How to Read a Poem

Read a poem several times to unlock its meanings.

Easier said than done? Perhaps, because the poems pitched to you during the exam are a world away
from “Roses are Red/Violets are Blue” or “Casey at the Bat”—ditties that may share the name poem
with “In Memorium” and “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” but can’t compare in artistry or in the
authentic expression of human experience. Because poems on the exam tend to be far from
transparent, plan to read them two or three times. With each reading, a poem should start to reveal its
meanings.
Before you begin to read a poem, think about the possible meaning of its title. The title may contain just
the clue needed to crack open the world within the poem. After reading the poem, think about the title
again. Very possibly, its meaning will have been expanded in ways you couldn’t have imagined before.
As you read, avoid pausing at the end of every line; unnecessary pauses create a choppy effect that
obscures meaning. Rather, pause where punctuation, if any, indicates that a pause is needed.

Read the title first and speculate on what the poem might be about.

1. Who is talking?
What can you tell about the speaker’s age, gender, station in life, opinions, and feelings? What, if
anything, does the poem reveal about the speaker’s character?
Some speakers take on a distinct personality. The speaker in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” for
example, is urgently “on the make,” citing reasons his sweetheart should go to bed with him. Other
speakers simply reflect on a theme; in e. e. cummings’s “in just,” the speaker pays tribute to the coming
of spring. Aside from that, we learn nothing of his character. Likewise, the speaker in “Pied Beauty” by
Gerard Manley Hopkins meditates on the magnificent colors, shapes, and textures of God’s creations.
Beyond that, there’s little to say about him or her.

2. To whom is the speaker talking?

To the reader only? To someone else? If so, to whom, and what is the listener’s relationship to the
speaker?
Some poems, such as Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” are addressed only to the reader. Others, such as Blake’s
“A Cradle Song,” are directed at a third person but focus so intently on the subject of the poem that they
reveal nothing about the speaker’s connection to his audience. Still others are dramatic monologues—
poems that resemble a speech in a play. In such monologues speakers address a specific person and
often respond to the listener’s unspoken reactions. Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and Tennyson’s
“Ulysses” are examples.

3. What is the dramatic context of the poem?

Is there a reason or occasion for the poem? Is there any evidence of a setting, a time, place, season, or
situation?
For lyric poems the answer will most likely be no to those questions. Narrative poems, dramatic
monologues, ballads, and other poems that tell or imply stories often provide background that helps to
shape the poem’s effect and meaning. Frost’s “Out, Out—” takes place on a farm during wood-cutting
season. In Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the speaker tells the story to guests at a wedding
reception.

4. What happens during the poem?

Is there a conflict? If an event occurs, is it in the past or the present? Is it external or internal? Why is it
important to the speaker or to a character in the poem? From what perspective does the speaker
describe events: as an omniscient narrator? as a participant? as an observer? Poems often begin in one
place and end in another. So, look for shifts in the speaker’s insights or understanding of the experience.
The speaker in “The Twa Corbies,” who happens to overhear two ravens talking about their next meal,
has no vested interest in the conversation. In Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge,”
however, the speaker expresses his great affection for the city of London. Lyric poems, such as Keats’s
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” refer to no particular events, although it seems likely that the speaker is at that
moment scrutinizing an ancient urn.

5. What motivates the speaker to speak now, in the tone he/she uses?
Does the speaker evince an attitude or bias regarding the subject matter of the poem? What imagery,
diction, figures of speech, and choice of details contribute to the speaker’s tone? Does the speaker use
comparisons made via metaphors, similes, personification, or metonymy? Do you see any shifts in tone
or perspective? Any contradictions?
To understand a poem you must understand its tone. The tone of William Blake’s “The Tyger” has long
puzzled and intrigued readers. To this day, therefore, more than two centuries after it was written, the
poem remains an enigma. In contrast, there’s nothing elusive about the tone of “Counting-Out Rhyme”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay and “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll. Both poems are intended solely to
entertain readers with collections of playful sounds. The types of poems you’ve studied in class, as well
as those that typically show up on AP tests, fall somewhere between those two extremes. For instance,
the topic of Shakespeare’s sonnet #33, “When to the Sessions of Sweet Silent Thought,” is friendship.
The speaker reflects on how the presence of his “dear friend” soothes his troubled spirit.

