of self-love, and savoring murmur
full in the mouth and falling like fruit
taut skin pierced, bitten, provoked into
juice, and tart flesh
question and reply, lip and tongue of pleasure.
Imagery- mental picture prompted by words. Appeals to the 5 senses: sight, smell, touch, hearing, tasting

10. Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins
Imagery
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

11. Figurative Language: Simile
A Dream Deferred
By Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Simile- an announced comparison. It is announced because we use words like and as.

12. Figurative Language: Simile
Simile by N. Scott Momaday
What did we say to each other that now we are as the deer who walk in single file with heads high with ears forward with eyes watchful with hooves always placed on firm ground in whose limbs there is latent flight 
Simile- an announced comparison. It is announced because we use words like and as.

13. Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins
Figurative Language
I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch. I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.
Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

14. Figurative Language: Metaphor
Fog
By Carl Sandburg
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Metaphor: a more direct or more complete comparison than a simile. It doesn’t announce itself; it states that something is something else (My love is a red rose) or implies it (My love has red petals and sharp thorns).

15. Figurative Language: Personification
Personification- giving human characteristics or qualities to something not human.
A frequently used form of metaphor
The Wind By James Stephens The wind stood up and gave a shout. He whistled on his fingers and Kicked the withered leaves about And thumped the branches with his hand And said that he'd kill and kill, And so he will and so he will.

16. Figurative Language: Symbol
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
Symbol- something that represents more than itself
The Road Not Take by Robert Frost

17. Sound & Structure: Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance
Assonance: repeated vowel sounds in the middle of the end of words.
Don’t Rhyme
Example: time line
Example: Fleet feet sweep by sleeping geese
Alliteration- Repeated initial (beginning of the word) consonant sound.
Example: “Dreams deferred”
Example: “Sally sells seashells down by the seashore.”
Consonance: repeated constant sounds in the middle of the end of words.
Don’t Rhyme
Example: short, smart, sweet
Example: In "The Raven", Edgar Allan Poe writes "And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain”

18. Sound & Structure: Rhyme Scheme
Poem:
Rhyme Scheme:
Explanation:
Roses are red
Violets are blue
Sugar is sweet
And so are you
First line always gets
Blue doesn’t rhyme with red so it gets
Sweet doesn’t rhyme with red or blue so it gets
You rhymes with blue so it gets
But you are not
Not doesn’t rhyme with red, blue, or sweet so it gets
But now they are dead
Because of you
Dead rhymes with red so it gets

19. Sound & Structure: Limericks
Light and humorous
Almost always anonymous
Five lines
aabba rhyme scheme
1st, 2nd, & 5th lines have the same meter
3rd and 4th lines have the same meter
There was a young maid who said, “Why Can’t I look in my ear with my eye? If I put my mind to it, I’m sure I can do it. You can never tell till you try.

20. Sound & Structure: Haiku
Sophisticated
Relies on sound
Japanese
Short section of a longer poem called a haikai
3 lines
1st line has 5 sounds/syllables
2nd line has 7 sounds/syllables
3rd line has 5 sounds/syllables
Doesn’t rhyme
Whether astringent I do not know. ‘Tis my first Persimmon picking.

21. Sound & Structure: Meter
Meter- refers to the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line.
Foot- the group of syllables making up one metrical unit
Iambic- unstressed, stressed
trochaic- stressed, unstressed
Anapestic- two unstressed, one stressed
Dactylic- one stressed two unstressed
Monometer- one foot
Dimeter- two feet
Trimeter- three feet
Tetrameter- four feet
Pentameter- five feet
Hexameter- 6 feet
Heptameter- 7 feet
Octameter- 8 feet

22. Sound & Structure: Stanzas
Couplet- 2 lined stanza
Rhymed couplet- successive rhyming lines- aa
Tercet- 3 lined stanza
Triplet- 3 successive rhyming lines- aaa
Quatrain- 4 lined stanza
Quintain, a quintet, or a cinquain- 5 lined stanza
Sestet- 6 lined stanza
Septet- 7 lined stanza
Octave- 8 lined stanza

23. Sound & Structure: Formal Verse- The Sonnet
14 lines long
Iambic pentameter
English/Shakespearean
3 quatrains followed by a couplet.
Rhyme scheme- ababcdcdefefgg
Italian/Petrarchan
Octave followed by a sestet
Rhyme scheme:
octave- abbaaabba
Sestete- cdecde, or cdcdcd or cdedce

24. Sound & Structure: Blank Verse
Mending Wall by Robert Frost
* Just the first 4 lines
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground- swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast
Unrhymed, but still followed a regular pattern, usually iambic pentameter

25. Sound & Structure: Free or Open Form Verse
Doesn’t have a rhyme scheme nor a regular rhythm.
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
By Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

26. Interpretation: Theme
the meaning the reader receives from the poem.
Gives insight to human nature.

27. Interpretation: Explication
Explication- involves a line- by-line analysis of the text
Good for poetry since they are brief and packed full of meaning.
Look closely at the sounds, words, images, lines, and how they all work together to deliver the poem’s meaning.
Not a summary or translation
It is a detailed interpretation of how and what you believe the poem means.

28. Types of Poetry: Lyrical
An expression of the speaker’s innermost feelings, thoughts, and imagination.
Most popular
Dramatic monologues are often lyrical

29. Types of Poetry: Narrative
Tells a story
Oldest stories were recorded as poetry because they rhythm and rhyme made it easier to memorize.
Unless an epic poem, like the Odyssey or Ellen Hopkins’ novels, character and conflict development are limited.
Casey at the Bat by EL Thayer ges/pdf/casey.pdf

30. Additional questions and checklist to guide your essay on page 91, 93-94