Poetry analysis is the process of investigating the form of a poem, content, structural semiotics, and history in an informed way, with the aim of heightening one's own and others' understanding and appreciation of the work.
The words poem and poetry derive from the Greek poiēma (to make) and poieo (to create). One might think of a poem as, in the words of William Carlos Williams, from Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams, copyright © 1954 by William Carlos Williams a "machine made of words." A reader analyzing a poem is akin to a mechanic taking apart a machine in order to figure out how it works.
There are many different reasons to analyze poetry. A teacher might analyze a poem in order to gain a more conscious understanding of how the poem achieves its effects, in order to communicate this to their students. A writer learning the craft of poetry might use the tools of poetry analysis to expand and strengthen their own mastery. A reader might use the tools and techniques of poetry analysis in order to discern all that the work has to offer, and thereby gain a fuller, more rewarding appreciation of the poem. Finally, the full context of the poem might be analyzed in order to shed further light on the text, looking at such aspects as the author's biography and declared intentions, as well as the historical and geographical contexts of the text (though Formalism would deny any significant analytical value for context).
Overview Meter and Rhyme One can derive pleasureLouise Bogan, 'The Pleasures of Formal Poetry', in Reginald Gibbons (ed.), The Poet's Work: 29 Poets On The Origins And Practice Of Their Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979) from two of the most fundamental tools in the poet's toolbox—meter and rhyme—without necessarily knowing a lot of terminology. Consider, for example, the first stanza of Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib":
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Byron's use of meter and rhyme is especially evident and rewarding when one reads the lines out loud. The lines have a powerful, rolling, and very evident rhythm, and they rhyme in a way that is impossible to ignore. In other words, the physicality of the language—how it sounds and feels—accounts for a large measure of the poem's effect. The poem does not have a deep, hidden, symbolic meaning. Rather, it is simply pleasurable to read, say, and hear.
Critical terminology becomes useful when one attempts to account for why the language is pleasurable, and how Byron achieved this effect. The lines are not simply rhythmic: the rhythm is regular within a line, and is the same for each line. A poem having a regular rhythm (not all poems do) is said to follow a certain meter. In "The Destruction of Sennacherib," each line has the basic pattern of two unstressed syllables followed by a third stressed syllable, with this basic pattern being repeated four times in a line. Those basic patterns are called feet, and this particular pattern (weak weak STRONG) is called an anapest. A line with four feet is said to be in tetrameter (tetra-, from the Greek for four). Therefore, this poem is written in anapestic tetrameter. (This process of analyzing a poem's rhythms is called scansion.) The poem also rhymes (not all poems do), and the rhymes follow a pattern (they do not have to). In this case, the rhymes come right next to each other, which emphasizes them, and therefore emphasizes the sound, the physical nature, of the language. The effect of the poem's language derives in part from Byron's choice of an appropriate pattern of rhyme (or rhyme scheme): these adjacent, rhyming lines are called couplets. The sound, the physical nature, of the language is also emphasized by alliteration, as in the repetition of s sounds in the third line: "And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea".
Tools
Poetic forms Poems can have many forms. Some forms are strictly defined, with required line counts and rhyming patterns, such as the sonnet (mostly made of a 14-line poem with a defined rhyme scheme) or limerick (usually a 5-line free rhyme poem with an AABBA rhyme scheme). Such poems exhibit closed form, meaning they have strict rules regarding their structure and length. Others (which exhibit open form) have less structure or, indeed, almost no apparent structure at all. This appearance, though, is deceptive: successful open form poems are informed throughout by organic structure which may resist formal description but is nonetheless a crucial element of the poem's effect on the reading mind.Free Verse - Definition and Examples | LitCharts
Closed forms A poet writing in closed form follows a specific pattern, a specific design. Some designs have proven so durable and so suited to the English language that they survive for centuries and are renewed with each generation of poets (sonnets, sestinas, limericks, and so forth), while others come into being for the expression of one poem and are then set aside (Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a good example). from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., renewed 1951, by Robert Frost
Of all closed forms in English prosody, none has demonstrated greater durability and range of expression than blank verse, which is verse that follows a regular meter but does not rhyme. In English, iambic pentameter is by far the most frequently employed meter. Among the many exemplary works of blank verse in English are Milton's Paradise Lost and most of the verse passages from Shakespeare's plays, such as this portion of a famous soliloquy from Hamlet:
To be, or not to be—that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep — No more, and by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep, To sleep—perchance to dream. Aye, there's the rub.
