American Literature / Unit 1 AML 0033 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading a Short Poem in Six Moves
The idea
A short poem under exam conditions takes six moves and about ninety seconds. Move one: read it straight through for the plain sense, finding the sentences inside the lines. Move two: name the speaker and the occasion, asking who is talking, to whom, and at what moment. Move three: take the shape, counting lines and stanzas and lettering the rhyme, because fourteen lines with a closing couplet is a fact worth having. Move four: mark the turn, the place where the argument or the feeling changes, which in a sonnet is the volta and in a free-verse poem is usually a shift in diction or image. Move five: name the figures that carry the weight, the central metaphor first. Move six: state the poem's claim in one sentence of your own words, then check that sentence against the last line.
In practice
Sense, speaker, shape, turn, figure, claim.
Where people slip
The last line is the check, not the first. A poem that changes its mind does so late, and a reading built from the opening image alone will miss the reversal the exam is asking about.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
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