Poetry Essay 1

*When quoting poetry, please use slashes to indicate line breaks "/" . See how the slash is used in the Shakespeare examples below.

 Choose one of the poems you have read for this class—one of the ones I assigned, and write an essay that fulfills the following: 

•  Identifies the theme of the poem (i.e. unconditional love, or the ridiculousness of war, etc.)

• and then discuss what elements in the poem help communicate the theme.

• elements such as

•     images or analogies/metaphors

•     sensory details (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell)

•     the rhythm or changes in rhythm that aid the theme

•     rhymes

•     word choices

•     etc.

Please be careful NOT to just explain the poem. You are analyzing how the poet created this work of art to get across meaning, entertainment, beauty, surprise, or whatever you think is most important.

What follows is an example of the difference between explaining (or explicating) the poem and analyzing it:

Explaining
When Shakespeare says "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds/Or bends with the remover to remove," he is describing unconditional love. (Note the slash after "finds")

Analyzing
Shakespeare's use of repetition emphasizes the eternal aspect of his definition of unconditional love. He repeats the word love -  "Love is not love"  - to create a negative definition of what love is not. And he repeats different forms of the word "alters" by following it with "alteration" to make the reader pay close attention to the speaker's belief that unconditional love requires constancy in the face of change.