Note that Shakespeare does not rigidly follow a pattern of five iambs per line. Rather, most lines have five strong syllables, and most are preceded by a weak syllable. The meter provides a rhythm that informs the line: it is not an invariable formula.
Rhymed pairs of iambic pentameter lines form the heroic couplet. Two masters of the form are Alexander Pope and John Dryden. The form has proven especially suited to conveying wit and sardonic humor, as in the opening of Pope's An Essay on Criticism.
’Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill Appear in writing or in judging ill; But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ offence, To tire our patience, than mislead our sense. Some few in that, but numbers err in this, Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss; A fool might once himself alone expose, Now one in verse makes many more in prose.
Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter arranged in a more elaborate rhyme scheme form a sonnet. There are two major variants. The form originated in Italy, and the word derives from "sonetto", which is Italian for "little song". The Italian sonnet or Petrarchan sonnet follows a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, ABBA ABBA CD CD CD, ABBA ABBA CCE DDE, or ABBA ABBA CDD CEE. In each of these, a group of eight lines (the octave) is followed by a group of six (the sextet). Typically, the octave introduces a situation, idea, or problem to which the sestet provides a response or resolution. For example, consider Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "The Sound of the Sea":
The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep, And round the pebbly beaches far and wide I heard the first wave of the rising tide Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep; A voice out of the silence of the deep, A sound mysteriously multiplied As of a cataract from the mountain's side, Or roar of winds upon a wooded steep. So comes to us at times, from the unknown And inaccessible solitudes of being, The rushing of the sea-tides of the soul; And inspirations, that we deem our own, Are some divine foreshadowing and foreseeing Of things beyond our reason or control.
The octave presents the speaker's experience of the sound of the sea, coming to him from some distance. In the sestet, this experience mutates into a meditation on the nature of inspiration and man's connection to creation and his experience of the numinous.
English has (proportionally) far fewer rhyming words than Italian. Recognizing this, Shakespeare adapted the sonnet form to English by creating an alternate rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The poet using this, the English sonnet or Shakespearean sonnet form, may use the fourteen lines as single unit of thought (as in "The Silken Tent" above), or treat the groups of four rhyming lines (the quatrains) as organizational units, as in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth steal away, Death's second self, which seals up all in rest. In me thou seest the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the deathbed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
In lines 1–4, the speaker compares his time of life to autumn. In lines 5–8, the comparison is to twilight; in lines 9–12, the comparison is to the last moments of a dying fire. Each quatrain presents a shorter unit of time, creating a sense of time accelerating toward an inevitable end, the death implied in the final couplet.
At the "high end" of closed forms are the sestina and villanelle. At the "low end" are forms such as the limerick, which follows a metrical pattern of two lines of anapestic trimeter (three anapests per line), followed by two lines of anapestic dimeter (two anapests per line), followed by one line of anapestic trimeter. (The beginning of the metrical foot does not have to coincide with the beginning of the line.) Any poem following this metrical pattern would generally be considered a limerick, however most also follow an AABBA rhyme scheme. Most limericks are humorous, and many are ribald, or outright obscene (possible rhymes that could follow an opening like "There once was a man from Nantucket" are left as an exercise for the reader). Nonetheless, the form is capable of sophisticated and playful expression:
Titian was mixing rose madder. His model posed nude on a ladder. Her position to Titian Suggested coition So he nipped up the ladder and had her.
Open forms