S.O.A.P.S.Tone to Analyze Poetry
English 12
Using the Acronym S.O.A.P.S.Tone (Subject, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Speaker, Tone),
analyze the photograph on the overhead.
1.
Subject: What is the topic of the photograph?
2.
Occasion: What is the reason for taking this photograph? Why is it particularly of
interest?
3.
Audience: To whom is the photograph addressed? (Who is the audience?)
4.
Purpose: What does the photographer want to convince the audience to believe or
persuade the audience to do?
5.
Speaker: Who is the photographer? What do you know about the photographer from
looking at the photograph?
6.
Tone: What is the photographer’s attitude about the topic? What mood is conveyed by
the photograph?
In any piece of text, there are specific elements that demonstrate the arguments and intent of an
author. These elements will help you analyze and break down Renaissance poems.
Subject: What is the topic?
Occasion: What is the immediate occasion for writing the piece? What is the reason for writing
about this topic at this time?
Audience: To whom is she/he addressing the piece?
Purpose: What does the writer want to convince the reader to believe?
Speaker: is the writer? What do you know about the writer from this piece of writing?
Tone: What is the writer’s attitude about the topic? If the writer were reading the piece aloud,
what tone of voice would he or she use to convey that attitude? What mood is conveyed by the
piece?
Shakespeare’s Sonnets – The term “sonnet” means “little song.” A sonnet is a poem of fourteen
lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and logical structure.
Sonnet 29
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Subject:
Occasion:
Audience:
Purpose:
Speaker:
Tone:
Sonnet 3
Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou would not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime:
So thou through windows of thine age shall see
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remember’d not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
Subject:
Occasion:
Audience:
Purpose:
Speaker:
Tone: