Elements of Poetry

A Brief Introduction about analyzing poetry, and a quiz, before studying poetry. Once students see what is possible, choosing a technique to express themselves is easier.

Photo by Rob Melton

Units of study are organized around genres, so of course each unit begins with a reading and a quiz about the breadth and depth of the genre. I’ve been fortunate to have found documents that served this purpose well, as well as receiving permission and support to use and adapt it in my classroom. When I haven’t found such documents, I have written them myself, with help from others. Here is the introduction and quiz on Elements of Poetry. (The “Elements of” is from “Elements of Style” by Strunk and White, one of the first books I read that really broke things down into understandable bits and pieces.)

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By Paul P. Reuben

1. What is Poetry?

It is difficult to define; we have been more successful at describing and appreciating poetry than at defining it. Poetry might be defined, initially, as a kind of language that says more and says it more intensely than does ordinary language. William Wordsworth defined poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquility." Poetry is the most condensed and concentrated form of literature, saying most in the fewest number of words. Webster defines poetry as human “expression through words or speech of experiences, ideas, and emotions… that is more concentrated, powerful and imaginative than ordinary speech or prose.”

2. Reading the Poem:

• Read a poem more than once.

• Keep a dictionary by you and use it.

• Read so as to hear the sounds of the words in your mind. Poetry is written to be heard: its meanings are conveyed through sound as well as through print. Every word is therefore important.

• Always pay careful attention to what the poem is saying.

• Practice reading poems aloud. Ask yourself the following questions:

—Who is the speaker and what is the occasion?

—What is the central purpose of the poem?

—By what means is the purpose of the poem achieved?

3. Denotation and Connotation:

The average word has three components parts: sound, denotation, and connotation:

Denotation is the dictionary meaning(s) of the word;

Connotation is what it suggests beyond what it expresses: its overtones of meaning. It acquires these connotations by its past history and associations, by the way and the circumstances in which it has been used.

4. Imagery (see, hear, taste, touch, smell):

Poetry communicates experience and experience comes to us largely through the senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling, and touching). Imagery may be defined as the representation through language of sense experience. The word image perhaps most often suggests a mental picture, something seen in the mind's eye - and visual imagery is the most frequently occurring kind of imagery in poetry. But an image may also represent a sound; a smell; a taste; a tactile experience; and an internal sensation.

5. Figurative Language:

Figures of speech are another way of adding extra dimensions to language. Broadly defined, a figure of speech is any of saying something other than the ordinary way, and some rhetoricians have classified as many as 250 separate figures. Figurative language is language that cannot be taken literally:

Metaphor and Simile are both used as a means of comparing things that are essentially unlike; in simile the comparison is expressed by the use of some word or phrase such as like, as than, similar to, resembles or seems; in metaphor the comparison is implied - that is, the figurative term is substituted for or identified with the literal term.

Personification consists in giving the attributes of a human being to an animal, an object, or a concept. Apostrophe is closely related to personification. It addresses someone absent or something non-human as if it were alive and present and could reply to what is being said.

Synecdoche (the use of the part for the whole) and Metonymy (the use of something closely related for the thing actually meant) are alike in that both substitute some significant detail or aspect of an experience for the experience itself.

A symbol may be roughly defined as something that means more than what it is. Image, metaphor, and symbol shade into each other and are sometimes difficult to distinguish. In general, however:

an image means only what it is;

a metaphor means something other than what it is; and a symbol means what it is and something more too.

Allegory is a narrative or description that has a second meaning beneath the surface one. Although the surface story or description may have its own interest, the author's major interest is in the ulterior meaning. Allegory has been defined as an extended metaphor and sometimes as a series of related symbols.

Paradox is an apparent contradiction that is, nevertheless, true. It may either be a situation or a statement ("damn with faint praise").

Irony, like paradox, has meanings that extend beyond its use merely as a figure of speech. Verbal irony, saying the opposite of what one means, is often confused with sarcasm and with satire. Sarcasm and satire both imply ridicule, one on the colloquial level, the other on the literary level. The term irony always implies some sort of discrepancy or incongruity: between what is said and what is meant, or between appearance and reality, or between expectation and fulfillment (dramatic irony and irony of situation).

Overstatement, or hyperbole, is simply exaggeration but exaggeration in the service of truth. Understatement, or saying less than one means, may exist in what one says or merely in how one says it.

Allusion, a reference to something in history or previous literature, is, like a richly connotative word or a symbol, a means of suggesting far more that it says. Allusions are a means of reinforcing the emotion or the ideas of one's own work with the emotion or ideas of another work or occasion. Because they are capable of saying so much in so little, they are extremely useful to the poet.

6. Tone and Musical Devices:

Tone, in literature, may be defined as the writer's or speaker's attitude toward the subject, the audience, or toward herself/himself. Almost all the elements of poetry go into indicating a poem’s tone: connotation, imagery, and metaphor; irony and understatement; rhythm, sentence construction, and formal pattern. The poet chooses words for sound as well as for meaning.

