Well before the written word existed, there was poetry; this much we know. For example, the ballad is an ancient form that tells a narrative in short stanzas, and it is the form that reveals song and poetry to be old friends. One of the perhaps oldest and lasting definitions of poetry considers it to be a special form of rhythmic speech. We begin to feel poetry before we begin to make meaning from it, just as we feel our mother’s heartbeat before we ever see her face.

Perhaps the most ubiquitous type of poetry, one that has been with us since antiquity, is lyric poetry, usually short poems expressing the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker. You might assume that the strong ‘I’ found in a lyric poem, for example, signifies that it is the author speaking, but that is not a good assumption to make. Authors often write to express their own feelings on a subject, yes, but they also take on personas, a concept which comes from the Latin word for “mask.” The author is not always the speaker, or the voice that speaks the poem. Authors become other characters, other people. Consider Natasha Tretheway’s use of first person in her lyric poem “White Lies,” a poem included in this OER. Even though the poem speaks to her own experience growing up biracial in the South, she is NOT the speaker of the poem. Don’t confuse the speaker with the poet!

Keys to Interpreting Poetry

1. Word Choice and Punctuation

Where does the poet begin? Well, with the word, of course.

Stories and novels are made of words, too, yes, but poems are often short enough that poets labor over every single word. Unlike stories, which are strings of sentences, a poem may contain no sentences at all, just fragments of speech and solitary words. Choosing the right word can be difficult. Words have denotations, or literal meanings, but words also carry connotations, unspoken meanings that are often cultural and contextual. Take the phrase, “They are yellow.” If they are literally yellow, we might be worried they are jaundiced, but within U.S. colloquial English, to be “yellow-bellied” is to be a coward.

Colloquial English designates a type of diction. There is formal English, which is the sort of diction usually reserved for speeches and academic essays; there is standard English, which is the everyday English spoken in schools, churches, courthouses, and public parks; there is colloquial English, which is often confined to a group with shared interests or geography; there is slang, words that carry connotations far removed from their denotative meanings; and there is jargon, specialized vocabulary specific to a field of study, such as engineering, medicine, or law. An exceedingly clever poet might engage in wordplay such as puns, plays on words that sound alike but have different meanings (sun/son).

To make things more complex, every single word has its own rhythm, a rhythm that might throw off the entire rhythm of the line. To string words together in rhythmic fashion requires an understanding of punctuation and how it affects those rhythms. Any line of poetry that ends on a punctuation mark is called an end-stopped line. Lines that do not end on punctuation are said to be run-on lines, or to show enjambment. Punctuation breaks in the middle of a line of poetry are called caesura—literally, cuts. It is even helpful to translate common punctuation marks into plain language: A period states, “This idea ends, and a new begins”; a semi-colon states, “This idea ends, but the next is closely related”; and a colon states, “What follows clarifies what came before.”

Poets also use white space to convey meaning; you must study absence, too. We are accustomed to seeing white space as occupying the margins, but many poets incorporate white space in ways that demand our attention. How do we occupy the white spaces? How do we wait? Do we hold our breath? Or do we breathe deep? Most importantly, how do we begin to view absence not as nothing but as something? Or put another way, nothing is something, too.

2. Rhythm and Sound

As a poet strings words together, they may also prioritize sound over sense. This is especially true of performative subgenres such as spoken word. Rather than constructing a line of poetry to convey a meaning in the clearest possible fashion, a poet might construct a line of poetry according to rules of euphony (pleasant sounds) or cacophony (unpleasant sounds). Repetition plays a key role in creating euphony or cacophony. To repeat a clause at the beginning of a sentence, to repeat the clause at the beginning of a sentence, that is anaphora; epistrophe happens when you repeat a clause at the end of the sentence, at the end of the sentence.

Individual sounds are also repeated. While the alliterative repetition of an ‘s’ sound might have a pleasing effect, euphony, the repetition of ‘b’ and ‘t’ sounds might produce a cacophony. While alliteration refers to the repetition of consonant sounds, usually at the beginning of words, assonance refers to the repetition of vowel sounds, such as found in the sentence: “He fell asleep at the wheel.” Of course, this line also alliterates (asleep/at). Similar to alliteration, consonance employs repetition of consonant clusters within words; consider: streak/struck, mammal/clammy, pitter/patter, and so forth. Consonance often creates a near rhyme or slant rhyme, that is, a rhyme that is not quite exact. Rhyme is, of course, one of the major driving sonorous features of poetry, and rhyme can be divided into single rhyme (rhyme on a final, stressed syllable; ex: confer/defer) and  double rhyme (a rhyming stressed then unstressed syllable; ex: bower/power). To complicate matters further, there are also eye rhymes, that is, words that look like they ought to rhyme but do not (for example, tough/though). And of course there is onomatopoeia, a word imitating a sound, which will allow us to end this paragraph with a BANG.

