Poetry: Appreciation and Critical Analysis
Poetry questions in the DHSE paper ask you to appreciate - that is, to explain how a poem means, not to retell what it says. The examiner looks for accurate device-naming, the effect of that device, and a link to theme or tone.
What to analyse, in order
- Situation: who speaks, to whom, on what occasion. The persona is not automatically the poet.
- Shape: stanzas, line length, rhyme, refrain, and any turn (but, yet, then) where the argument shifts.
- Sound: alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, repetition - say what the sound does, not just that it exists.
- Figuration: metaphor, simile, personification, symbol, irony, hyperbole.
- Tone and theme: one sentence of assertion about the poem's central idea.
Worked example
Katharine Tynan's Any Woman opens with the mother declaring, “I am the pillars of the house; / The keystone of the arch am I.” Answer frame: claim - the mother is presented as structurally essential to the home; evidence - architectural metaphor plus the anaphora of “I am”; effect - the metaphor makes her labour foundational yet invisible, since pillars are noticed only when they fail; the title's “Any” universalises the claim beyond one household. Link - the poem's theme is the unacknowledged dependence of the family on the mother. Notice the shape of that paragraph: assertion, device, effect, theme. Four sentences, full marks.
Traps
- Listing devices without effects (“there is a simile in line 3”).
- Paraphrasing stanza by stanza instead of arguing.
- Calling every comparison a metaphor; check whether like or as is present.
- Confusing the speaker with the poet's biography.
- Ignoring the exact slant of the question - how is the mood created is not what is the poem about.