A Modest Guide to the Elements of Poetry

A modest guide to the elements of poetry

Theme: this is “an idea or intellectually apprehensible meaning inherent and implicit in a work” (DiYanni 754). In other words, a theme is a particular meaning you might identify in a poem. There is rarely only one theme, as poems are complex. Poems can be interpreted from many different angles (as our powers of perception are equally complex).

Voice: Speaker: this is the perspective from which the poem was written (don’t always assume this is the

poet’s voice). A poem can be written from the perspective of a child, a servant, a criminal, a king, a soldier, a cynic, a naïve fool, a sap . . . the list goes on. You can tell something about the speaker of the poem by the language used (diction), the syntax, and content of the poem.

Tone: this is the implied attitude of the speaker. The tone of the poem might be ironic, bitter, mournful, humorous, joyous, innocent. The tone comes from the speaker and can be identified by the diction, by the imagery, etc. Consider the tone of these lines “I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back/She’s all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!” in Corso’s “Marriage” (3.30-31). The tone invoked by the “corny men” is leering, intrusive, sexual. The tone created by speaker thinking this line is critical, disgusted.

Diction: This is word choice. Words have more than a denotative definition (literal). They have connotations, associations that emerge from our cultural use, from their placement in context. These are the suggestions of the words. Both denotations and connotations are important in a poem. In “My Papa’s Walz,” for example, the word “beat” in “You beat time on my head” might just mean “to mark rhythm,” but in the context of the poem, “beat” connotes violence (4.1).

Imagery: this is specific detail that appeals to our senses (touch, taste, smell, remember, etc.). These are usually collected in a pattern of images—the whole poem may be trying to invoke a particular image, in fact. In H.D.’s “Heat,” imagery that turns on our sense of touch is dominant: “O wind, rend open the heat,/cut apart the heat,/rend it to tatters” gives us the tactile imagery of cutting, of the wind as a knife (1.1-3). “Fruit cannot drop/through this thick air--/that presses and blunts/the points of pears/and rounds the grapes” give us an opposite tactile image, round and smooth feelings (2.3-6). The sharp and blunt images offer the contrast between the wind and the heat H.D wants to explore (note that she could have described the wind as “smooth” and heat as “sharp” to invoke a different set of images and associations!).

Figures of speech: When we talk about figurative language, we mean “something other than the actual meaning of the words” (709). There are many specific types of figures of speech, like synecdoche (describing something by a part of it, like “lend me your ear”), hyperbole (exaggeration, like “it took me a million years to write this paper), metonymy (substituting an attribute or related object for a thing itself, like “we must remember the victims of ’911’”), and personification (giving an inanimate object the behavior or feelings of a person, like “my computer is misbehaving”).

Similes and metaphors: the “making of connections between normally unrelated things” (DiYanni 709). Similes, usually using like or as, make an explicit comparison. “My son stretched like a cat” creates a very specific connection—I want you to see no other aspect of my son as catlike but his stretching. Metaphors tend to leave more room for further connection because they are more implicit: “my son, the cat, stretched out his arms” makes you think that my son is catlike in many ways—you might think of him as a lover of sleep, as sly, as independent, as fickle. In “My Papa’s Walz,” “But I hung on like death” is a simile guiding us to see the child with a “death grip” on his father (1.2). However, we might see an extended metaphor at work in that poem as well: “dancing” and all related images could really mean beating.

Sybolism: a symbol is “an object or action that represents something beyond itself” (DiYanni 715). This tends to go beyond just a word. In “The Naming of Parts,” we see this: “The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers;/They call it easing the Spring” (4.23-24). Here the bees’ behavior can mean something other than just pollination. These images are symbolic of the less tactful human “wooing” behavior. Further, the imagery (visual), along with the idea that this is “easing the Spring” brings up the common symbols of springtime: sexuality, love, youth, life. Of course, if paired with the other side of the poem (the naming of parts of a gun, where they are instructed to slide the breech back and forth, “easing the spring”), “easing the Spring” can symbolize “life” in one context and “death” in the other (4.22, 4.24).

Allegory: this is a form of narrative where there is a “strict system of correspondences between details of action and a pattern of meaning.” There is great authorial purpose in allegory—often he/she wants you to get the exact meaning, while symbolism can be more open ended in possibilities for interpretation. Where “The Naming of Parts” is a symbolic poem (we can come up with many different meanings for the gun parts and the natural descriptions), “Because I could not stop for Death,” could be seen as allegorical because each detail expressly represents some specific thing (e.g. “We paused before a House that seemed/A Swelling of the Ground--/The Roof was scarcely visible--/The Cornice—in the Ground” makes an allegorical comparison of a house and a grave site (5.17-20). Dickinson really means us to see it this way.

Syntax: This is word order. Think of the significant difference between how Frost wrote the line “Whose woods these are I think I know” and he could have written it: “I think I know whose woods these are” (1.1). There is a difference in the flow of the writing, in emphasis (in the real version, the emphasis is on the woods, while in second example the emphasis is on the ‘I’”), in its lyrical sound, and in the possibilities of rhyme-scheme!

Rhyme, Alliteration and Assonance: Although some scholars call “alliteration” any matching of sounds, “assonance” the matching of vowel sounds, and “consonance” the matching of consonant sounds, DiYanni calls “alliteration” the matching of consonant sounds exclusively. Example: “He gives his harness bells a shake/To ask if there is some mistake./The only other sound’s the sweep/Of easy wind and down flake” (3.9-12). There is assonance created by the vowels in “shake” and “mistake” and “flake,” but also between “sweep” and “easy.” There is alliteration created by the “s” in “some” and “mistake,” “sound’s” and “sweep.”

Rhythm is complex. See your book and below.

Structure:

Closed form: poetry in closed form is fixed, restrained by a tradition of form, usually guiding its rhyme and meter. For example, English sonnets, traditionally, are in iambic pentameter (each line has five “feet”—beats, really), with each foot an iamb (accent in each foot is on the second of two syllables), and have an “abab, cdcd, etc.” rhyme scheme (meaning the first and third lines rhyme, the second and forth lines rhyme, etc.), until the last two lines, which have a “gg” rhyme scheme (the last two lines form a couplet—they rhyme). Here are two sample lines from a Shakespearean sonnet: “That time of year thou may’st in me behold/When yellow leaves or none, or few, do hang” (1.1-2). Note the rhythm and rhyme of these two “closed form” lines.

Open/free form: for our purposes, let’s lump these two together. Free form does not mean that the writer is too lazy to create form and rhyme. On the contrary, the writer is very careful to use form to create a very specific effect in his/her poem. In “When I heard the learn’d astronomer,” Whitman uses long, drawn-out lines, dense language, and complex grammatical formations to symbolize the complexity and clutter of the lecture the speaker is attending. When the speaker moves outside to look at the stars, the form of the poem shifts, becoming airy, simple, lyrical. Open or free form lets poets use every devise at their disposal to create specific effects. One only has to see e.e. cummings’ “l(a” to see how far a poet might take free form!