Analyzing Poems

Writing a poem can be challenging but analyzing a poem will be a lot harder to interpret and understand. The key to analyzing a poem is to know where to find it and what is it that you need to find.

You need to read the poem several times in order to find out what emotions the poem wants to evoke to the reader. Reading only once or twice will never work. Read it aloud and try to feel the tone of the poem.

Get a dictionary and highlight all the words that you do not understand. Poems usually have words that are hard to understand so you have to look them up in the dictionary. You cannot fully understand the poem if you do not know the meaning of some of its words.

A poem has a speaker and it is not always the poet who is the speaker in the poem. Find out also where the poem takes place. This will help you find out the point of view of the poem and the imagery that you can construct.

Study the meter, rhyme and pattern of the poem. There are guides and textbooks that can help you with this.

Poems are full of sensory images. The themes of the poem are sometimes based on the images, objects or scenes in the poem. A particular flower in a poem may signify something or it may try to evoke feelings from the reader. Analyze if certain images or objects are given importance in the poem.

Remember that the poet who created the poem combined the words, emotions and images in order to convey a message. You have to analyze each elements and fuse them together to have a good understanding of the poem and its message.