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To scan a poem is to analyze the rhythms, or meter. Traditionally, English language poetry offers six rhythms: the iamb, the trochee, the anapest, the dactyl, the spondee, and the pyrrhic. Let us take the iamb as an illustrative example. An iamb consists of two syllables, the first unstressed and the second stressed. So words like define, attain, describe, destroy, these words all exhibit one metric foot of iambs, or iambic monometer (see the glossary to learn the terms monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, etc.).

If you recall from above, a sonnet is written in iambic pentameter—five feet of iambs. If an iamb consists of an unstressed and stressed syllable, a line of iambic pentameter will be ten syllables long with the following stress pattern: “ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM ba-DUM.” Read aloud this first line from a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, making sure to over-accentuate the stressed syllables: “What LIPS my LIPS have KISSED and WHERE and WHY.” Now you should have a feel for the most common meter in all of English poetry. But let’s take it further. We’ve analyzed the ‘being’ of that first line, but look closer at the stressed words: “LIPS LIPS KISSED WHERE WHY.” Even by analyzing the meter of a single line, we can see the poem begin to take shape. This speaker has kissed quite a few lips, so many she no longer recalls them all, and perhaps even regrets a few.

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3. Imagery

Poets also think hard about imagery. To identify something as an image, one must be able to imagine the poet’s descriptions in a way that engages one of the five senses; while most images are visual, there are auditory images, tactile images, olfactory images, and gustatory images. If a word engages the five senses in the imagination, that word belongs to the class of words called concrete diction. A collection of concrete words comprises an image (there is even a genre of poetry called concrete poetry, where the words take on the shape of the subject of the poem). In contrast, words that cannot be filtered through one of the five senses are considered abstract diction. Abstractions not only include ideas, like freedom, but also feelings, like love. While some poets value the concrete over the abstract, and vice versa, poetry covers all aspects of the human experience, from what we can sense to what we cannot, from the palpable to the ineffable.

4. Irony and Figures of Speech

Of course, poets rarely say exactly what they mean, often arriving at truth through the artistic application of lies, half-truths, and contradictions. An oxymoron, for example, provides two contradictory terms that might cancel each other out, such as “working vacation,” while a paradox provides a seemingly contradictory set of propositions that upon further reflection reveal a deeper truth. If a poet says one thing but does not mean it, then that poet has employed verbal irony, of which sarcasm is one variety. But there are other types of irony. Dramatic irony (sometimes called situational irony) occurs when you, the reader, know something the characters do not, while cosmic irony occurs when a character tries to escape their explicit fate but only ends up fulfilling their fate in the process.

The biggest lies told by poets are figures of speech. In order to be a figure of speech, the words in question must denote something that is literally impossible. Consider an exaggeration such as hyperbole. To say, “I’m so hungry I could eat a large pizza” would not constitute hyperbole, because a person can, in fact, eat an entire large pizza. But to say, “I’m so hungry I could eat a horse,” well, no single person could eat an entire horse on their own. Understatement also exists, but is often more subtle, because it downplays the severity or gravity of an event.

Figures of speech offer the poet some of their most powerful tools: metaphor, simile, metonymy, and synecdoche. You have probably heard that a simile is a comparison using like or as, but any comparison word will suffice. “My love resembles a red rose” is as much a simile as “my love is like a red rose.” A metaphor removes the comparison word and replaces it with the verb “to be,” creating an equivalency between two unlike things: “My love IS a red rose.” Of course, metaphors that are not explicit in their comparisons are implied metaphors, such as “My love has petals and thorns,” and a metaphor can be an extended metaphor, which merely denotes a metaphor that goes on for four or more lines. Metonymy and synecdoche are closely related figures of speech, each relying on replacements or stand-ins. Metonymy uses a closely related idea or object to stand-in for something, while synecdoche uses a part of something to stand in for the whole. So, to say “The White House issued a press release” is not to say that the physical White House accomplished this task in anthropomorphic fashion, but to metonymically state that the president, whom the “White House” replaces, issued a press release. A common synecdoche might be, “Let’s grab your wheels and get out of here.” Wheels are part of a car, so here, synecdochally, wheels stand in for the car.

What is important to remember for all figures of speech is that they must be impossible! If it can be interpreted literally and still make sense, it is likely not a figure of speech. So even if you have trouble differentiating metonymy from synecdoche, you can still identify a figure of speech using this rule of thumb.

Additional Resources:

“How to Read a Poem” from Poets.org: https://poets.org/text/how-read-poem-0