Exploring a Poem—Chapter 4, Helen Vendler



Exploring a Poem AP Literature

Balla

The following is a series of inquiries that can help reveal a poem:

1. Literal Scenario—What is occurring on a literal level? In other words, what situation is being described? This does not mean that something has to occurring at the moment, as it may be an event or image from the past. In either case, it is important to have the facts of the poem clear. Are two lovers departing? Is an event being commemorated? Is the speaker describing something in the natural world? Is the speaker reflecting on a past event? This is the usual sort of information-retrieval reading done with any passage of prose or verse: a summary of the basic facts of the situation being described.

2. Agency—Who is the main agent in the poem, and does the main agent change as the poem as the poem progresses? The agent/agency is the subject(s) of the verbs.

3. Speech Acts—What are the speech acts? When poems are classified by their speech acts, attention is drawn to their manner of expression as well as their content.

For example, a speaker can apologize for any number of things— tardiness, or mistakes, or negative remarks—but in each of these cases the speech act (whatever its content) is an apology. Similarly, a speaker can protest about time, or death, or love—but in every case, the speech act is a protest. Since the language of most poems can be thought of as a series of utterances by a speaker, the poem expects you to track the speaker’s successive speech acts from one to the next (the changing speech acts often coincide with a poetic shift). A poem’s speech acts, therefore, need to be followed and identified. Some speech acts include, but of course are not limited to:

Explanation Evaluation Condemnation Celebration

Declaration Protestation Salutation Valediction

Revelation Admiration Contradiction Glorification

Admonition Vilification Clarification Canonization

Recognition Demonstration Resignation Affirmation

4. Antecedent Scenario—What has disturbed the status quo and set the poem in motion? What has been happening before the poem starts? Although this seems to drift dangerously close to wild speculation outside the boundaries of the text, it is legitimate to infer the antecedent scenario when the poem allows. For example, if the speaker is discussing her father’s passing and spends most of the lines discussing what a tyrant her father was, one can safely assume that the father, while alive, was deemed too harsh by the daughter. This is a way of exploring the larger context of the poem.

5. A Division into Inner Structural Parts – What are the major “movements” in the poem? Uncovering this requires a division of the poem into larger pieces or movements – the inner structure. In investigating the internal structure of a poem, divide it into parts along its “fault lines.” Where does the logic of the argument seem to break? Where does the poem change narrative stance? Where does the major change in tense or speech act take place? Some of the elements of internal structural form include:

✓ Sentences—How many sentences are there in the poem, and how do they relate to one another? What are the length and type of sentences used?

✓ Person—Determine whether the person is first, second, third. Is the person is singular or plural? A change of person as poem goes along is a significant structuring device.

✓ Agency—Determine the subject in each sentence; the subject is the agent of the verb. It is important to know who “owns,” by agency, each part of every poem.

✓ Tenses—Tenses are also an important internal structuring aspect of the poem, making it move in time from past to present to future. Tense-changes ask to be noticed.

✓ Images or Sensual Words—Linked words (referring especially to the senses of sight and hearing) also help to structure many poems. These words can be all of one sort (a collection of names of different flowers, for instance, in Milton’s “Lycidas”) or they can be of different sorts: that is, a series of specific nouns like “flood,” “earthquake,” “fire,” and “shipwreck” can all help to construct the single abstract category “catastrophe.” There are systematic ways in which the concrete words that some refer to as “images” may be assembled, too: they may be arranged in parallel, or in contrast, or in a ranked hierarchy.

6. Tone—What is the tone progression? Poems rarely sound a single note, tending to be dynamic rather than static. For example, a poem can move from lugubrious to tentatively hopeful to resigned. Reading the poem aloud will often help distinguish the various tones of voice it exhibits.

7. Outer Structural Forms—What is the poem’s outer form? The outer form has to do with meter, rhyme, and stanza-form, and sometimes (as in the case of a sonnet, for example) will follow a prescribed pattern. This is in many ways the least helpful avenue to explore, because it can be very difficult to tie meaning to structure in a manner that reveals meaning. Some forms do provide some general help in this matter. For example, the content of a Shakespearean sonnet will often develop through three quatrains followed by a conclusive, often epigrammatic, comment of the final couplet. It is important to remember that commenting on the structure without linking it directly to how it operates within the poem as a whole is not helpful.

8. Imagination—What has the poet’s imagination invented that is striking, or memorable, or beautiful—in content, in genre, in analogies, in rhythm, in a speaker?

9. Climax—Where is the climax of the poem? In lyric poems, the various parts tend to cluster around a moment of special significance—which its attendant parts lead up to, lead away from, help to clarify, and so on. The climax usually manifests itself by such things as greater intensity of tone, an especially significant metaphor, a change in rhythm, or a change in person.

10. Meaning – Taking everything into account, what is the overall meaning of the poem? What idea about life or experience has the poem articulated? What is relevant to the human experience that this poem offers?

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