Reading Poetry: Line, Sound, Form, Figure

This is Unit One of American Literature, part two of two: the figures that let a poem mean twice, and the procedures for reading one you have never seen. Part one ended on the first figures of comparison, the metaphor and the substitutions. This part finishes that work and then does something different with it. Six of these fourteen entries are procedures rather than definitions, and that shift is the unit's governing idea arriving at its payoff. A term you can define is worth very little under exam conditions. A term you can apply in ninety seconds to a poem you have never met is worth a great deal, and the difference between those two states is a sequence of steps. So we take the last of the figures, symbol and allegory, image, irony, paradox, allusion and ambiguity, and then we put everything from both parts into six moves for a whole poem, three adjustments for an excerpt, a counting method for naming a form, a two-column method for reading tone, and a way of answering the question the board asks most often about a speaker. By the end you will be able to tell a symbol from an allegory and name the three ironies. To recognize an allusion and handle a poem with two defensible readings. To read a short poem in six moves and an excerpt without its frame. To name a verse form by counting and read tone from diction. And to answer a speaker's-response question and avoid the standing traps.

Six entries on the remaining figures: what each one lets a poem do, and which pairs the exam likes to set against each other.

One image, or the whole machine.

AML 0027 Symbol and Allegory: The Difference the Exam Tests

A symbol is an object that carries a meaning beyond itself, and a contextual symbol carries that meaning only inside its own work. An allegory is a whole work whose characters and events stand for something else, so the second meaning runs the length of the story. Allegory is structural and a symbol is local, and that distinction is what the exam tests.

A picture put before the senses.

AML 0028 Image, Imagery, and the Concrete Particular

An image is a word picture, in the glossary's phrase, a line that puts something before the senses. Imagery is the pattern such pictures make across a whole poem. Images work on sight most often, but they also work on sound, on touch, on taste and on smell. An image can be perfectly literal and still be doing figurative work.

Saying one thing, meaning another.

AML 0029 Irony: Verbal, Situational, Dramatic

Cicero called irony saying one thing and meaning another, and the glossary keeps his definition. Verbal irony is a speaker's meaning differing sharply from the speaker's words. Situational irony is an outcome that reverses what was expected. Dramatic irony is a reader knowing something a character does not. Irony is not sarcasm, and it is not coincidence either.

Too much, too little, and contradiction.

AML 0030 Paradox, Oxymoron, Hyperbole, Understatement

A paradox seems self-contradictory and makes sense anyway, the glossary quoting the line about being cruel only to be kind. An oxymoron packs that contradiction into two words. Hyperbole exaggerates for effect. Understatement says less than the case, and in American poetry it is often the sharper of the two instruments, which is why it gets missed.

A reference that arrives carrying weight.

AML 0031 Allusion and the Borrowed Authority

An allusion is a reference to something outside the poem, most often scripture, classical myth, or another poem, which the poet expects a reader to catch. It carries the weight of its source into the new work without having to argue for it. American poetry alludes to the Bible above all else, and a missed allusion loses the poem's argument.

Two readings, one better supported.

AML 0032 Ambiguity: When Two Readings Are Both Defensible

Ambiguity is a word or a passage open to more than one reading, and in poetry it is usually deliberate rather than accidental. The exam handles it by asking which reading is best supported rather than which reading is possible. That phrasing turns the work into weighing evidence on the page. Two readings can both be defensible, and one of them still fits better.

Three procedures for an unseen poem: one for a whole poem, one for a fragment, and one for naming the form.

Six moves, about ninety seconds.

AML 0033 Reading a Short Poem in Six Moves

A short poem under exam conditions takes six moves and about ninety seconds. One: read it straight through for the plain sense, finding the sentences inside the lines. Two: name the speaker and the occasion, asking who is talking, to whom, and at what moment. Three: take the shape, counting lines and stanzas and lettering the rhyme, because fourteen lines ending in a couplet is a fact worth having early. 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 in image. Five: name the figures carrying the weight, the central metaphor first. Six: state the poem's claim in one sentence of your own words, then check that sentence against the last line. 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.

A fragment, read as though whole.

AML 0034 Reading an Excerpt From a Long Poem

An excerpt is harder than a whole poem because the frame is missing, and the board sets them often. Three adjustments do the work. First, read the excerpt as complete in itself and answer only from what is printed, since the questions are set on the passage and not on the poem it was cut from. Second, look for the internal shape a long poem repeats, most often a verse paragraph that states a thought, develops it and closes it, and treat that unit as the poem. Third, treat proper names and unexplained references as clues to the tradition rather than as gaps in your knowledge, because the exam asks what a passage does and not what surrounded it. An excerpt's first line is rarely a beginning and its last is rarely an ending, so the turn may fall outside the passage entirely. Where no turn appears, say that the passage develops one position, rather than inventing a reversal to find.

Count first, then read.

