Reading Poetry: Line, Sound, Form, Figure

This is Unit One of American Literature, part one of two: how to read a poem, which is the single largest thing this exam asks you to do. Here is the governing idea, and part two pays it off. Between thirty-five and forty percent of the exam prints a poem or an excerpt and asks what it means, how it sounds, or what its speaker feels. That band rewards a careful reader rather than a stocked memory, which means the vocabulary in this lecture is not decoration. It is the equipment you read with. We move outward from the smallest choice a poet makes to the largest: first the voice and the words, then the line and its rhythm, then rhyme and the sounds inside a line, then the stanza and the fixed forms built from stanzas, and last the figures that let a poem say one thing by naming another. Every term here is one the board has a use for. By the end you will be able to separate speaker from poet and name a poem's tone, diction and syntax. To scan a line and tell blank verse from free verse. To letter a rhyme scheme and name the sound devices. To identify a stanza shape and the fixed forms. And to recognize the dramatic monologue and the figures of comparison.

Five entries on the reader's task: what the exam wants, whose voice you are hearing, and the three things that voice is made of.

The largest band asks for reading.

AML 0001 What the Exam Asks You to Do With a Poem

The board prints a short poem or an excerpt and asks what it means, how it sounds, or what its speaker feels. Between thirty-five and forty percent of the exam works this way, which makes it the largest skill band on the test. The questions reward a careful reader rather than a stocked memory. Reading is what is tested here, not recall.

The voice is made, not confessed.

AML 0002 Speaker and Poet: The Difference That Decides Answers

A poem is spoken by a voice the poet makes, and that voice is the speaker. The speaker may be a child, a corpse, a townsman, a madman. Questions ask what the speaker feels or knows, and never what the poet felt. Answers that reach for the poet's biography go wrong, and that is the commonest wrong turn a reader takes.

Attitude, carried by the words themselves.

AML 0003 Tone: The Attitude a Poem Takes Toward Its Subject

Tone is the attitude a literary work projects toward its subject, in the glossary's words: serious and solemn, or lighthearted and amusing, or any shade between those two. It is carried by word choice, by rhythm, and by what a poem leaves out. A tone question is answered from the page, because a grave subject can be handled lightly and a small one gravely.

Word choice sets a distance.

AML 0004 Diction: High, Low, and the Distance Between

Diction is the poem's choice of words, and the exam tests the gap between a word and the words around it. Formal diction lifts a subject, plain diction lowers it, and dialect places a speaker in a region and a class. A shift in diction partway through a poem is always a signal, and noticing where it happens is usually the answer.

Difficulty is often order, not meaning.

AML 0005 Syntax: The Sentence Inside the Lines

Syntax is the order of words in a sentence, and poems bend it. Inverted order, delayed verbs and long suspended clauses slow a reader down and put weight where the poet wants weight. Finding the plain sentence inside a difficult stanza is the first move of any close reading, because what looks like obscurity is often only rearrangement.

Seven entries on rhythm: the line itself, the break at its end, the foot that measures it, and a procedure for counting.

Poetry's unit is the line.

AML 0006 The Line as a Unit of Meaning

Prose is built from sentences and poetry from lines, and the line is the poet's instrument. Wherever a line ends a reader pauses slightly, whether punctuation is there or not. So a line's last word carries weight and the first word of the next line carries surprise. Lines and sentences do not have to agree with each other.

Sense that spills past the break.

AML 0007 Enjambment and the End-Stopped Line

An end-stopped line closes together with its sentence, at a comma or a period. An enjambed line runs past its ending into the next one, so the sense spills over the break. The Yale lectures use enjambment to show how a poem can say one thing where the line stops and something else a word later. That doubleness is the effect.

Two halves make a meter's name.

AML 0008 Meter: Counting Stress, Not Syllables Alone

Meter is the rhythmic pattern of a poem, measured in feet, and an English foot is built from stressed and unstressed syllables rather than from long and short ones. Naming a meter means naming the foot and then counting how many of them fall in a line. Both halves of the name carry information, and English counts stress rather than length.

The line four centuries defaulted to.

AML 0009 Iambic Pentameter, the Default English Line

An iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, the rhythm of the word abide. Five iambs make a pentameter line, and that line has carried most serious English verse for four centuries. The Yale lectures treat it as the measure every other rhythm is heard against. Perfectly regular lines are rare, and dull when they happen.

