Title – Examine the title

Paraphrase – Translate the poem into your own words.

Connotation –

                Figurative Language

                                Simile

                                Synecdoche, metonymy

                                Symbol

                                Personification

                                Overstatement, hyperbole, understatement, litotes,  oxymoron

                                Paradox, pun

                                Irony – verbal, situational, dramatic

                                Apostrophe, allusion

                                Metaphor

Musical Devices

                Onomatopoeia

                Alliteration

                Assonance

                Consonance

                Rime – masculine, feminine, internal, end, approximate/slant

                Refrain

                Euphony, cacophony

Rhythm and Meter

                Foot/meter:  iamb (iambic), trochee (trochaic), anapest (anapestic), dactyl (dactylic), spondee (spondaic)

                scansion

                Line (monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter, heptameter, octameter)

                End-stopped line, run-on line

                Free verse

                Blank verse

Imagery

Patterns

                Stanza

                Sonnet (Italian and English)

                Villanelle

                Haiku

                Epic

                Lines up to 5 lines

                                2 – couplet, heroic couplet

                                3 – tercet

                                4 – quatrain

                                5 – cinquain

                Ballad stanza

Attitude – (tone)  Examine both the speaker’s and the poet’s attitudes

Shifts – Shifts can be signaled by the following:

                Key words (but, yet, however, although)

                Punctuation (dashed,  periods, colons, ellipsis)

                Stanza divisions

                Changes in line or stanza length, or both

                Irony (sometimes irony hides shifts)

                Effect of structure on meaning

                Changes in sound that may indicate changes in meaning

                Changes in diction

Title – Exam the title again, this time on an interpretive level.

Theme – First list what the poem is about (subjects), then determine what the poet is saying about each of those subjects (theme).  The theme must be expressed as a complete sentence.