Verbal music is one of the important resources that enable the poet to do something more than communicate mere information. Essential elements in all music are repetition and variation:

Alliteration is the repetition of initial consonant sounds, as in "tried and true," "safe and sound," "fish and fowl," "rime and reason."

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds, as in "mad as a hatter," "time out of mind," "free and easy," "slapdash."

Consonance is the repetition of final consonant sounds, as in "first and last," "odds and ends," "short and sweet," "a stroke of luck."

Rime is the combination of assonance and consonance. Rime is the repetition of the accented vowel sound and all succeeding sounds.

7. Rhythm and Meter:

Rhythm refers to any wave like recurrence of motion or sound.

Meter is the kind of rhythm we can tap our foot to. Metrical language is called verse; non metrical is prose.

Trochee trips from long to short;

From long to long in solemn sort

Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot yet ill able

Ever to come up with Dactylic trisyllable.

Iambics march from short to long –

With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng.

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The foot is the metrical unit by which a line of poetry is measured; it usually consists of one stressed or accented ( ' ) and one or two unstressed or unaccented syllables ( – ).

Name of Foot / Name of Meter / Measure

• Iamb / Iambic / – '

• Trochee / Trochaic / ' –

• Anapest / Anapestic / – – '

• Dactyl / Dactylic / ' – –

• Spondee / Spondaic / ' '

• Pyrrhus / Pyrrhic / – –

The line, the secondary unit of measurement, is measured by naming the number of feet in it. A line that ends with a stressed syllable is said to have a masculine ending and a line that ends with an extra syllable is said to have a feminine ending. A pause within a line is called a caesura and is identified by a double vertical line (||). A line with a pause at its end is called end-stopped line, whereas a line that continues without a pause is called run-on line or enjambment. The following metrical names are used to identify the lengths of lines:

Length Name

• one foot Monometer

• two feet Dimeter

• three feet Trimeter

• four feet Tetrameter

• five feet Pentameter

• six feet Hexameter

• seven feet Heptameter

• eight feet Octameter

The third unit, the stanza, consists of a group of lines whose metrical pattern is repeated throughout the poem. The process of measuring verse is referred to as scansion. To scan a poem we do these three things:

1. We identify the prevailing meter;

2. we give a metrical name to the number of feet in a line, and

3. we describe the stanza pattern or rhyme-scheme.

8. Patterns of Traditional Poems

Ballad, or literary ballad, is a long singing poem that tells a story (usually of love or adventure), written in quatrains - four lines alternatively of four and three feet - the third line may have internal rhyme. Ballade is French in origin and made up of 28 lines, usually three stanzas of 8 lines and a concluding stanza, called envoy, of 4 lines. The last line of each stanza is the same and the scheme is ababbcbc and the envoy's is bcbc.

Blank Verse is made up of unrhymed iambic pentameter lines.

Elegy is a lyric poem written to commemorate someone who is dead.

Epigram is a brief, pointed, and witty poem of no prescribed form.

Free Verse has no identifiable meter, although the lines may have a rhyme-scheme.

Haiku is an unrhymed poem of seventeen syllables derived from Japanese verse; it is made up of three lines, lines 1 and 3 have five syllables, line 2 has seven.

Heroic Couplet is two lines of rhyming iambic pentameters.

Limerick is a five-line poem in which lines 1, 2, and 5 are anapestic trimeters and lines 3 and 4 are anapestic dimeters, rhymed as aabba. Possible source of origin is Limerick, Ireland.

Lyric is a poem of emotional intensity and expresses powerful feelings.

Narrative form is used to tell a story; it is usually made of ballad stanzas - four lines alternatively of four and three feet.

Ode, English in origin, is a poem of indefinite length, divided in 10-line stanzas, rhymed, with different schemes for each stanza - ababcdecde, written in iambic meter.

Parody is a humorous imitation of a serious poem.

Quatrain is a four-line stanza with various meters and rhyme schemes.

Sestina consists of thirty-nine lines divided into six six-line stanzas and a three-line concluding stanza called an envoy.

Sonnet is a fourteen line poem. The Italian or Petrarchan has two stanzas: the first of eight lines is called octave and has the rhyme-scheme abba abba; the second of six lines is called the sestet and has the rhyme decde or cdcdcd. The Spenserian sonnet, developed by Edmund Spenser, has three quatrains and a heroic couplet, in iambic pentameter with rhymes ababbcbccdcdee. The English sonnet, developed by Shakespeare, has three quatrains and a heroic couplet, in iambic pentameter with rhymes ababcdcdefefgg.

Tercet is a three-line stanza; when all three lines rhyme they are called a triplet. Terza Rima consists of interlocking three-line rhyme scheme (aba, bcb).