Four more feet, each reversing something.

AML 0010 Trochee, Anapest, Dactyl, Spondee

A trochee reverses the iamb, stressed then unstressed, as in the word tiger. An anapest runs two unstressed syllables then one stressed, the gallop of Byron's Assyrian coming down. A dactyl reverses the anapest. A spondee is two hard stresses together, the glossary's example being Hopkins's phrase shook foil. Trochaic openings are common inside iambic poems.

Four steps, and one honest answer.

AML 0011 Scanning a Line: The Procedure

Marking a line's rhythm is a four-step habit, and the exam rewards it even where the board never uses the word. One: read the line aloud naturally and let the sentence place the stresses rather than your expectation. Two: mark each syllable above the word, working outward from the words you are surest of, which are usually the two-syllable ones. Three: divide the marks into repeating groups and take the group that occurs most often as the poem's foot. Four: count the groups and name the length, from monometer at one, through tetrameter at four, to pentameter at five and hexameter at six. Two cautions. A poem's meter is the pattern most lines keep, not the pattern every line keeps, so a reversed opening foot does not change the name. And a line that resists all grouping is likely free verse, where the honest answer is that there is no pattern.

One drops rhyme, one drops everything.

AML 0012 Blank Verse and Free Verse Are Not the Same Thing

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter, and the witness attaches Frost's "Birches" to it. Free verse has neither a set rhyme scheme nor a rhythm pattern, and its example is Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers". One of them keeps the meter and drops the rhyme; the other drops both. The exam likes setting these two against each other.

Four entries on sound: the four kinds of rhyme, a method for writing a scheme down, and the noises inside a line.

Four rhymes, and one that lies.

AML 0013 Rhyme: End, Internal, Slant, Eye

End rhyme falls at the close of a line and internal rhyme falls inside a single line. Slant rhyme, which Emily Dickinson made into an instrument, matches the consonants and misses the vowel. Eye rhyme looks like rhyme and is not: the glossary pairs good and mood, which the eye joins and the ear refuses. Eye rhyme is spelling rather than sound.

Letters for sounds, in order.

AML 0014 Lettering a Rhyme Scheme

A rhyme scheme is written as letters, and the exam uses that notation without ever explaining it. The method has three steps. One: read to the end of the first line and give its final sound the letter a. Two: read each following line and ask whether its final sound matches one you have already lettered. If it does, reuse that letter. If it does not, give it the next letter you have not used. Three: write the letters out in order and look at the shape they make. A ballad quatrain rhyming only its second and fourth lines comes out as a b c b, which the glossary gives as the ballad's usual scheme. A couplet comes out a a, and an English sonnet comes out a b a b, c d c d, e f e f, g g. Letter the sound and not the spelling, so eye rhymes take different letters. And an unrhymed line inside a rhymed poem takes a letter of its own rather than being skipped, which is how a reader spots the one line a poet left deliberately loose.

Position decides which one it is.

AML 0015 Alliteration, Assonance, Consonance

Alliteration repeats a consonant sound at the start of words, the glossary's example being storm strewn sea. Assonance repeats a vowel sound, as in Owen's phrase rapid rattle. Consonance repeats consonants inside words or at their ends rather than at their beginnings. All three bind a line together and slow a reader down, and all three are noticed first and explained second.

Sound imitating sense, pleasant or harsh.

AML 0016 Onomatopoeia, Euphony, Cacophony

Onomatopoeia is a word whose sound suggests its meaning, and the glossary offers bang and thwack. Euphony names a pleasant run of sound and cacophony a harsh one. A poet who wants a reader to flinch chooses hard consonants, and one who wants a reader soothed chooses liquids and long vowels. These terms describe an effect rather than a rule.

Seven entries on shape: how many lines are grouped together, and which fixed forms those groupings make.

Count the lines in the group.

AML 0017 Stanza Shapes: Couplet, Tercet, Quatrain

A stanza is a group of lines set off by white space, and each length has a name. Two lines make a couplet, which the glossary defines as a stanza whose last words rhyme. Three lines make a tercet, four a quatrain, six a sestet and eight an octave. Knowing the shape narrows the field of possible forms before you try to name one.

