Poetry (Prescribed Poems)
What the section tests
Poetry questions ask for the central idea, an explanation of a stanza, the effect of a device, the tone, or the rhyme scheme of a prescribed poem. The examiner wants interpretation - what the lines do - not a prose paraphrase.
Core rules
- Read the poem aloud once; punctuation, not the line ending, decides where the sentence stops.
- Answer device questions in three steps: name, quote, effect. 'Alliteration' alone is worth nothing; 'the hard b sounds beat like hammer blows, reinforcing the labour' is worth full marks.
- Rhyme scheme: label end sounds a, b, a, b - and allow for eye-rhymes and half-rhymes where the pattern is irregular.
- Tone words must be justified: not 'sad' but 'sad and resigned, because the last line accepts what the first line protests'.
- Central idea: one sentence on the poem's subject, one on its attitude to that subject.
Worked example
Lines: 'The lamp leans low; the shadows climb the wall, / and every chair remembers who has gone.' Question: Comment on the effect of one figure of speech. Reasoning: 'chairs remember' is personification, giving the room a memory so that absence feels like a kind of presence; 'climb' makes the shadows active, lengthening as the light fails. Model answer: 'The personified chairs give the room a memory of its own, so the emptiness feels inhabited; the climbing shadows make that emptiness grow as the light dies.'
Traps
- Naming a device and stopping there.
- Paraphrasing the stanza without interpreting it.
- Guessing rhyme scheme from spelling rather than sound.
- Confusing the poet's view with the speaker's.
- Writing three lines for a five-mark question.