THREE STEPS TO ANALYZING FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE IN A POEM

Writing an essay about a poem is both similar to and different from writing an essay about a
short story. Here are some tips and suggestions:

Like all essays you will write for this class:

 You need a central claim that takes a debatable position on the poem.

 You need to support that claim using evidence from the text, and you need to analyze that
evidence, explaining how it supports your claim.

 However, unlike an essay about a story or a play, an essay about a poem will often focus
more on figurative language and formal poetic devices and less on character development
and narrative. A poem, in many ways, is more similar to a song than to a novel or film.

Here, then, are THREE STEPS to analyzing figurative language in a poem:

1) Identify what it is (metaphor, simile, personification, metonymy, assonance, alliteration, etc,

or significant diction, line breaks, punctuation, syntactical choices, etc).

2) Explain what that poetic, figurative language means in that particular part of the poem. This
could include saying what two things are being compared, what symbolizes what, how one
object stands in for an emotion or idea, the significance of the line or image, etc. (For example, a
rose symbolizes love, a black shoe represents the overbearing presence of the father in the
speaker’s life, etc.)

3) Describe how that figurative language relates to the overall meaning, theme or purpose of the
poem. The overall meaning, theme or significance of the poem will depend on what your central
claim is. Your central claim is your interpretation of the poem, so step three ensures that your
analysis links back to your central claim.

Here’s an example of a passage on Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” that follows all three steps.

The speaker in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” describes the “black shoe / In which [she has] lived, like a
foot / For thirty years” (2-4). The speaker’s metaphorical black shoe, in which she has been
trapped “like a foot,” represents her unresolved feelings of grief over her father’s death. This
grief was intensified by the fact that her father died while she was still in love with him and
worshipped him like a god. In other words, he died before she had moved beyond the Electra
complex stage of childhood development. The metaphorical shoe, and the fact that the speaker
characterizes herself as a foot, is particularly relevant to Plath’s biography because her father
died of complications from a gangrenous foot (Smith 106). Throughout the course of this
allegorical poem, the speaker is trying to escape the black shoe – her unresolved feelings of guilt
and grief over her father’s death – by symbolically transforming her father into a Nazi oppressor
and herself as the Jew who kills her tormentor. *
* Keep in mind that this is not a full paragraph because it has no topic sentence, though it
is a large chunk of a body paragraph. Also note that the three steps are followed in order
in the paragraph above. In the paragraph below, the steps unfold out of order.

Here is another example:

In Cummings’s early poem [I will wade out], the speaker explores a life / death dichotomy:

i will wade out

till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers

I will take the sun in my mouth

and leap into the ripe air

Alive

with closed eyes

to dash against darkness … (1-7)

In these lines, the speaker vows to steep himself in the intensity and heat of being alive –
represented by “burning flowers” (2) and “the sun” (3) – and dash against death, which will try
to keep him from living by enveloping him in darkness: the opposite of the light of the burning
flowers and sun. Furthermore, he vows to fight the darkness “with closed eyes,” which means he
will let his intuition and emotions guide him through battle (6). If the speaker were to fight with
his eyes open, he would be able to see what is around him and strategically engage in battle,
employing his intellect and rationality. For Cummings, intellectualism and rationality are
associated with death; they are a way for one to detach from one’s emotions and the body’s
sensual pleasures. On the other hand, emotions are connected to being alive. Therefore, the
speaker fights “with closed eyes” (6) and, by doing so, is able to become a whole person: to
move from the lower-case “i,” which signifies that the speaker is not yet fully alive, to an upper-
case “I” – a person who has become one with his body and with the natural world.

(adapted from Claudia Cortese, with thanks)