CRITICAL
ANALYSIS OF POETRY/ ELEMENTS OF POETRY
1.
Speaker
(Voice):
One
who speaks; the voice we hear in the poem. Many times in poetry, personal
feelings and thoughts are expressed in first person. However, just as the
authors of novels do not necessarily feel and think the same things as their
characters, poets who use “I” in their poems may not be speaking for
themselves.
The
poet is usually the speaker in subjective and narrative poetry, as in John
Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ and William
Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’; whereas, in dramatic poetry, such as ‘Macbeth’,
‘My Last Duchess’ it is the characters who speak.
2.
Setting:
‘Setting’
means the place and the time of the action of the poem.
Setting
may be rural or urban. For example, the Romantic poetry of Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats has got rural and natural setting; whereas,
the Neo-classical poetry of John Dryden and Alexander Pope has got the urban
and artificial setting.
Setting
may be clearly stated or subtly implied. For example, in ‘The Extasie’ by John
Donne the setting is clearly stated. But in Donne’s religious poems the setting
is subtly implied.
3. Structure:
‘Structure’
means the thematic structure or internal sequence or flow of ideas and thoughts
or feelings and emotions in a poem. It comprises conflicts, ambiguities and
uncertainties, the tensions in the poem, as these give clear guides to the
direction of meanings in the poem, the poem's 'in-tensions'.
Sometimes
‘Structure’ corresponds ‘Pattern’ or ‘Formal Structure’. For example, in William Wordsworth’s sonnet
‘The World is too much with Us’ the first eight lines (called ‘octave’) that we
are always occupied with the business of earning money and spending it and that
we have no time to look around us and appreciate the beauty of Nature. The last
six lines strike the note of revolt. The poet would prefer to be a pagan like
ancient Greeks and Romans than what he is now because he would at least have
the glimpse of the beauty in Nature.
4. Subject:
It’s
possible to have a poem which is just a random collection of sounds — or even a
carefully constructed collection of sounds — but 99% of poetry has a subject.
The subject is what the poem is about —or, at least, the starting point.
Quite
often the clue is in the title. John Keats’s ‘To Autumn’ is, very obviously, about
Autumn. Some poems are slightly
more cunning. Browning’s My Last Duchess is
about a murder. Generally, though, one doesn’t have to look far to find the
subject.
The
subject of William Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘The World is too much with Us’ is
clearly expressed in the opening lines which is the same as its title.
5.
Theme:
The
theme is what the poem is ‘really’ about. ‘Theme’ means the central idea or the
point of view or the message of the poem. Sometimes the theme is
also called the motif. It’s been said that all serious poetry is about God, sex
(or love) and death, and that great poetry is often about more than one of
them.
Theme
can also be defined as the comment about life a writer makes through his or her
work. A subject might be "love," but "love" is not a theme
("love" does not convey a "comment about life"). Instead, a
theme might be "love can save us from our past and give us a new
future." That's a comment about life.
The
subject of Blake’s ‘Tiger Tiger’
is, on the surface of it, a Tiger. But when we consider it further, it becomes clear
that the poet is really interested not in the Tiger, but in the ‘immortal hand
or eye’ that created it—in other words, God.
The
subject of John Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ is
‘Fall of Man’.
A
theme in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is the difficulty of
correlating the ideal and the real.
6. Tone:
The
tone of a poem is roughly equivalent to the mood it creates in the reader. It
refers to the writer's attitude towards the subject of a literary work as
indicated in the work itself.
One
way to think about tone in poetry is to consider the speaker's literal
"tone of voice": just as with tone of voice, a poem's tone may
indicate an attitude of joy, sadness, solemnity, silliness, frustration, anger,
puzzlement, etc.
The
tone may be based on a number of other conventions that the poem uses, such as
meter or repetition. If a poem is depressing, that may be because it contains
shadowy imagery. Tone is not in any way divorced from the other elements of
poetry; it is directly dependent on them."
All that said, think about how you feel when you read the poem, and that would be the author's tone.
All that said, think about how you feel when you read the poem, and that would be the author's tone.
7. Diction:
It refers
to both the choice and the order of words. It has typically been split into
vocabulary and syntax.
The basic
question to ask about vocabulary is "Is it simple or complex?"
Another important point about the vocabulary it carries two types of meanings -
’denotation’ (dictionary meaning) and ‘connotation’ (the meanings that a word
suggests in a particular context). For example, the word ‘home’ by denotation
means only a place where one lives. But by connotation it suggests security,
love, comfort, and family. Often words connote (carry contextual meanings)
strikingly in a poem. The connotative meaning of a word is based on
implication, or shared emotional association with a word. Connotations are important in
poetry because poets use them to further develop or complicate a poem's
meaning.
The basic
question to ask about syntax is "Is it ordinary or unusual?" Taken
together, these two elements make up diction. When we speak of a "level of
diction," we might be misleading, because it's certainly possible to use
"plain" language in a complicated way, especially in poetry, and it's
equally possible to use complicated language in a simple way. It might help to
think of diction as a web rather than a level: There's typically something
deeper than a surface meaning to consider, so poetic diction is, by definition,
complex.