Villanelle is a fixed form consisting of nineteen lines divided into six stanzas: five tercets and a a concluding quatrain.

(Definitions and examples are from Laurence Perrine, LITERATURE: Structure, Sound, and Sense; 1978, Shapiro and Beum, A Prosody Handbook; Miller Williams, Patterns of Poetry; and Lawrence Zillman, The Art and Craft of Poetry.)

MLA Style Citation of this Web Page:

Reuben, Paul P. "PAL: Appendix F: Elements of Poetry." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature – A Research and Reference Guide. URL:https://www.paulreuben.website/pal/append/axf.html (Jan 5, 2025).

Additional materials available at: https://www.paulreuben.website/pal/index.html

© Paul P. Reuben Ph.D., Professor of English, Emeritus, Department of English, California State University, Stanislaus

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There is always an open-book quiz over the reading. The questions are always in the order of the text:

ELEMENTS OF POETRY QUIZ — Mr. Melton

1. What are five things you should do when reading a poem?

2. What are the three parts of every word?

3. When the five senses are represented through language, what is it called?

4. About how many separate figures of speech are there?

5. Metaphor and simile are both used to do what?

6. When you give human attributes to an animal, object or concept, what is it called?

7. In what way are synecdoche and metonymy alike?

8. What is the difference between image, metaphor and symbol?

9. What is the difference between irony and sarcasm?

10. When a poem refers to previous literature, what is it called?

11. What does tone reveal in a poem?

12. What are the two essential elements in all music?

13. What is the difference between rhythm and meter?

14. Metrical language is also known as what?

15. Non-metrical language is known as what?

16. A metrical unit is also known as what?

17. How is a line measured?

18. What is iambic pentameter?

19. When a group of lines has a metrical pattern that is repeated throughout the poem, what do we call it?

20. What is the process of measuring verse referred to as?

21. Name five of the patterns that traditional poems follow?

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How to explicate a poem

A good poem is like a puzzle--the most fascinating part is studying the individual pieces carefully and then putting them back together to see how beautifully the whole thing fits together. A poem can have a number of different "pieces" that you need to look at closely in order to complete the poetic "puzzle." This sheet explains one way to attempt an explication of a poem, by examining each "piece" of the poem separately. (An "explication" is simply an explanation of how all the elements in a poem work together to achieve the total meaning and effect.)

Examine the situation in the poem:

• Does the poem tell a story? Is it a narrative poem? If so, what events occur?

• Does the poem express an emotion or describe a mood?

• Poetic voice: Who is the speaker? Is the poet speaking to the reader directly or is the poem told through a fictional "persona"? To whom is he speaking? Can you trust the speaker?

• Tone: What is the speaker's attitude toward the subject of the poem? What sort of tone of voice seems to be appropriate for reading the poem aloud? What words, images, or ideas give you a clue to the tone?

Examine the structure of the poem:

• Form: Look at the number of lines, their length, and their arrangement on the page. How does the form relate to the content? Is it a traditional form (e.g. sonnet, limerick) or "free form"? Why do you think the poem chose that form for his poem?

• Movement: How does the poem develop? Are the images and ideas developed chronologically, by cause and effect, by free association? Does the poem circle back to where it started, or is the movement from one attitude to a different attitude (e.g. from despair to hope)?

• Syntax: How many sentences are in the poem? Are the sentences simple or complicated? Are the verbs in front of the nouns instead of in the usual "noun, verb" order? Why?

• Punctuation: What kind of punctuation is in the poem? Does the punctuation always coincide with the end of a poetic line? If so, this is called an end-stopped line. If there is no punctuation at the end of a line and the thought continues into the next line, this is called enjambment. Is there any punctuation in the middle of a line? Why do you think the poet would want you to pause halfway through the line?

• Title: What does the title mean? How does it relate to the poem itself?

Examine the language of the poem:

• Diction or Word Choice: Is the language colloquial, formal, simple, unusual?

• Do you know what all the words mean? If not, look them up.

• What moods or attitudes are associated with words that stand out for you?

• Allusions: Are there any allusions (references) to something outside the poem, such as events or people from history, mythology, or religion?

• Imagery: Look at the figurative language of the poem--metaphors, similes, analogies, personification. How do these images add to the meaning of the poem or intensify the effect of the poem?

Examine the musical devices in the poem:

• Rhyme scheme: Does the rhyme occur in a regular pattern, or irregularly? Is the effect formal, satisfying, musical, funny, disconcerting?

• Rhythm or meter: In most languages, there is a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a word or words in a sentence. In poetry, the variation of stressed and unstressed syllables and words has a rhythmic effect. What is the tonal effect of the rhythm here?

• Other "sound effects": alliteration, assonance, consonance repetition. What tonal effect do they have here?

Has the poem created a change in mood for you--or a change in attitude? How have the technical elements helped the poet create this effect?

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