Poetry: form, figuration and the reasoned personal response
Poetry: form, figuration, response
Poetry questions in this paper ask for a critical appreciation, an explanation of a stanza, a comment on tone or theme, or a comparison of two poems. Marks are earned by moving from what the poem says to how it says it.
The reading sequence
- Read once for the sense unit - follow the sentence across line breaks, not the line ending. Enjambment means the syntax, not the layout, controls the meaning.
- Identify speaker and addressee. The speaker is not automatically the poet.
- Mark the turn: where does the argument, mood, or address change?
- Note form: stanza shape, rhyme scheme, metre, refrain, free or blank verse - then ask what the form does.
- Name devices only where you can state an effect.
Worked example
Line (illustrative, not quoted from your text): "The lamp hissed and died." Reasoning: the verb hissed transfers an animal or steam sound to a dying lamp - personification shading into onomatopoeia; died is literal for a lamp and figurative for the room's life. Effect: an ordinary object becomes a small, hostile presence, so the silence that follows feels threatening. This is the shape of every good device sentence: device → transferred meaning → effect on mood or theme.
Traps
- Paraphrasing the poem and calling it analysis.
- Listing "alliteration, metaphor, imagery" without saying what each does.
- Mislabelling: a comparison using like or as is a simile even when compressed; personification requires human action, not merely feeling.
- Ignoring the question's focus (tone is not theme).
- For comparison questions, writing two separate essays instead of alternating between the poems on shared points.