TP-CASTT: A METHOD FOR ANALYZING POETRY

Title

Examine the title before reading the poem. Consider connotations.

Paraphrase

Translate the poem into your own words (literal/denotation). Resist the urge to jump to interpretation. A failure to understand what happens literally inevitably leads to an interpretive misunderstanding.

Look for:Syntactical units (complete sentence rather than line by

line.)

Find pronouns and identify their antecedents. If there is no antecedent, ask why.

Connotation

Examine the poem for meaning beyond the literal.

Look for:Diction

Imagery (especially metaphor, simile, personification)

Symbolism

Irony (paradox, understatement, oxymoron)

Allusion

Effect of sound devices (alliteration, onomatopoeia,

assonance, consonance, rhyme.

Attitude

Tone – Examine both the speaker’s and the poet’s attitudes. Remember, don’t confuse the author with the persona.

Look for: Speaker’s attitude toward self, other characters, and the

subject.

Attitudes of characters other than the speaker.

Poet’s attitude toward the speaker, other characters and finally toward the reader.

Shifts

Note shift in speaker and attitude.

Look for:Occasion of poem (time and place)

Key words (but, yet)

Punctuation (dashes, period, colons, etc.)

Stanza divisions

Changes in line and or stanza length

Irony (sometimes irony hides shifts)

Effect of structure on the meaning.

Title

Examine the title again, this time on an interpretive level.

Theme

First list what the poem is about (subject), then determine what the poet is saying about each of those subjects (theme). Remember, theme must be expressed as a complete sentence.

CONNECT: Connect the poem to The Lord of the Flies. Create a claim and find warrants from both pieces of text to support your claim.

Fly Poetry

The History Teacher

Billy Collins (1994)

Trying to protect his students' innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly Age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.

And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.

The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
"How far is it from here to Madrid?"
"What do you call the matador's hat?"

The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.

The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,

while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.

Little Fly

William Blake (1794)
Thy summer's play,
My thoughtless hand
Has brush'd away.
Am not I
A fly like thee?
Or art not thou
A man like me?
For I dance

And drink & sing;
Till some blind hand
Shall brush my wing.
If thought is life
And strength & breath;
And the want
Of thought is death;
Then am I
A happy fly,
If I live,
Or if I die.

Mending Wall

Robert Frost (1914)

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.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Whydo they make good neighbours? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Picture of Childhood

Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1963)

Elbowing our way, we run.
Someone is being beaten up in the market.
You wouldn’t want to miss it!
We pick up speed, racing to the uproar,
scooping up water in our felt boots
and forgetting to wipe our sniffles.
And stood stock-still. In our little hearts something tightened,
when we saw how the ring of sheepskin coats,
fur coats, hooded coats, was contracting,
how he stood up near the green vegetable stall
with his head pulled into his shoulders from the hail
of jabs, kicks, spitting, slaps in the face.
Suddenly someone from the right by the handcart
pushed his teeth in,
Suddenly someone from the left bashed his forehead with a
chunk of ice.
Blood appeared-and then they started in, in earnest.
All piled up in a heap they began to scream together,
pounding with sticks, reins,
and linchpins out of wheels.

In vain he wheezed to them: 'Mates,
you’re my mates-what’s the matter? '
The mob wanted to settle accounts fully.
The mob was deaf with rage.
The mob grumbled at those who weren’t putting their boots in,
and they trampled something that looked like a body
into the spring snow that was turning into mud.

They beat him up with relish. With ingenuity. Juicy.
I saw how skillfully and precisely
one man kept putting the boots in,
boots with greasy flaps on them,
right under the belt of the man who was down,
smothered in mud and dungy water.
Their owner, a guy with an honest enough mug,
very proud of his high principles,
was saying with each kick: 'Don’t try your tricks with us! '
booting him deliberately, with the utmost conviction,
and, sweat pouring, with a red face, he jovially called to me:
'Come on, youngster, get in it! '
I can’t remember-how many there were, making a din,
beating him up.
It may have been a hundred, it may have been more,
but I, just a boy, wept for shame.
And if a hundred are beating somebody up,
howling in a frenzy-even if for a good cause-
I will never make one hundred and one!