Poetry and song lyrics
What is different about writing on poetry
- A poem is short enough to hold in your head at once. Whole-text structure — the hardest thing to reach in a novel — is the easiest thing to reach here, and structure questions are where poetry candidates do best.
- Your evidence is denser. A three-word quotation from a novel is a detail; three words from a poem may be a twentieth of the whole text, so you can afford to analyse the same phrase twice for two different reasons.
- The questions do not change. Every stem still reads Analyse how…, and every one is worded to fit any text type. A question about the beginning of a text means the opening lines of your poem, or the opening poem of your selection.
- Say what your text is in the first sentence — a single poem, a named group of poems, or a whole collection by one poet.
Deciding what counts as "the text"
- You have three legitimate answers, and the choice decides the essay.
- One poem. Best where the poems have little in common. You can cover the whole text closely, which no novel candidate can.
- Two or three poems. The usual choice, and the strongest, because a claim proved twice in different material is harder to dispute than a claim proved once.
- The collection as a whole. Only where you can name something the poet does repeatedly, and only if you can still quote.
- If you take more than one poem, the thesis must be about something the set does. In poem one the poet uses imagery, and in poem two the poet uses imagery is two essays stapled together, and the interpretations do not connect.
- The safe shape for a set: name the habit in the thesis, establish it in the first poem where it is most obvious, then complicate it with the poem where it works differently. The second poem earns its place by changing the claim, not by repeating it.
- Never write a poem-by-poem tour. Three poems given a paragraph each, in the order they appear in the book, is a contents page with quotations.
The line is the one tool poetry has that prose does not
- A poem is broken into lines by the poet, and every break is a choice. In prose the line endings are set by the width of the page and mean nothing.
- What a break does: it puts weight on the last word of the line, because the eye stops there; and it suspends the sense for a beat before the next line resolves it.
- Enjambment is a sentence running over the break without punctuation. It pulls the reader forward, and it lets a line mean one thing on its own and something else once completed. Say what the reader assumed at the break, and what the next line did to that assumption.
- An end-stopped line — one that finishes on a full stop — does the opposite. A run of them makes a poem sound like a series of verdicts.
- A stanza break is a silence, and it is longer than a line break. What is on either side of it is being separated on purpose.
- The last line of a poem is the most weighted position in the whole text, and the last line of a stanza is the second most.
- A line that is much shorter or much longer than its neighbours is doing something. Say what.
Sound, said in a way that counts
- Naming a sound device earns nothing. The poet uses alliteration identifies; it does not analyse. Neither does it makes the line flow, it makes it memorable, or it emphasises the word.
- Tie every sound observation to sense. The test: finish the sentence …so reading the line feels like… or …so the sound of the line does what the line describes.
- Hard consonants and heavy stresses slow a line, so a line about effort takes effort to say.
- Long vowels stretch a line out; clipped ones make it curt.
- The highest-value sound observations are all breakages, because a pattern that holds is invisible and a pattern that fails is not.
- A rhyme that arrives where it should not, or fails to arrive where the poem has trained you to expect it.
- A rhythm that stumbles on the one word that matters.
- A word repeated so that its third appearance means something its first did not.
- Leave the rhyme scheme alone unless it does something. Labelling a poem ABAB is a description of the page.
- Read the poem in your head at speaking pace and mark where you have to slow down. Those places are where the sound is doing work you can write about.
Form and shape as structural evidence
- Structure questions on a poem can often be answered with no quotation at all, which makes them the most reliable material you can take into the exam.
- Have these ready for every poem you have studied:
- The shape on the page — stanza lengths, whether they are regular, and where the regularity breaks.
- The turn — the point where the poem changes direction, tense, scale, mood or who it is speaking to. Everything before and after can be described in relation to it.
- Whether the ending returns to the opening, and what has changed by the time it gets there.
- What the poem never says — a name, a cause, a feeling — and how long it withholds it.
- A form used against its content is always worth a paragraph. A tidy, regular form holding a chaotic subject makes the tidiness part of the meaning.
Song lyrics
- A lyric is a poem with a structure imposed on it from outside: verse, chorus, bridge. That structure is given, so what you analyse is what the writer does inside it.
- The chorus is repetition made structural. A chorus line is heard three or four times, and it does not mean the same thing each time, because the verses between have changed what the listener knows. The refrain that returns changed is the single strongest piece of structural evidence a lyric offers.
- The bridge is the turn, in the same sense as in a poem — it is where the song is allowed to change direction.
- Write about the words as written, not the recording. Delivery, instrumentation and production are analysed under visual and oral texts, not here.
- Say the speaker, not the singer, for the same reason you say the speaker and not the poet.
Worked Example
Two poems by the same invented poet, both written for this page, from a collection called Out of True.
Gate
The gate has not been shut since 1996,
the year the last of the sheep went
and the post leaned out of true.
It stands open the way a hand stays openafter the thing it held is gone.
My father drives past it twice a day.
He has never once said anything about the gate.
He slows down, though. He always slows down.
Inventory
Two spades, one broken at the neck.
A drench gun. Nine metres of orange cord.
The chest freezer, unplugged, holding
a single bag of peas from another decade.I write them down because writing them down
is a thing I can finish.
Outside, the hill goes on doing
what a hill does, which is nothing, which is stay.
The question: Analyse how the writer used language features to help you understand a feeling that is not stated.
Step 1 — find the habit that links the two poems, because the thesis has to be about the set and not about each poem in turn. Neither poem contains a word for grief, sadness or loss. Both give the feeling a physical action instead: slowing down, and writing a list.
The thesis. The writer refuses the vocabulary of feeling and gives the reader a measurable action in its place, so that grief reaches you as something a person is observed doing rather than something a poem tells you they feel.
Step 2 — establish it, using the line break. In Gate, the simile is split across the stanza break: "It stands open the way a hand stays open", then the silence, then "after the thing it held is gone." At the break the reader holds an open hand and does not yet know why it is open — the second-longest pause the poem has, spent on not knowing what has been lost. The word "open" ends the line and opens the stanza, so it is the last thing and the first thing the reader has.
Step 3 — the sound, tied to sense. The final line, "He slows down, though. He always slows down.", repeats the same three words with the sentence's shape reversed. The word "though" arrives after a full stop, as an afterthought, which is exactly how the father's feeling arrives — after the statement that he never says anything. The repetition is the poem's only emotion and it is spent on a speed limit.
Step 4 — complicate it with the second poem. In Inventory the same refusal is louder, because the speaker names it: "I write them down because writing them down / is a thing I can finish." The enjambment leaves "writing them down" hanging at the break and then repeats it, so the line performs the circling it describes. The habit is the same and its cost is now visible: the list is not detachment, it is the only completable task in a situation with no end.
Step 5 — the structural point, needing no quotation. Both poems end on a small physical fact rather than a conclusion — a car slowing, a hill staying. The endings are the same shape, and the last line of Inventory spends its final position on the word "stay", which is what neither the sheep, nor the thing the hand held, nor the speaker's ability to finish anything, has done.