AML 0035 Naming a Verse Form From the Shape on the Page

Form questions are answered by counting before reading. Count the lines first. Fourteen means a sonnet, and the rhyme decides which kind: an octave and a sestet make it Italian, three quatrains and a couplet make it English. Nineteen lines in five tercets and a quatrain, with two lines returning as refrains, make a villanelle. Three short lines around a single image make a haiku. Quatrains rhyming a b c b and telling a story make a ballad. If the lines carry no rhyme but keep five stresses each, the form is blank verse. If they keep no pattern of rhyme or stress at all, the form is free verse, which is an answer rather than a failure to find one. Two traps sit here. A poem in quatrains is not automatically a ballad, because the ballad also needs a story. And a poem without rhyme is not automatically free verse, because blank verse is unrhymed and strictly metered.

Three entries on the questions that recur: tone from word choice, the speaker's response, and the wrong turns.

Sort the words into two columns.

AML 0036 Reading Tone From Diction: A Worked Case

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 itself 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 entire effect. Do not take the elevated column as the poem's own view. That royal diction belongs to the speakers, and the poem is measuring their distance from the man rather than endorsing their picture of him.

The mildest option is often right.

AML 0037 What the Speaker's Response Question Rewards

A recurring question asks how the speaker's apparent response to the poem's events can best be characterized, and the answer is almost never the strongest feeling on the list. Three steps. One: separate what the speaker reports from what the speaker judges, because a poem may narrate a catastrophe and pass no verdict at all. Two: check whether the poem supplies any word of evaluation; where none appears, feelings like anger, malice and remorse are unsupported, however natural they seem to a reader. Three: choose the option that matches the poem's silence. A speaker who reports an event without explaining it, and whose telling stops where the event stops, is registering a fact and not accounting for it, and the word for that is bewilderment. The strong emotions on the list are distractors placed for readers answering from their own reaction.

Four wrong turns, and a fifth.

AML 0038 The Four Traps in Poetry Questions

Four wrong turns account for most lost marks on poetry questions. The first is answering from the poet's life when the question asks about the speaker, which a reader avoids by treating the voice as a character. The second is naming the subject when the question asks for the theme, since the subject is what a poem is about and the theme is what the poem says about it. The third is choosing the most dramatic option in a tone or response question when the page supports a milder one. The fourth is naming a form from a single feature, most often calling any unrhymed poem free verse without checking whether its lines keep five stresses. A fifth trap is subtler than those. An option can be true of the poem and still not answer the question that was asked, and the exam builds distractors that way deliberately, so test each option against the wording of the question before you test it against the poem.

Two entries to close: the labels the board actually prints, and what this whole unit is claiming.

Learn a term by its example.

AML 0039 The Terms the Board Actually Uses

The board's sample questions name a form and ask for its label, and the labels are ordinary ones. One question offers allegory, burlesque, epistle, fable and parody. Another asks for a movement name. The exam asks for recognition rather than for definition, so the efficient way to hold a term is by its clearest example. One clear example beats a memorized gloss every time.

Every answer, traceable to the page.

AML 0040 How a Poem Means: The Method This Course Uses

This unit is the instrument the rest of the course uses, and it holds one argument: a poem's meaning is built from things a reader can point to, so every interpretive answer should be traceable to a word, a line break, a rhyme or a turn. The parts assemble in order. A poem is spoken by a made voice, and the first question is always who speaks, to whom, and when. The voice carries an attitude, which is tone, and tone is built from diction, so sorting the words into elevated and plain is the most reliable way into an unfamiliar text. Beneath the words runs the line, the poet's own unit, where stopping or running over is a choice about emphasis and surprise. Beneath the line runs meter, counted by naming the foot and the number of feet, with iambic pentameter as the measure everything else is heard against. Above the line sits the shape: the stanza, the fixed forms, and the sonnet above all, whose turn is where the argument moves and where the questions sit. Across all of it work the figures that let a poem say two things at once, and the reader's task is to name the one carrying the weight. What this unit does not claim is that a poem has one meaning. Ambiguity is often deliberate, and the exam knows it, which is why its questions ask which reading is best supported. That phrasing is the warrant for teaching interpretation as evidence rather than as opinion.

That closes the unit, and with it the equipment the rest of the course will assume you have. You can tell a symbol, which is local, from an allegory, which runs a whole work, and you can name verbal, situational and dramatic irony. You can spot an allusion arriving with its source's weight, and you can handle a poem that supports two readings by asking which one the page supports better. You can take an unseen poem in six moves, checking your one-sentence claim against the last line rather than the first. You can read an excerpt by answering only from what is printed. You can name a form by counting lines, then stanzas, then stresses, without mistaking blank verse for free verse. You can read tone by sorting words into elevated and plain and listening for the collision. You can answer a speaker's-response question by weighing what the poem refuses to say. And you know the four traps, and the fifth one, where an option is true of the poem and still answers a different question. Unit two does the same work for prose and drama.