THE BEAUTY OF PARAPHRASING

Perhaps the best way to crack open a poem’s meaning is to write a paraphrase. Putting into your own
words line-by-line exactly what takes place in the poem can be eye-opening. It can transform a vague
impression into a clear and firm grasp of the poet’s intent, particularly if your paraphrase contains the
same number of sentences as the poem itself. Students report that paraphrasing poems often clears
away the fog.

6. How does the language of the poem contribute to its meaning?

Is there anything distinctive about the poem’s diction? Does the poet repeat words, sounds, phrases,
and ideas? If so, to what purpose and effect? Which figures of speech and images are particularly
potent? Do alliteration, assonance, consonance play a role in the poem?
Since words are the lifeblood of poetry, look hard and long at the poem’s language, especially at the
connotations of words. Think of Macbeth’s powerful words as he ponders his life: “Life’s but a walking
shadow … full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Or consider a challenging poem like “Thirteen Ways
of Looking at a Blackbird,” in which Wallace Stevens embodies meaning in a series of intense, compact,
and suggestive images. William Butler Yeats, spellbound by a fiercely independent woman, fills his love
poem “No Second Troy” with language that alludes to Ireland’s quest for freedom from England. Indeed,
good poets bind language and meaning so tightly that altering a syllable would damage the poem’s
integrity.

7. How is the poem organized?

Does it adhere to a closed form, such as a sonnet or villanelle? Or does it take liberties? Is it free form? Is
it grammatical? Is the poem constructed with complete sentences? With phrases? With a mixture of
usages? Does the poet use stanzas? Lines of different lengths? Changes in sound or diction? Are the
form and meaning of the poem related in some way? Does the ending contain some sort of resolution?
How does organization, including syntax, contribute to the poem’s meaning and effect?
The fourteen-line structure of the sonnet used by Shakespeare, Milton, Browning, and countless others
has come to be considered the embodiment of human thought, just as the limerick seems just pithy
enough to convey a whimsical idea with cleverly crafted rhymes. On the other hand, a more free-flowing
organization is appropriate for “Ode to the Confederate Dead” by Allen Tate, a poem that takes place in
the mind of a person wandering among the headstones in a Confederate cemetery and pondering the
meaning of the soldiers’ sacrifice.

8. Do patterns of rhyme and rhythm contribute to the meaning and effect of the poem?
How does rhyme function in the poem? Are there patterns of sound that help to convey meaning or
create effects? What does the meter contribute to the poem’s meaning?
Rhyme and rhythm that distract from the sense of a poem is a common flaw of second-rate poems.
Thus, critics scorn Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” for its thundering hoof beats and repetitive
rhymes that make the poem easy to remember but hard to take seriously. In high-quality poems, rhyme
and meter are more than decorative features. They are a medium that subtlely enhances meaning and
effect. Frequent shifts of meter in Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” for example, suggest the wildness
of the wind itself.

9. What themes does the poem contain?

Are themes stated or are they implied? Can you make a generalization about life or human nature from
the poem? In short, what idea is the poet communicating to the reader?
Poetic motifs are often vividly suggested or even stated outright. Anarchy, for instance, is evoked by a
series of brief statements in William Butler Yeats’ “The Second Coming”: “The falcon cannot hear the
falconer;/Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”
Themes, on the other hand, are rarely articulated. Instead, they must be inferred from the text.
Sometimes a theme practically jumps off the page, as in the antiwar poems of Wilfred Owen (e.g.,
“Anthem for Doomed Youth”). In other poems, themes are less accessible. For example, “The Red
Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams consists of three visual images preceded by the words “so
much depends/upon”—an altogether sparse amount of evidence from which to identify a theme. Yet
it’s sufficient. Williams’s poem is about writing poetry. For him poems start with visual cues like “a red
wheel /barrow” and “white/chickens.”