8. Feeling or Emotional Response:
What
emotions does the poem evoke within the reader? Is it pity, indignation, laughter,
sympathy or surprise? With his words, the poet conveys
what he feels or felt. The readers have to understand the depth of what he is
going through. A poem is essentially about the emotions of the poet. Readers
with differing backgrounds would react to the same poem in different ways. Each may see a different thing in the poem.
The
reader’s response to Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ may be sympathy with the
poet for being ‘forlorn’ or ‘sickness’ of this world:
‘Where
but to think is to be full of sorrows and leaden-eyed despair’
9.
Imagery:
Imagery
means language through the experience of sense. Image is language that evokes
one or all of the five senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, touching.
An
image can appear by the stroke of a single word, in the rush of a phrase, in a
line or a group of lines; it may even be the entirety of a short poem.
Essentially, imagery is a word or group of words that creates a mental image.
It creates mental images about a poem’s subject. For example: “Continuous as the stars that
shine and twinkle on the milky way”.
The
word "image" suggests most obviously a visual image, a picture, but
imagery also includes vivid sensory experiences of smell, sound, touch, and
taste as well. Most imagery, however, is visual. About 90% of it. Imagery goes
beyond mere description to communicate an experience or feeling so vividly that
it encourages the creation of images in the mind of the reader and readers
experiences for themselves the specific sensations that the poet intends.
An
image may be literal (without figurative language) or figurative (involving the
use of simile, metaphor, synecdoche, etc). Literal images appeal to our sense
of realistic perception, like a nineteenth-century landscape painting that
looks "just like a photograph." Figurative images appeal to our
imagination, like a twentieth-century modernist portrait that looks only
vaguely like a person but that implies a certain mood.
Literal images saturate Samuel Coleridge's poem, "Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream":
Literal images saturate Samuel Coleridge's poem, "Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream":
So twice five miles
of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And there were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. (lines 6-11)
A figurative image begins T. S. Eliot's famous poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And there were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. (lines 6-11)
A figurative image begins T. S. Eliot's famous poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
To see the evening in the way Prufrock describes it requires an imaginative leap: He's doing much more than setting the scene and telling us that it's nighttime. We are encouraged to see stars, to feel the unconscious and infinite presence of the universe, but these things are only implied. In either case, poetic imagery alters or shapes the way we see what the poem is describing.
An image may be:
“The whiskey on your breath / Could make a small boy dizzy”
(Theodore Roethke)
2)
Tactile: It
stimulates the sense of touch (for example hardness, softness, wetness, heat,
cold); e.g.
“…the sedge is withered from the lake
And no bird
sings”
(John Keats: ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’))
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”
(Robert Frost: ‘The Road Not Taken’)
4)
Gustatory: It
imagery stimulates the sense of taste; e.g.
“O, for a draught of vintage! that hath
been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green”
(Keats': Ode to a Nightingale’)
A.
‘the sweep of
easy wind and downy flake’
B.
“A voice so
thrilling ne’er was heard
In spring time from the cuckoo bird”
(William
Wordsworth: The Solitary Reaper”)
6)
Kinesthesia: It
recreates a feeling of physical action or natural bodily function (like a
pulse, a heartbeat, or breathing) ;e.g.
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
(Eliot:
‘Love Song’)
7)
Synaesthesia:
It involves the use of one sense to evoke another (Ex: loud color; warm
gesture) ; e.g.
"Sunburnt mirth"
and "beaded bubbles winking at the brim"
(Keats': Ode to a Nightingale’)
8)
Abstract: It
pertains to
the intellect.
It refers to things that are intangilble, that is, which are perceived not
through the senses but by the mind, such as truth, God, education, vice,
transportation, poetry, war, love. e.g.
“More happy love! more happy,
happy love
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd”
(Keats':’Ode on a Grecian Urn’)
A
poet employs imagery when he sets up an image—or picture—in the reader's mind.
Metaphors and similes are the simplest form of imagery because they set up
images in the reader's mind. " He is a rat" is a metaphor; "he
is like a rat” is a simile
Imagery
may be used on a bigger scale than that of the single metaphor or simile. In
Tennyson's Crossing the Bar we have an
excellent example of imagery on a large scale:
Sunset
and evening star.
And
one clear call for me!
And
may there he no moaning of the bar,
When
1 put out to sea.
The
tide bearing a boat out to sea is the image of death carrying Tennyson's soul
from life into the world after death. The harbour bar is the division between
life and death.
Figurative
language uses "figures of speech" - a way of saying something other
than the literal meaning of the words. For example, "All the world's a
stage"
11.
Versification:
The
art of making verses, or the theory of the phonetic structure of verse. In English language it consists of the phonetic characteristics or elements of
verse, such as metre, rhythm, rhyme and pattern and poetic kind or genre.
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