American Literature / Unit 1 AML 0036 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading Tone From Diction: A Worked Case
The idea
Tone questions are answered from word choice, and the method is to sort the poem's words into two columns. Put the elevated, formal or archaic words in one column and the plain, colloquial or blunt words in the other. A poem that keeps to one column has a stable tone, and the answer names it directly: solemn, celebratory, wry. A poem that mixes them is doing something, and the mixture is the answer. Robinson's "Richard Cory" is the standard case: the townspeople describe the man in the vocabulary of royalty, calling him imperially slim and a gentleman from sole to crown, and then the last line reports a bullet in plain monosyllables. The collision of those two columns is the poem's whole effect.
In practice
Sort the words, then read the collision.
Where people slip
Do not take the elevated column as the poem's own view. In "Richard Cory" the royal diction belongs to the speakers, and the poem is measuring their distance from the man, not endorsing it.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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