By: Phillip Mattie
As much as I enjoy poetry, and as much as I recognise the artistry and talent of the many fantastic English speaking poets that have come about, I don’t think many students share my sentiments—not that I blame students in any way; poetry in high school is force-fed, and so there isn’t a lot of joy in reading it. To make matters worse, poetry is hard to understand, circumstantial, and contextual, littered with figurative language … and yet there is great value in reading it. Because it can be beautiful, relatable, emotional. However, this article isn’t about the tough figurative language or the circumstantial learning or poetry. It’s about increasing your poetic literacy, to make reading it easier and more understandable, and I’m going to do that through some simple organizational patterns that you can find in many different types of poems.
The Speaker
Ah, the speaker, perhaps the simplest organizational device to identify. Now, this word may seem foreign to those taking their first foray into poetry; however, it’s easy to define: The speaker is the poem’s protagonist. Every poem has one, even if there is no identifying pronoun or antecedent. Sometimes the protagonist will announce him- or herself by saying something like, “I am Beowolf the great!” or sometimes the poem is narrated by an omniscient speaker. Or sometimes, the poem is in the first person. Be careful, here, because students tend to think that every time the poet uses the first person, the poet must be the speaker, which may be true, and I do say ‘may.’ There is no guarantee that the use of the first person means that the protagonist of the poem is also the poet. Your good judgement is needed to confirm this problem. So knowing who is speaking to you will help you to increase your understanding of the poem.
The Tone
The tone of a poem is how a poem makes you feel, or rather, how the author wants you to feel. At first, tone may not seem like an organizational device, but you can make it so. Just hear me out. Tone can be easily identified in poetry by finding the adjectives. Go through the poem and highlight all the descriptive words—yes, all of them. You should be able to identify a certain theme among these adjectives. Maybe they are kind of creepy and give you an unsettling, fearful feeling in the pit of your stomach (are you reading Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps?). Maybe the adjectives make you feel content, like you want to kick your feet up and watch the clouds float by (Wordsworth, anyone?) If you have a really active reading voice in your head, you should find issues like identifying tone in poetry easy, natural, almost. But for the rest of us, we need something a little bit more concrete than gut instincts, which is where the adjectives come in.
If you find that the adjectives alone aren’t enough to fully understand the tone, go back and circle all the nouns that the adjectives are connected to (all adjectives are connected to nouns, e.g., a delicious meal, delicious being the adjective, meal being the noun). Compare and contrast these pairs. Are they oxymoronic (a free slave)? Metaphorical (the pearly moon)? Try to use your knowledge of poetic devices such as these to help you identify the tone, which will, of course, increase your understanding of the poem.
The Plot
Another organizational pattern in poetry that I’ve found improves my comprehension is to know that many poems are stories or personal experiences. With any story, there needs to be a plot; therefore, there should be an exposition phase. Look for settings and characters to be introduced early. If there is none, look for the conflict. What is this speaker’s problem? What is he or she fighting for, or against? Who? What challenges or obstacles are in his or her way? And like any good story, the speaker must make difficult decisions.
If you are a very visual person, it may help to picture poems in your mind, almost like canvas paintings, when trying to find the conflict. Where is the speaker in your mind? Is anyone else with him? What direction is he facing, where is he looking? Think of yourself as the director of a very, very short film, even. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” might be a short commercial of a man standing before a fork in the road, looking wistfully down each path before setting off down the one slightly less travelled. This poem has a clear exposition (details of the setting, character), conflict (tough decisions in life), and resolution (those decisions define us). Identifying these plot points is easy if you follow the typical, tried and true mode of storytelling.
The Turn
If you look at poetry as a form of storytelling, then the turn would be considered the resolution, or dénouement, of the poem, and it almost always happens at the end of poems. A poet usually triggers the turn through the use of conflict transition words like ‘but,’ ‘however,’ ‘yet,’ or my personal favourite, ‘and yet.’ These transition words often occur in the final stanza of poems, so keep your eyes peeled for them. Another way poets trigger the turn is by a change in rhyme scheme, a la Shakespearean sonnets ABAB CDCD EFEF GG scheme, the GG being the turn. Note the position of the rhyming couplet. You got it—it’s at the end.
So why is the turn important in poetry? Well, the turn is a signal. It signifies that the poem’s message or moral is upcoming. Consider this moral to be the main idea, or thesis statement, of the poem. To simplify the positioning of the turn, consider this contrast: In essays, the main idea is at the beginning. In poetry, the main idea is at the end. Understanding where the main idea is in a poem, any poem, will undoubtedly increase your comprehension.
So there you have it. Here are four easy-to-identify organizational patterns common throughout English poetry. Remember to identify each component in the organizational structure of every poem so that you can best understand their messages.