Literary, Stylistic and Metrical Commentary
The commentary toolkit
Commentary questions ask you to describe how a text produces meaning. Build a vocabulary you can deploy under time pressure, then practise applying it to short quotations.
Sound and rhythm: alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, sibilance; dactyls for speed, spondees for weight, caesura for pause, enjambment for momentum, hiatus for collision. In hendecasyllables and lyric metres, note the shorter line's epigrammatic snap.
Syntax and arrangement: hyperbaton, chiasmus, tricolon, anaphora, asyndeton, polysyndeton, apostrophe, rhetorical question, parenthesis, golden line (adjective A, adjective B, verb, noun A, noun B).
Figurative language: simile, metaphor, metonymy, personification, ekphrasis, irony, litotes.
Traps
- Naming a device and stopping. The mark is in the effect.
- Misidentifying metre: check the first foot before committing.
- Claiming a golden line when the pattern is only approximate.
- Confusing caesura (within a foot) with diaeresis (between feet).
- Ignoring context so the effect is asserted, not argued.
Rule of thumb
Use the formula device → placement → effect → link to theme. For metre, always quote the Latin words that create the effect.
Worked example: Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum. Device: asyndetic tricolon of adjectives, each polysyllabic, with a spondaic weight in the line. Placement: the adjectives pile up before the relative clause reveals the blinding. Effect: the description slows and enlarges the creature, so the reader experiences the monstrous bulk before learning its wound. Link: the monster's formlessness mirrors the poem's interest in what lies beyond human categories.