Exploring a PoemChapter 4, Helen VendlerPoems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology Dr.

Vendler suggests a series of questions that can help reveal a poem. The following is either quoted from the text or a summary of it, with some revisions. 1. Speech ActWhen we classify poems by their speech acts, we draw attention to their manner
of expression more than to their content. I can apologize for any number of thingsmy tardiness, or my mistakes, or my clothingbut in each of these cases my speech act (whatever its content) is an apology. Similarly, I can protest about time, or death, or lovebut in every case, my speech act is a protest. Since the language of most poems can be thought of as a series of utterances by a speaker, the poem expects you to track the persons successive speech acts, just as you might do in life when you might say, First, she criticized me, then she apologized, then she explained why she was upset, and finally she asked if we could still be friends. A poems speech acts need to be followed and identified in the same way.

2. AgencyWho is the main agent in the poem, and does the main agent change as the poem as the
poem progresses? Dr. Vendler defines agent/agency as subjects of the verbs.

3. Antecedent ScenarioWhat has been happening before the poem starts? What has disturbed the status quo and set the poem in motion? 4. A Division into Structural PartsBecause small units are more easily handled than big ones, and because the process of a poem, even one as short as sonnet, cant be addressed all at once with a single global question like Whats going on here? first divide the poem into pieces. 5. The Other PartsAbout each part, it is useful to ask how it differs from the other parts. What is distinctive in it by contrast to the other members of the poem? Does something shift gears? Does the tense change? Does the predominant grammatical form change? Is a new person addressed? Have we left a general overlook for certain particulars? 6. Find the SkeletonWhat is the dynamic curve of emotion on which the whole poem is arranged? This asks students to discover the changes in tone as the poem progresses. 7. The ClimaxIn lyric poems, the various parts tend to cluster around a moment of special significancewhich its attendant parts lead up to, lead away from, help to clarify, and so on. The climax usually manifests itself by such things as greater intensity of tone, an especially significant metaphor, a change in rhythm, or a change in person. 8. ToneRead the poem aloud now as if it were your own utterance. This activity will help you to
distinguish the various tones of voice it exhibits and to name them. You might need to reference #6even though you know the changes in toneREAD IT ALOUD!

9.

Roads Not TakenCan you imagine the poem written in a different person, or a different
tense, or with the parts rearranged, or with an additional stanza, or with one stanza left out, conjecturing why the poem might have wanted these pieces in this order? It is useful to think of plausible roads not taken by a poem, because they help to identify the roads that were taken. This will help you understand the function of each piece of the poem within the whole, and of the dynamic curve of emotion governing the order in which the pieces appear.

Adapted from materials developed by Danny Lawrence

10. Outer and Inner Structural FormsA poem can also be classified according to various
aspects of its outer and inner form. The outer form has to do with meter, rhyme, and stanza-form. In investigating the internal structure of a poem, one should try to divide it into parts along its fault lines. Where does the logic of the argument seem to break? Where does the poem change from first person to second person? Where does the major change in tense or speech act take place? Here are some of the ingredients of internal structural form that will help you to explore a poem.
SentencesThe poet means for us to notice how many sentences there are in a poem, and how they relate to one another. Look closely at length and type of sentences used. PersonDetermine the personfirst, second, third and whether that person is singular or plural. A change of person as poem goes along is a significant structuring device. AgencyEvery sentence has a subject; the subject is the agent of the verb. It is important to know who owns, by agency, each part of every poem. TensesSentences are written in tense, and tenses are also an important internal structuring aspect of the poem, making it move in time from past to present to future. Tense-changes ask to be noticed. Images or Sensual WordsLinked words (referring especially to the senses of sight and hearing) help to structure many poems. These words can be all of one sort (a collection of names of different flowers, for instance in Miltons Lycidas) or they can be of different sorts: that is, a series of specific nouns like flood, earthquake, fire, and shipwreck can all help to construct the single abstract category catastrophe. There are systematic ways in which the concrete words that some refer to as images may be assembled, too: they may be arranged in parallel, or in contrast, or in a ranked hierarchy.

11. ImaginationWhat has the poets imagination invented that is striking, or memorable, or
beautifulin content, in genre, in analogies, in rhythm, in a speaker?

12. MeaningThis is the usual sort of information-retrieval reading that we do with any passage of prose or verse. We come up with a summary of greater or lesser length giving the import of the passage as we make sense of it.

Adapted from materials developed by Danny Lawrence