Fourteen lines, arranged two ways.

AML 0018 The Sonnet: Italian and English

A sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter in one of two arrangements. The Italian, also called Petrarchan, breaks into an octave of eight lines and a sestet of six. The English, also called Shakespearean, runs three quatrains and a closing couplet, rhyming a b a b, c d c d, e f e f, g g. Count for that closing couplet, because it settles which kind you have.

Find the hinge, find the answer.

AML 0019 The Volta, and Why the Turn Is the Question

The volta is the sonnet's turn, the place where the argument shifts from a problem to an answer, or from a claim to a qualification of it. In the Italian sonnet the turn falls between the octave and the sestet. In the English it usually waits for the closing couplet. Exam questions tend to sit right on the turn, so finding it often answers the question.

A story told in quatrains.

AML 0020 Ballad, Ballad Stanza, and the Refrain

A ballad is a narrative poem, usually in quatrains rhyming a b c b, which the glossary gives as its standard shape. Ballads tell a story plainly, lean heavily on dialogue, and often carry a refrain, a line that returns. The witness uses Service's "The Cremation of Sam McGee" as its example. That plainness is a chosen technique rather than a shortfall.

Three forms named by occasion.

AML 0021 Ode, Elegy, Lyric

An ode is a long formal poem presenting a poet's views on a large subject such as nature, art or death. An elegy commemorates a death, and the witness attaches Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young" to that term. A lyric is any short poem voicing feeling rather than telling a story. These three name an occasion rather than a shape.

Recognize these three by counting.

AML 0022 Villanelle, Sestina, Haiku

A villanelle runs nineteen lines in five tercets and a closing quatrain, turning on two refrains, and Bishop's "One Art" is the American example the witness attaches. A haiku is three short lines holding a single image. A sestina repeats six end words in rotation across its stanzas. All three of these are recognized by counting rather than by feel.

Heroic, mock-heroic, or merely narrative.

AML 0023 Epic, Mock Epic, Narrative Poem

An epic is a long narrative poem on a heroic subject, opening in the middle of the action and carrying a nation's values. A mock epic borrows all of that machinery for a trivial subject, and the gap between the machinery and the subject is the joke. A narrative poem is any poem that tells a story. Longfellow's Hiawatha is the American attempt at an epic.

Three entries to close: a poem shaped as a speech, and the two families of figure the exam returns to.

One voice, one silent hearer.

AML 0024 The Dramatic Monologue

A dramatic monologue is dramatic because it is a speech delivered to a listener, and a monologue because nobody else talks, in the glossary's formulation. The listener is present and silent, the occasion is specific, and the speaker reveals more than he intends to. Browning's "My Last Duchess" is the model, and that self-betrayal is the whole point of the form.

A comparison, with or without a signpost.

AML 0025 Simile and Metaphor: Tenor and Vehicle

A metaphor asserts that one thing is another. A simile makes the same comparison explicit with the word like or the word as, and the glossary treats it as a type of metaphor. The thing being talked about is the tenor, and the thing it is compared to is the vehicle. An ingenious extended metaphor is called a conceit.

Four ways of standing in.

AML 0026 Personification, Apostrophe, Metonymy, Synecdoche

Personification gives human qualities to something that is not human. Apostrophe addresses the absent or the dead as though they were present. Metonymy substitutes an associated thing, so that sabre rattling stands in for threatening war. Synecdoche substitutes a part for the whole, the glossary's example being lend me a hand. Association is metonymy; a part is synecdoche.

That is the poem's machinery, and the order we built it in is the order to use it in. You can separate the speaker from the poet, which stops the commonest wrong answer before it starts, and you can name a poem's tone, its diction and its syntax. You can read a line as a unit, hear an enjambment, mark the stresses in four steps, name the foot and the count, and tell blank verse, which keeps the meter, from free verse, which keeps neither. You can letter a rhyme scheme by giving every new sound a new letter, and name the sounds working inside a line. You can count a stanza, name a sonnet by its closing couplet, find the volta the questions sit on, and recognize a ballad, an ode, an elegy, a villanelle and an epic. And you can hear a dramatic monologue betraying its speaker, and take apart a comparison into the thing meant and the thing borrowed. Part two takes the figures further, into imagery, symbol, irony and the procedures for reading a poem cold.