The Complete Guide to Poetry Analysis

1. Reading a Poem: The First Three Passes

Pass 1 (pleasure): read aloud once; note gut reaction and title's promise.
Pass 2 (map): mark sentence boundaries, stanzas, turns, and any shift in tense or address.
Pass 3 (mine): annotate devices, but only those serving an emerging interpretation.

2. Meter & Scansion

Meter is patterned stress. Mark unstressed ( ˪ ) and stressed ( ʲ ) syllables to find the dominant foot:

Foot	Pattern	Feel / famous case
Iamb	da-DUM	Natural English speech — Shakespeare's iambic pentameter ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?")
Trochee	DUM-da	Insistent, chant-like — "Tyger Tyger burning bright" (Blake, 1794)
Anapest	da-da-DUM	Galloping momentum — "'Twas the night before Christmas"
Dactyl	DUM-da	Falling, elegiac — Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854)
Spondee	DUM-DUM	Weighty pause — used to slow lines dramatically

Count feet per line for the meter's name: pentameter = five, tetrameter = four, trimeter = three. The analytic gold is deviation: when iambic verse suddenly breaks pattern, something in the meaning breaks too.

Worked example of metrical deviation

In Hamlet's "To be, or not to be", the line scans with a hard spondaic jolt on "not" — the metre itself stumbles at the thought of non-being. Form enacts hesitation.

3. Rhyme & Sound Schemes

Rhyme scheme notation: ABAB, AABB, ABBA — label every poem you study.
Couplet closure: Shakespearian sonnets resolve their argument in the final rhyming couplet — treat it as verdict.
Slant/half rhyme: near-misses (Emily Dickinson's "soul/all") signal unease where perfect rhyme would comfort.
Internal rhyme: speeds lines, adds incantation.
Assonance/sibilance: see the Techniques pack.

4. Fixed Forms

Form	Architecture	Analytical angle
Sonnet (Shakespearian)	14 lines, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, three quatrains + couplet	Argument develops per quatrain; couplet twists or resolves.
Sonnet (Petrarchan)	Octave ABBAABBA + sestet (CDECDE etc.), volta at line 9	Problem then turn/answer; locate the pivot precisely.
Villanelle	19 lines, two refrains alternating (A1bA2 / abA1 / abA2…)	Obsessive return; refrains change meaning by context (Do Not Go Gentle, Dylan Thomas, 1951).
Ballad	Quatrains, ABCB or ABAB, often dialogue/narrative	Folk memory, dramatic economy, fatalism.
Ode	Elevated address to subject, irregular stanzas	Praise complicated by doubt (Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, 1820).
Elegy	Meditation on death moving toward consolation	Track emotional arc, not just content.
Free verse	No fixed meter/rhyme; lineation is the form	Ask why lines break WHERE they break — that IS the technique.

Do not go gentle into that good night… Rage, rage against the dying of the light.— Dylan Thomas (1951) — villanelle refrains turning grief into command.

5. Lineation & White Space

End-stopped line: punctuation at line end — measured, deliberate pace.
Enjambment: sense runs over the break — momentum, surprise, double meanings activated at line-turn.
Caesura: mid-line pause — interruption, breath, fracture.
Stanza breaks: silences that stage time jumps or tonal shifts.
Concrete/shaped verse: visual layout as meaning (Herbert's "Easter Wings").

6. Poetic Voice & Address

Who speaks? To whom? Persona poems adopt masks (Duffy's voices); apostrophe addresses absent things ("O Captain! my Captain!" — Whitman, 1865). Tone words matter: elegiac, wry, defiant, reverent, ironic. Voice can betray: unreliable lyric speakers exist just as unreliable narrators do.

7. The Band 6 Annotation Method (Step-by-Step)

Title first: what does it promise or withhold?
Paraphrase each stanza in one plain sentence.
Label rhyme scheme and meter; circle deviations.
Mark imagery clusters; name the controlling metaphor if any.
Find the turn(s) — volta, tense shift, addressee change.
Write a one-sentence interpretation: "Through X, the poem argues Y."
Select only annotations supporting that argument; discard the rest.

Band 6 model analysis paragraph

The sonnet's architecture performs its own argument. Each quatrain attempts a definition of love — star, bark, fool's error — and each metaphor fails upward into greater abstraction, so that by the closing couplet the speaker has wagered his entire art on love's indefinability: "If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ." The couplet does not resolve; it stakes. Form becomes gamble.

Citations

Shakespeare, William. Sonnet 116; Hamlet.
Blake, William. "The Tyger." Songs of Experience. 1794.
Thomas, Dylan. "Do not go gentle into that good night." 1951.
Whitman, Walt. "O Captain! My Captain!" 1865.
Keats, John. "Ode on a Grecian Urn." 1820.