Reading Poetry

Poetry Analysis I

Readings

Bishop, Elizabeth “At the Fishhouses.” In The Complete Poems, 1927-1979. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. ISBN: 978037451872.

Heaney, Seamus. “Digging.” In Death of a Naturalist. Faber and Faber, 2006. ISBN: 9780571230872.

Moore, Marianne. “The Fish.” Poets.org.

Things to mark up/questions to ask when you read a poem:

1. Are there regularities in line length?
2. What controls or motivates the end of a line?
3. Is there an organized rhythm?
   1. If yes, are there places of important variation in pattern or emphasis?
4. Are units of meaning (phrases and sentences) aligned with units of meter, so lines end with punctuation—or not?
5. Are there places that stand out as different?
6. What places and times exist in the poem?
7. Who is in it? Where and when are they?
   1. Where? “offstage”, near/far in Frost.
   2. When: remembered past, Yeats; past + ongoing present, Whitman.
8. Who is speaking? Pronouns: I, we, they.
9. Are there key terms (“home”) being evaluated and/or vocabularies of words grouped under related concepts (worth and value)?

These are questions to ask about a poem: if they seem boring/trivial OR too hard/confusing to answer, they might not be the most revealing questions about a given poem. But all are worth trying!