10. What was your initial response to the poem?

Did the poem speak to you? Touch you? Leave you cold? Confuse you? Anger you? Blow your mind?
Cause you to text a friend?
More important, did your response change after reading the poem a second, third, or even a fourth
time?
These ten meaty questions are far too many to keep in mind all at once. But they’ll give you enough
information to take a stab at putting poems into your own words. A reasonably accurate paraphrase is a
sure sign that you’ve conquered a poem—that you’ve found its essence. And you can depend on the ten
questions to sink in as you use them repeatedly while prepping for the AP exam.
First, however, find a poetry anthology such as The Book of Living Verse edited by Louis Untermeyer or
The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Each contains a variety of poems—old, new, easy, hard, long, short.
Taking your time, read a poem and run through the list of questions. Then read another and answer the
questions again. Then read a few more, and then still more. Repeat the routine the following day and
again the day after. Read whenever you have a few spare moments—while waiting for the bus, having
coffee, standing in the cafeteria line. Gradually, the questions will sink in, and as you continue to read
poems, you’ll start reading all poems more deeply. For every poem you read deeply, you’ll learn
something about reading the next one. In time it will become second nature to read poetry perceptively.
Not that you’ll breeze through every poem you encounter, but you will have at your command a number
of strategies for insightfully drawing out a poem’s effects and meanings.
To start you off, here is a Walt Whitman poem followed by the ten questions and some possible
answers.
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide,
Line and measure them,
(5) When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with
much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick,
Till, rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
(10) Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
(1865)

1. Who is talking?
The speaker may be a student or perhaps the poet himself. In either case, he is someone who attends
lectures and has no stomach for pedantry. Before the lecture ends, he stalks out of the room repulsed
by both the astronomer’s presentation and the audience’s response.

2. To whom is the speaker talking?

He is talking to the reader and also to himself, perhaps to justify or make sense of his impulsiveness.

3. What is the background of the poem?

The speaker attends a lecture on the heavens given by a learned astronomer.

4. What happens during the poem?

Hard facts and mathematical problems dominate the astronomer’s presentation. Disappointed in both
the lecture and the audience’s receptivity to it, the speaker leaves the lecture hall. Outside, as if
awestruck, he occasionally looks up at the stars, saying nothing.

5. What motivates the speaker to speak now, in the tone he/she does?
The speaker distances himself from the lecturer’s scholarly, scientific perspective in favor of a more
personal one. In fact, he appears to disavow science by assuming an almost disdainful, holier-than-thou
attitude toward the astronomer. He also objects to the audience, whose applause pays unwarranted
homage to the learned lecturer.

6. How does the language of the poem contribute to its meaning?

The “facts” of astronomy are represented by a barrage of hard, clipped words: “proofs,” “figures,”
“charts,” “diagrams.” The repeated use of “When” at the beginning of successive clauses suggests the
astronomer’s plodding delivery as well as an absence of concern for anything other than getting the
facts across to his audience. The repetition of “lecture” (line 6) further emphasizes the spiritlessness of
the astronomer’s presentation.
In contrast, the speaker’s view of the stars is couched in poetic language including such sound-rich
phrases as “off by myself,/In the mystical moist night-air.”
In the last line the speaker feasts his eyes on stars “in perfect silence,” suggesting that words are not
only unnecessary but inadequate to describe the mystery of what he observes. The speaker’s silence
also contrasts with both the lecture and the applause it elicited.

7. How is the poem organized?

The poem is structured like a short story with a beginning (lines 1–4), middle (5–8), and end (9–10). The
lecture serves as the stimulus for the speaker’s response and his escape from the lecture room. The
episode is resolved as the speaker looks up at the stars in silence. All parts of the poem work together to
tell a brief anecdote and to convey the speaker’s disapproval of both the astronomer’s approach to his
subject and the audience’s reaction.

8. Do patterns of rhyme and rhythm contribute to the meaning and effect of the poem?
As an example of “free verse,” the poem ignores customary patterns of meter or rhyme. It creates its
effect via the words, images, subtle variations in rhythm and length of the lines. The account of the
lecture, for example, consists of lengthy, prosaic lines. Only at the end does the speaker’s poetic voice
reassert itself. For a poem about a person who rejects conventionality, free verse seems an appropriate
choice.

9. What themes does the poem contain?

The speaker, a romantic, seems to believe that rationality robs nature of beauty and mystery. As
someone with an antiscientific bent, he prefers to contemplate the stars in silence. On one level, the
speaker’s silence is literal, but it also implies a sense of isolation. While others in the audience applaud
the astronomer, the speaker disapprovingly slinks out of the room to commune with the stars. Ironically,
his silence is a sham because it is trumpeted loud and clear by this poem.

10. What was your initial response to the poem?

The answer to this question will vary from reader to reader.