Understanding Poetry
Ms. Meyer / English 10
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In poetry the sound
and meaning of words
are combined to
express feelings,
thoughts, and ideas.
Vivid, strong words
are the most
important part of a
poem
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Poetry Elements
Writers use many elements to create their
poems. These elements include:
Rhythm
 Sound
 Imagery
 Form
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Rhythm
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Rhythm is the flow of the
beat in a poem.
Gives poetry a musical
feel.
Can be fast or slow,
depending on mood and
subject of poem.
You can measure rhythm
in meter, by counting the
beats in each line.
(See next two slides for
examples.)
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Rhythm Example
Where Are You Now?
When the night begins to fall
And the sky begins to glow
You look up and see the tall
City of lights begin to grow –
In rows and little golden squares
The lights come out. First here, then there
Behind the windowpanes as though
A million billion bees had built
Their golden hives and honeycombs
Above you in the air.
The rhythm in this poem is
slow – to match the night
gently falling and the
lights slowly coming on.
By Mary Britton Miller
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Sound
Writers love to use interesting sounds in
their poems. After all, poems are meant to
be heard. These sound devices include:
Rhyme
 Repetition
 Alliteration
 Onomatopoeia
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Rhyme
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Internal rhyme, or middle
rhyme, is rhyme that occurs
within a single line of verse, or
between internal phrases across
multiple lines. By contrast,
rhyme between line endings is
known as end rhyme.
Rhyming sounds don’t have to
be spelled the same way. (Cloud
and allowed rhyme.)
A poem does not have to rhyme
to be considered poetry, but
rhyme is the most common
sound device used.
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End Rhyme vs. Internal Rhyme
Internal rhyme – look at the
first and third lines below
 Ex:
I am the daughter of Earth and
Water,
I pass through the pores of the
ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
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End rhyme – look at
the last syllables of
the verses
Ex:
Whose woods these
are I think I know,
His house is in the
village, though;
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Rhyme Scheme
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A rhyme scheme is
the pattern of rhymes
at the end of each line
of a poem or song. It is
usually referred to by
using letters to indicate
which lines rhyme;
lines designated with
the same letter all
rhyme with each
other.
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AABB – lines 1 & 2 rhyme
and lines 3 & 4 rhyme
ABAB – lines 1 & 3 rhyme
and lines 2 & 4 rhyme
ABBA – lines 1 & 4 rhyme
and lines 2 & 3 rhyme
ABCB – lines 2 & 4 rhyme
and lines 1 & 3 do not
rhyme
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Repetition
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Repetition occurs when poets
repeat words, phrases, or
lines in a poem.
Creates a pattern.
Increases rhythm.
Strengthens feelings, ideas
and mood in a poem.
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Alliteration
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Alliteration is the
repetition of the first
consonant sound in
words, as in the
nursery rhyme “Peter
Piper picked a peck
of pickled peppers.”
The snake slithered silently
along the sunny sidewalk.
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Onomatopoeia
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Words that represent the
actual sound of something
are words of onomatopoeia.
Dogs “bark,” cats “purr,”
thunder “booms,” rain
“drips,” and the clock “ticks.”
Appeals to the sense of
sound.
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Imagery
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Imagery is the use of words
to create pictures, or images,
in your mind.
Appeals to the five senses:
smell, sight, hearing, taste
and touch.
Details about smells, sounds,
colors, and taste create
strong images.
To create vivid images
writers use figures of speech.
Five Senses
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Figures of Speech
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Figures of speech are
tools that writers use to
create images, or “paint
pictures,” in your mind.
Similes, metaphors, and
personification are three
figures of speech that
create imagery.
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Forms of Poetry
There are many forms of poetry including the:
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Couplet
Sonnet
Acrostic
Haiku
Concrete Poem
Free Verse
Some poems
use stanzas
while others do not.
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Couplet: A pair of rhyming verse lines
 Ex:
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
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Sonnet: a 14-line poem that expresses a
single, complete thought, idea, usually in
iambic pentameter. The Italian sonnet has
8 lines (octave) followed by a group of 6
lines (sestet). The English sonnet has 4
quatrains (4-line stanzas) followed by a
couplet.
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Acrostic
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An acrostic poem is a
type of poem where the
first, last or other letters in
a line spell out a particular
word or phrase. The most
common and simple form
of an acrostic poem is
where the first letters of
each line spell out the
word or phrase.
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Haiku
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A haiku is a Japanese
poem with 3 lines of 5, 7,
and 5 syllables. (Total of
17 syllables.)
Does not rhyme.
Is about an aspect of
nature or the seasons.
Captures a moment in
time.
Little frog among
rain-shaken leaves, are you, too,
splashed with fresh, green paint?
by Gaki
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Concrete Poem
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A concrete poem (also
called shape poem) is
written in the shape of
its subject.
The way the words are
arranged is as important
what they mean.
Does not have to rhyme.
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Free Verse
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A free verse poem
does not use rhyme or
patterns.
Can vary freely in
length of lines,
stanzas, and subject.
Revenge
When I find out
who took
the last cooky
out of the jar
and left
me a bunch of
stale old messy
crumbs, I'm
going to take
me a handful
and crumb
up someone's bed.
By Myra Cohn Livingston
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Tone in Poetry
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Tone is the attitude that the writer of the poem exhibits
toward his subject or audience. This attitude may be
expressed in the subject matter of the poem, the
poem’s characters, or the particular events that the
poem describes.
Furthermore, tone is conveyed in the style or manner of
how the writer expresses his attitude and may come
through in the poem’s structure or vocabulary.
In order to figure out the tone of a poem, you should
analyze the writer’s attitude just like you would
interpret the attitude of someone speaking to you. We
know that when others speak to us, their tone of voice
suggests a particular attitude either toward us or the
subject that they are discussing.
Tone can be formal, informal, playful, angry, serious,
humorous, etc. You describe tone with an adjective
that usually depicts attitude or feeling.
Tones can also change throughout a poem.
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Poetry is already so packed with
emotion that seeing a poet
swearing right at the start may be
a shock, but MacDiarmid does
exactly that. He makes the
Here is MacDiarmid's very angry
disturbing move of insulting the
"Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries":
dead soldiers, calling them
"professional murderers." Usually,
people try not to speak ill of the
It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man's pride. dead, but evidently MacDiarmid
thinks so little of the mercenaries
They were professional murderers and they took that he feels justified in insulting
Their blood money and impious risks and died. them. In the last two lines, he
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth implies that, with such evil men in
existence, human goodness
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.
persists only "with difficulty."
These clues lead you to
MacDiarmid's tone and his attitude
toward his subject: contempt.
Analyzing Tone
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Analyzing Tone continued
From one thousand mountains the birds' flights are gone;
From ten thousand byways the human track has vanished.
In a single boat, an aged man, straw cloak and hat,
Fishes alone; snow falls, cold in the river.
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This poem conveys a tone of melancholy: The birds have
abandoned the mountains, and the footprints of human beings
(which are signs of human presence) have "vanished" from
thousands of roads. The old fisherman you see at the end is all
alone, and the word "single," used for his boat, conveys
loneliness. The last image is wintry indeed, with snow falling all
around him.
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Contemporary Poetry
Taylor Mali’s “What Teachers Make” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuBm
SbiVXo0
 Jesse Parent’s “To the Boys Who May
One Day Date my Daughter” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcIw
Z1Dth0c
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