Poetry & British Romanticism
When we analyze poetry, what we’re going to do is take
a look at the structure of poems and try to figure out their
meanings. Poems are very compact. They have a lot of
information in a really small space. So, you’re going to
have to analyze each line in a poem and really take a
look at all those words and try to figure out what they
mean. I always tell my students there are lots of correct
answers as well as a lot of wrong answers when
analyzing poetry. Your job is to try to figure out meaning
in a poem and then you have to use lines from that poem
to support your ideas.
Poem Example – A Poison Tree
by William Blake
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I water’d it in fears,
Night and morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole
When the night had veil’d the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree.
Structure
 Rhyming or Prose [not rhyming].


When we analyze the structure of a poem, we usually try to
find out if it is a rhyming poem where lines rhyme perhaps at
the end of the lines or sometimes in the middle. We even
have sight rhymes where the words look like they would
rhyme on the page even though if we pronounce them, the
words don’t rhyme, and then we have prose and what prose
essentially means is non-rhyming.
If we take a look at A Poison Tree, we can see that this is a
rhyming poem. For example, in the first stanza “I was angry
with my friend: / I told my wrath, my wrath did end. / I was
angry with my foe:/ I told it not, my wrath did grow. We can
see that the first and second lines rhyme [friend / end] and
the third and fourth lines rhyme [foe/grow].
Structure II
 Poems are usually broken into sections separated by a space
called Stanzas [like a paragraph] - couplet = 2 lines, tercet = 3,
quatrain = 4
 A Poison Tree has 4 stanzas and each is made of 4 lines
[quatrain]
 Why know this structure?

Sometimes the structure leads to a better understanding of the
meaning. For example, from A Poison Tree, we can see that
every stanza kind of moves a little bit. The first part talks about
friends and enemies, the next stanza talks about ones wrath
growing and how, the next stanza talks about the tree bearing
fruit, and finally the last stanza shows the foe’s defeat. So you
can see those stanzas are there to break up time and show us
movement in the poem.
Analyzing Poetry
 Speaker


The person speaking in the poem may not be the poet. It may be that
the poet has created a persona, or a person in the poem.
In A Poison Tree – the speaker is in the poem, talking about his/her life.
We know this because it says “I” many times. Remember, the speaker
is not necessarily the same person as the author!
 Audience in the poem


There’s often an audience that’s in the poem. For example, the poem
may be written to someone specific [not us].
The audience in A Poison Tree is not the Foe but rather some third
party. We know this because in the end the speaker says, “In the
morning glad I see / my foe [rather than you] outstretch’d beneath the
tree”
 Audience reading poem – there is the intended audience when poem
was written and of course you are the audience too!
Words #1
 Tone of voice & Rhythm:
 tells us the mood [happy / sad/ angry / excited/
passionate / etc… ]
 Tells us the message [how we should feel about the
information]
 Again in A Poison Tree, if you listen to the poem,
there’s a sing song like rhythm there. It is reminiscent
of a children’s poem like “Roses are red / violets are
blue / sugar is sweet/ and so are you.” And yet, the
author is contrasting this innocent type sound with the
killing of one’s foe through the planned growth of a
poison tree [and poison apple].
Words #2
 Diction: choice of words

If you describe a car crash and you call it an accident that’s a very
different image then if I said two cars smashed into one another.
 Syntax: order of words

If someone says, “Hi, how are you doing?”, that’s a regular kind of
order of words we’re used to, but if the person says, “Doing how are
you?” - that would kind of surprise us because the order of words were
reversed - so pay attention when word orders are different, the author
is trying to get your attention.
 Denotation: literal meaning & Connotation: implied meaning


If I said Mary had a cow and that’s a literal meaning or denotation then
Mary is probably a farmer, and she owns a cow. However, connotation
is the implied meaning. If I said Mary had a cow, I might mean that
she’s really upset - not that she actually owned a cow.
Poets often make use of both literal and implied meanings in poems –
in fact, he/she may want us to see both meanings at the same time!
Figure of Speech
 Simile (like)
she has eyes like blue pools
 Metaphor (is/are)
 her eyes are blue pools
 Personification / anthropomorphism
 giving inanimate objects human or living characteristics, so
your can say the car purred happily or the door groaned in
pain
 Allusion (reference to another work, historical event, art, or
person to add depth of meaning)
 An Allusion can be in the title of the poem or some line in the
poem will refer to another work, maybe a piece of art or a
person, to add depth of meaning. **It doesn’t mean the
poem is about that actual thing!! It means it’s similar. By
alluding to that other idea, the poet brings greater depth to
the poem.

