Poetry: Speaker, Sound and Structure
What the examiner tests
Poetry questions test close reading: who speaks, to whom, in what situation; how tone and mood differ; how imagery, figurative language, sound and form shape meaning. You need terms such as speaker, stanza, refrain, enjambment, caesura, rhyme scheme, rhythm and metre, and the ability to link a device to an effect rather than list labels.
Core rules
- The speaker is not automatically the poet.
- Tone is the speaker's attitude; mood is the feeling created in the reader.
- Literal level first, then figurative: what is said, then what is suggested.
- Sound devices: alliteration (consonant repetition at stressed openings), assonance (vowel repetition), consonance (consonant repetition inside or at the end), onomatopoeia.
- Structure: line breaks control pace; enjambment runs the sentence across lines; caesura is a pause within a line; a refrain repeats.
- Forms: sonnet, ode, elegy, ballad, lyric, dramatic monologue, free verse. Name a form only when its features are present.
Worked example
Two invented lines: 'The neem tree leans into the wind's low song, / and every leaf keeps time.' The tree is personified as a listener and dancer; 'low song' gives auditory imagery, and 'keeps time' extends the dance metaphor. The comma at the line end creates a slight pause before the second line completes the image. The effect is not merely decoration: it makes the tree seem flexible and alive in hardship, supporting a theme of resilience. Saying 'personification creates a vivid image' is insufficient; name what the personification does.
Traps
Paraphrasing without interpretation; identifying a device without effect; assuming every poem rhymes; forcing a rhyme scheme onto free verse; ignoring punctuation; reducing theme to one word such as 'nature'.