Term 2 Poetry

Read it

Say it out loud

Talk about it

Study it

Think about it

listen to it

Write about it

Enjoy it

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A poet spends a lot of time choosing exactly the best words for her/his poem. You may not understand them all or be able to see why they were chosen.

That doesn’t mean you cannot understand the idea that the poet is trying to share. And some poems you may be asked to read are written by and for people who have a lot more experience of life than you do at the moment.

You can enjoy and understand parts of a poem without fully grasping it all.

Always read a poem lots of times. And try to read it aloud. The first poetry was meant to be spoken aloud or read aloud, just like children’s poems and stories. And read to the punctuation. Often an idea is not contained in each separate line.

    1. Decide what you think the poem is generally about. There may be a simple surface meaning and a deeper one too. Do this before you begin to look at the way the poet has chosen words and images, has used figures of speech and layout, to deliver that meaning. Sometimes the title can hint at the theme of a poem.

    2. Look at the poem in more detail. Always ask yourself why the poet chose those particular words. Often you will be asked questions that guide you towards particular things like figures of speech (simile, metaphor, sound devices), parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives), pattern (rhythm, rhyme, sentence structure). At this level it is important that you are able to recognise and name the devices used, but much more important that you can comment on their effect in terms of the poem as a whole.

    3. Respond. Think about why you enjoyed the poem. Was it humorous? Was it relevant to your life? Poems mean different things to different people. Your personal response may be different from your classmates but it is just as valid.

    4. Don’t worry. Relax and enjoy as much poetry as you can. Read some for pleasure.

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Annotating a poem

A useful way to understand and appreciate a poem is to place a copy of it in the middle of a sheet of paper and annotate your ideas around it:

    1. Read the poem aloud if possible or alternatively listen to someone else read it.

    2. Read the poem to yourself several more times as you get confident with is vocabulary, rhythm and flow.

    3. Using a quality dictionary, look up the meaning of any words you are unsure of. Annotate these definitions. A dictionary often gives several meanings for a word so you need to pick the meaning that fits the poem.

Look for:

    1. the subject

    2. the poet’s attitude towards the subject, often revealed as ‘tone’

    3. the theme.

Then look for:

    1. images created by use of figures of speech perhaps

    2. effective words (diction, vocabulary)

    3. patterns like sentence structure, verses, rhyme

Then ask yourself:

    1. What do I think about the poem and its ideas?

(resource from Philippa Mulqueen)