Figures of Speech Cont..
 Metonymy – words based on association

Crown = monarchy [so when we say he took the crown, we don’t mean
just took the crown like a thief. We probably mean that he’s taking over
the monarchy and that he’s become king.]
 Synecdoche – part = whole

Hand = whole person [so when he takes her hand in marriage, he
doesn’t just marry her hand, he marries all of her.]
 Hyperbole [exaggeration]

I told you a million times to turn down that stereo!
 Litote [understatement]

Let’s say I ate 10 candy bars, and someone asks, “Did you eat a lot of
chocolate today?” and I reply, “Just a tad.” [opposite of hyperbole]
 Paradox and Oxymoron - impossibilities and contradictions


A paradox is two situations that couldn’t possibly occur at the same
time [a man could be alive and dead in a poem at the same time].
An oxymoron combines two contradictory terms like jumbo shrimp.
Shrimp means small and jumbo very big, so how you can have jumbo
smalls??
Sound
 Mood: (flowing, choppy)
We can really get the mood from the way things sound. I
remember a line from the Raven, “and the silk and sad
uncertain rustling of each purple curtain thrilled me, as I’ve
never been thrilled before.” The sound of that can really give
us a mood or an idea.
 Onomatopoeia: words that sound things they represent
 buzz sounds like a bee sound or hiss sounds like the actual
cat sound
 Alliteration: same consonant at beginning of each word
 Little lover lacy
 Assonance: same vowel sounds close together
 The crook took the book

**Poets use these techniques to get the reader’s attention, so a
line where you find this is usually important.
Rhyme Scheme
 Often what will happen in a poem is we’ll have very similar rhyme
schemes. So if we take a look at A Poison Tree the first stanza, ends on
the sounds from friend – “sound A”, the next line end “sound A”, third
line ends with foe and rhymes with grow, so that would be “Sound B”.
So our rhyme scheme would be a, a, b, b.

I was angry with my friend: [sound a]
I told my wrath, my wrath did end. [sound a]
I was angry with my foe: [sound a]
I told it not, my wrath did grow. [sound a] .

Rhyme schemes can change - in fact they can be very complicated you can have abc, abc, you could have a b c b d b, so only every other
line rhymes.
 Rhyme schemes can be really complicated. Take a look at the rhyme
scheme, often there will be a change in the poem’s rhyme scheme and
that will give us a clue that’s an important line we should take a look at.
Impressions

Imagery: sensory impressions


In A Poison Tree, the second stanza “And I watered it with fears, and night and
morning with my tears”, so the idea is that because he’s not sharing his wrath,
his fears, tears and sadness make it grow. “I sun it with smiles, and with soft
deceitful wiles”, and so then he gets an idea, soft deceitful wiles, to some trickery
that he might do. Again, there is some innocence in water and sun, but the
author is not using them innocently. So we want to take a look at those sensory
impressions because they’re trying to make an impact on us and make us feel
something.
Symbolism: [red rose = love]

In A Poison Tree, the tree “bore an apple bright”, and the idea - and when we say
we have an idea that bears fruit – so the speaker’s ideas, soft deceitful wiles,
and anger has grown until it bears fruit, an apple. The apple has a lot of
symbolism. We think of Adam and Eve and the apple from the Tree of
Knowledge. Eating from the tree of knowledge brings death ultimately, and so we
have an idea that this fruit is there as a temptation. “My foe beheld its shine and
he knew that it was mine”, so it was almost like the speaker grew this tree and it
bore fruit. The foe sees the fruit, goes into the garden, steals that fruit and “in the
morning glad I see my foe outstretched beneath the tree”. And so the foe must
have taken a bite of that apple, that poison fruit from the poison tree, and so he’s
outstretched like it has killed him.
Irony
 Verbal irony: (one thing said, another
meaning intended)

You could have a man tell a woman, “I love
you” but we can’t be sure of the meaning,
does he really mean “I love you”, or is he
being ironic? Is he saying, “Yeah, I love you”
as in “of course I DON’T love you”, but
because we don’t hear tone of voice in poems,
we have to really look for other clues to let us
know what the author means.
British Romanticism
The great flowering of English Romanticism
occurred about the middle of the second
decade of the 19th century when for some
ten years England became the focus of
European Romanticism. Poets such as
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Blake, Byron
and Keats were the major writers of this
period. These writers not only wrote poetry,
but wrote about poetry itself.
British Romanticism
Characteristics
 The natural and the supernatural – an attempt to see the unique and
beautiful in the simple and ordinary. The idea we are still connected to
nature.
 Poetry is often remembrances of the past, and through memories
we regain our link to the natural.
 It may take a supernatural event to make us recognize our link to
the natural.
 Imagination was another important theme of English Romanticism.
 Imaginative mind can lead to real freedom.
 It is within imagination and emotion that truth can be found.
 Reason must be combined with emotion.
 Much of the poetry of this period was lyrical in style.
 Some of the distinguishing characteristics included “emotion,
subjectivity,
melodiousness, imagination, description, and (sometimes)
meditation.”
 Many poems were elegies, odes and sonnets.
British Romantic Hero
 Often rebellious in nature [doesn’t wish to follow the norms of




society]
 He is usually isolated from society as a wanderer or is in
exile of some kind.
 Because he rejects the values and moral codes of society,
he is often unrepentant by society's standards.
Larger than life intellectual capacity, pride, and passion.
 These heightened abilities often make the hero arrogant,
extremely confident, abnormally sensitive, and extremely
conscious of himself.
Moody by nature or passionate about a particular issue.
Often plagued by a guilty memory of some terrible unnamed
crime.
With the possibility greatness, yet seriously flawed in some
manner, our hero usually meets with sad a end.
 Due to these characteristics, the hero is often a figure of
repulsion, as well as fascination.