Poetry and song lyrics
Why poetry suits a critical essay
- The five statements on the paper are worded to fit any text type, and several of them fit poetry better than they fit a novel, because they make claims about how a text works rather than about what happens in it.
- A poem is short enough to be known completely. No candidate writing on a novel can say they have accounted for every part of their text; on a poem you can, and an argument that accounts for the whole text is much harder to dispute.
- The evidence is dense. Three words may be a twentieth of the poem, so the same phrase can carry two different points without looking recycled.
- The risk is the mirror of the advantage. A short text gives you less to be wrong about and less to hide behind, so a thin claim about a poem is visibly thin.
Deciding what "the text" is — and declaring the scope
- Naming your text is the first evaluative decision you make, not an administrative one, and it belongs in the introduction.
- Three legitimate choices:
- One poem, read completely. The strongest option where the poems have little in common. Say so: this argument is made on one poem, because the claim is about a single formal decision.
- Two or three poems. The usual choice. The set has to be justified — these three are the poems in which the pattern is under strain is a scope statement; these are the three I studied is not.
- The collection as a text in its own right. Legitimate, and rarer, and it has its own evidence — see below.
- Scope is a judgement, so state its limit. The reading holds for the poems written in the first person and does not explain the two dramatic monologues is a stronger sentence than a claim that pretends the exception is not there.
- Never organise the essay poem by poem. Organise by stage of the argument, and take evidence from whichever poem the stage needs. A paragraph that draws one line from each of two poems is integration; a paragraph per poem is a list.
The line, the sound and the shape — briefly, then what to judge
- The line break is the one instrument poetry has that prose does not. It weights the last word of the line and suspends the sense until the next line resolves it. Enjambment — a sentence crossing the break — exploits the gap; an end-stopped line refuses to.
- A stanza break is a longer silence than a line break, and the last line of a poem is its most weighted position.
- Sound counts only when it is tied to sense. A pattern that holds is invisible; a pattern that breaks is evidence. The most productive observations are a rhyme that fails where the poem trained you to expect one, a rhythm that stumbles on the one word that matters, and a repeated word whose third appearance means something the first did not.
- The shape on the page is structural evidence needing no quotation — stanza lengths, whether they are regular, and where the regularity gives way.
- What makes all of this Level 3 is the next sentence. Having shown what a break or a broken pattern does, judge it:
- Does it earn itself? A formal effect that a reader has to be told about did not work.
- What does it cost? A poem that stakes its meaning on one line has bought concentration and given up the ability to be re-read for anything else.
- What does it commit the poem to? A form that will not name a feeling cannot later name one without breaking its own contract — which is why the exception, when it comes, is worth more than every instance of the rule.
The collection as a structure
- A collection is arranged, and the arrangement is a decision by somebody, usually the poet. That makes it whole-text structure for a body of short texts.
- What to have ready:
- The opening poem and the closing poem, and whether the last returns to the first.
- A poem placed immediately after another, so that the second is read through the first. Adjacency is the collection's version of a cut.
- A recurring image or object, and what it means the first, third and last time it appears.
- The title of the collection, which is a claim about all of it and can be tested against the poems that fit it worst.
- Judge the arrangement rather than describe it. Whether an order produces development or merely groups; whether the strongest poem has been placed where it does the most work; whether the recurrence is a deepening or a habit. A poet who returns to one image ten times has either built a text or run out of images, and the evidence for which is in whether the image changes.
Song lyrics
- A lyric's structure is imposed from outside — verse, chorus, bridge — so what you evaluate is what the writer does inside a form they did not design.
- The chorus is repetition made structural. It is heard three or four times and does not mean the same thing each time, because the verses between have changed what the listener knows. A refrain that returns changed is the strongest structural evidence a lyric offers.
- The evaluative question is whether the form is used or merely obeyed. A chorus that means the same thing on its fourth hearing has been filled in; one that has been turned by the last verse has been written.
- Analyse the words as written. Delivery, arrangement and production belong to visual and oral texts.
- Say the speaker, not the singer or the poet.
Worked Example
A poem written for this page, from an invented collection called Tally.
Tally
Six years my mother wrote the milk down in a book,
the litres and the date, the price per litre, and the day
the tanker did not come. She wrote it in one blue hand
for six years, and the columns are so straightyou could stand a level on them. Nothing else from then
is straight. Not the shed. Not the year my brother left.
Not the letter from the bank with the window in it.
I have the book. I take it out. I read the milk.And there, in June of the fourth year, one line
runs on past the margin, in the same blue hand,
and says nothing about milk, and I have read it
four hundred times, and it says: he rang.
The statement: A text is strongest when it trusts the reader to do the work.
Task: build an argument that analyses and then judges, and take a position with an extent.
Step 1 — the thesis, with an extent and a limit.
The statement is right about this poem and understates what the trust costs. The poem hands the reader everything by withholding almost everything, and the strategy works because the reader is given a measurement rather than a feeling; but the whole text is staked on two words in its final position, so it is a poem that can be read once with enormous force and not twice.
Step 2 — analyse the mechanism. The poem's controlling image is a ledger, and its form imitates one: three stanzas of four lines, an inventory register — "the litres and the date, the price per litre" — and a syntax of short declaratives, "I have the book. I take it out. I read the milk." The regularity is not decoration. It is the claim the poem makes about the mother, and it is verifiable in the shape on the page before a single word is read.
Step 3 — the break in the pattern is the poem. One line "runs on past the margin", and the enjambment across "one line / runs on" makes the sentence do what the line describes: the reader's eye crosses a boundary at the exact moment the poem reports one being crossed. The technique and its subject are the same event.
Step 4 — the judgement of effectiveness. It works, and the reason is worth stating precisely: the poem never names an emotion and never has to, because it has supplied a scale. Six years, one blue hand, straight columns, then a single irregularity — and "four hundred times" measures the daughter's grief in the same unit the mother used for milk. The reader is not asked to feel; they are asked to read a number against a background, which is a task with a right answer. That is the trust the statement describes.
Step 5 — the cost, which is where the extent lives. The strategy is total, and total strategies are brittle.
- Everything is spent in the last position. "he rang" carries the entire poem, so a reader who does not supply a brother, a departure and a silence gets nothing at all.
- The poem cannot be re-read for anything else. Once the last two words are known, the first eleven lines become a setting-up, and their own detail — the shed, the bank's window envelope — has no work left to do.
- The form has excluded a possibility. A text that will not name a feeling cannot later name one without breaking its own contract, so the mother is never allowed a sentence of her own. What the poem gains in restraint it pays for in her silence.
Step 6 — the counter-case, and the position. Against my reading: the withheld detail is not really withheld, since "the year my brother left" is stated plainly in stanza two, so the reader is doing less work than I claim. That is right, and it sharpens the claim rather than defeating it — the poem withholds no facts at all. What it withholds is interpretation, and it is the refusal to say what the facts mean, not any concealment of them, that the reader completes.