Poetry: form, structure and reading a poem

Literature in English · WAEC and JAMB · SS2 and SS3

Poetry frightens candidates because they try to analyse it before they have understood it. Read for sense first and technique second, and remember that the examiner wants the relationship between how the poem is built and what it means, not a list of its features.

What you need to know

Read the poem twice before writing anything. The first reading is for sense: who is speaking, to whom, about what, and in what situation. The second is for technique: form, sound, structure and the moment where the poem turns.
A stanza is a group of lines separated from the next group by a space. Learn the names: a couplet is two lines, a tercet three, a quatrain four, a sestet six and an octave eight. Naming the stanza form accurately is an easy mark in the poetry paper.
The Shakespearean sonnet has fourteen lines in three quatrains and a closing couplet, rhyming ababcdcdefefgg, and the couplet usually delivers the resolution or the sting. The Petrarchan sonnet divides into an octave rhyming abbaabba and a sestet, with the turn arriving at line nine.
Notate a rhyme scheme by giving the first line-ending sound the letter a, then a new letter for each new sound and a repeat of the letter whenever the sound returns. Write the letters down the margin beside the lines so you do not lose your place.
Rhyme is not always full. Half rhyme or para rhyme matches the consonants but not the vowel, as in heart and hurt, and eye rhyme looks like a rhyme on the page but does not sound like one, as in love and move. A poem that slides into half rhyme is often signalling unease.
Internal rhyme places the rhyme inside a line rather than at the end, which tightens the line and quickens it. Refrain is a whole line or phrase repeated at intervals, common in ballads and in poems built on song.
Metre is the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The iamb is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, the trochee is the reverse, the anapaest is two unstressed then one stressed, and the spondee is two stressed together.
Count the feet to name the line: three feet is trimeter, four is tetrameter, five is pentameter, six is hexameter. Iambic pentameter, five iambs to the line, is the standard line of English verse, as in the opening of Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day.
Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter and is the usual medium of Shakespeare's plays. Free verse has neither regular metre nor rhyme and is shaped instead by line breaks, repetition and breath, which is why line endings matter so much in it.
Enjambment and caesura control pace. Run-on lines push the poem forward and can make a line's final word land hard on the next line; a mid-line pause slows it and often marks hesitation or a shift in thought. Comment on pace, not merely on the presence of the technique.
The persona is not the poet. If the speaker is a soldier, a mother or a river, write the persona or the speaker throughout, and reserve the poet's name for decisions about the poem: the poet gives the persona short, broken lines so that the grief sounds breathless.
Find the turn. Most poems change direction somewhere, and the signal is usually a word such as but, yet or now, a change of tense, a shift from plural to singular, or a new stanza. The turn is where the meaning lives, so build your answer around it.
Weigh the title, the first line and the last line more heavily than the middle. Poets place their meaning at the edges, and a title often supplies the information the poem itself withholds.
When you quote poetry inside a sentence, keep it short and mark a line break with a forward slash. Give the line number if the examination paper numbers the lines, and never copy out a whole stanza, which wastes minutes and earns nothing.

Key terms

Stanza: A group of lines in a poem separated from other groups by a space, functioning as a unit of thought.
Rhyme scheme: The pattern of end rhymes in a poem, recorded with letters such as abab or abbaabba.
Metre: The regular arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables that gives a line of verse its rhythm.
Volta: The turn in a poem, especially a sonnet, where the argument or feeling changes direction.
Blank verse: Unrhymed verse written in iambic pentameter.
Free verse: Verse with no fixed metre or rhyme scheme, organised instead by line breaks, rhythm of speech and repetition.
Refrain: A line or group of lines repeated at intervals through a poem, usually at the end of stanzas.

Worked examples

State the rhyme scheme and the stanza form of this invented quatrain, and comment on one structural feature: 'The lorry left before the rain / and dust rose thick along the road. / We waited by the broken drain, / counting what the old men owed.'

Take the end words in order: rain, road, drain, owed.
Give the first sound the letter a, so rain is a. Road does not rhyme with rain, so it is b.
Drain rhymes with rain, so it takes the letter a again. Owed rhymes with road, so it takes b.
The scheme is therefore abab, an alternate rhyme, and the four lines in one group make it a quatrain.
Choose one structural feature to comment on: the alternate rhyme keeps the two ideas, the departure and the waiting, interlocked, so the reader cannot separate the leaving from the being left behind.
Note also the enjambment between lines three and four, which carries the sentence over the line break and makes counting arrive with a small jolt.

Answer: The rhyme scheme is abab and the stanza is a quatrain. The alternating rhyme binds the departure to the waiting, while the run-on line into counting delays and then stresses what the speakers are really doing.

How would you plan an answer to the question: how does the poet use structure to convey the speaker's changing attitude?

Underline the two content words, structure and changing attitude, so you answer both and not just one.
Map the poem stanza by stanza in the margin, writing two or three words for the attitude in each: stanza one, confident; stanza two, uneasy; stanza three, resigned.
Find where the change happens and what marks it, such as a conjunction, a change of tense or a shorter stanza.
Plan one paragraph for each stage of the attitude, each anchored to a structural feature: stanza length, rhyme, line breaks, repetition or the position of the turn.
Decide your line of argument in one sentence before writing, for example that the poem's confidence is dismantled stanza by stanza until the final short line leaves the speaker with nothing to say.
Open with that sentence, develop each stage in its own paragraph, and close by returning to the word structure from the question.

Answer: A three-paragraph plan tracking attitude against structure: confidence in the regular opening stanzas, the turn and its structural marker, then the collapse signalled by shortened lines, with the thesis stated in the introduction and restated at the close.

The mistake to avoid

Writing the poet says throughout when the poem has a persona, and then being unable to explain why the speaker is unreliable or limited. The other standing error is listing features, such as the poem has eight stanzas and uses alliteration, without connecting any of them to meaning. Structure only earns marks when it is tied to what the poem is doing to the reader.

In the exam

Annotate the printed poem before you write: mark the turn, bracket the rhyme scheme down the margin, underline repeated words. In the essay itself, every paragraph should name a feature and then answer the question with it, so your topic sentences should contain the words of the question. If you run short of time, a clear analysis of the turn and the final lines will score better than a rushed tour of every stanza.