G.M. Adhyanggono, S.S., M.A.

Subtopics
How to read poem?
Nature of Poem
What first to do to understand

a poem?
Genres of Poem
Intrinsic Elements of Poem

Some tips for reading a

poem
1. Read a poem more than once.
2. Keep a dictionary by you and use it as well

as other reference books.

3. Read so as to hear sounds of the words in
your mind. Lip reading is a good habit in
poetry.
4. Always pay careful attention to what the
poem is saying.
5. Practice reading poems aloud naturally
without being emotionally and rhytmically
exaggerated because they are already there.

Nature of Poem
Poetry primary concern is not with

beauty, not with philosopical truth,

not with persuasion, but with
experience.
Poetry does not always bear moral
message or lesson.
Poetry is not always beautiful.

Nature of Poem
Since

poem
experience, it has
dimensions:
Intellectual dimension
Senseous dimension
Emotional dimension
Imaginative dimension

communicates
at least four

What first to do with a

poem?
Basic questions need to be made:
Who is the speaker?
The speaker is not always the poet
himself/herself.
The speaker is as a representative of
human being than as an individual who
lives at a particular address, era, etc.
Be always catious about identifying
anything in a poem with the biography of
the poet

What first to do with a

poem?
What is the occasion when the speaker speaks?
What is the central purpose of the poem?
Whatever the purpose is, we must determine it for
ourselves,
And define it mentally as precisely as possible.

It is the way to fully understand the function and

meaning of the various detail in the poem, by
relating them to this central purpose.
By what means is the central purpose achieved?
Study the genre

Study the use of the intrinsic elements

What need to be
remembered about genres
of Poem

Keep in mind that a poem may fall into

several categories at the same time.

A poem could be a dramatic
monologue celebrating God or a love
relationship of some kind; a poem of
loss could also be a narrative poem.
Overlapping is common and natural in
poetry.

Genres of poem
Narrative poem
Dramatic monologue
Lyric poem
Meditative poem

Narrative poem
Poem that tells a story.
It is considered one of the oldest

genres of poem.
In the middle age, a common form of
narrative poem is called ballad or
folk ballad.
Ballad or folk ballad still exists up to
the present.

Dramatic monologue
Rather than tell a whole story, as in a long

poem or ballad, poets often give readers a

small piece of a story and let them infer the
rest. To do this they often create a character,
a persona or speaker, who plays some part
in the larger narrative, either as participant
or observer.
A poem written as a speech by one character
caught in a significant (dramatic) moment.
The speaker addresses another character,
who does not speak.

Lyric poem
A brief, intensely personal poem with a

strong musical quality.

The I in lyric the poet, or the writer, but
as in most fiction in propria persona in
his or her own voice.
Lyric comes from a Greek word, lurikos,
which referred to songs written to
accompany lyre, a seven-stringed
instrument resembling a small harp that
was invented in the seventh century B.C. by
a man called Terpander of Lesbos.

Meditative poem
A poem focusing on some object, theme, or

person in order to widen his or her

perspective.
In a meditative poem, the poet begins
narrow and ends wide.
Techniques of meditation is used by the
poet:
Start with the concrete image
Draw an analogy or comparison from the image.
Turn outward to widen his consciousness as the

result of drawing the comparison of the image.

Intrinsic Elements of
Poem
Speaker
Occasion
Theme
Imagery
Figurative language

Imagery
The representation through language

of sense experience.
Image = mental picture.
But an image also involves:
a sound, a smell, a taste;
a tactile (touch) experience such as

hardness, wetness, or cold;

an internal sensation, such as hunger,
thirst, or nausea; or
movement or tension in the muscles or
joints.

Figurative language
Metaphor
Simile

Allegory
Paradox

Personification
Apostrophe

Overstatement
Understatement

Metonymy
Synecdoche

Irony
Allusion

Symbol

Metaphor & Simile

A comparison

suggesting that
one thing is similar
to another though
they are
essentially unlike.
Study Frances

Cornfords The
Guitarist Tunes up

A means of

comparing things
that are essentially
unlike expressed by
the use of some
words or phrases
such as like, as, than,
similar to, resembles,
or seems.
Study

Robert Burns A Red,

Red Rose

Personification &
Apostrophe
A means of giving

the attributes of
human being to an
animal, an object,
or an idea.
e.g. The city

sleeps so
soundly

A means of

addressing
someone absent or
something
nonhuman as if it
were alive and
present, and could
reply to what is
being said.
Study James Joyces

I Heard An Army

Metonymy & Synecdoche

Talking about

something in terms
of something
associated with it.
e.g. The kettle is

boiling. actually
The water in the
kettle that is boiling.
It is a guilt by
association.

Naming a part for

the whole.
e.g. The cuckoos

song is unpleasing
to a married ear
married ear =
married man

Symbol & Allegory

Something that

means more than

what it is.
Study Robert Frosts

The Road Not

Taken

A narrative or

description that has

a second meaning
beneath the surface
one.
In allegory usually
there is a one-to-one
correspondence
between the details
and a single set of
ulterior meaning.

Paradox & Overstatement

An apparent

contradiction that is
nevertheless somehow
true.
It may be either a
situation or a
statement.
The value of paradox
is its shock value.
Study Richard

Lovelaces To Lucasta

Hyperbole
Study Lord

Tennysons The
Eagle

Understatement & Irony

Saying less than

one means, may

exist in what one
says or merely in
how one says it.
Study Robert Frosts

The Rose Family

Saying one thing

meaning another.
Verbal irony
Situational irony
Dramatic irony

Study Sir John

Sucklings The
Constant Lover
Do not misunderstand
irony with sarcasm
and satire.

Sarcasm & Satire

A simply bitter or

cutting speech
intended to wound
the feelings; it
works on the
colloquial level.

A written literature

implying a higher
motive in ridiculing
human folly or vice,
with the purpose to
bring about reform
or at least keeping
other people from
falling into similar
folly or vice.

Allusion
A reference to

something in history
or previous literature
is, like a richly
connotative word or
a symbol, a means
of suggesting far
more than what it
says.
Look at Leda and the
Swan

I Remember

(Eaven Boland)

I remember the way the big windows washed

out the room and the winter darks tinted
it and how, in the brute quiet and aftermath,
an eyebrow waited helplessly to be composed
from the palette with its scarabs of oil
colours gleaming through a dusk leaking from
the iron railings and the ruined evenings of
bombed-out, post war London; how the easel
was

mulberry wood and, porcupining in a jar,

the spines of my mothers portrait brushes
spiked from the dirty turpentine and the
face
on the canvas was the scattered fractions
of the face which had come up the stairs
that morning and had taken up position in
the big drawing-room and had been still
and was now gone; and I remember, I
remember

I was the interloper who knows both love and

fear,
who comes near and draws back,who feels
nothing
beyond the need to touch, to handle, to
dismantle it,
the mystery; and how in the morning when I
came down
a nine-year-old in high, fawn socks
the room had been shocked into a glacier
of cotton sheets thrown over the almond
and vanilla silk of the French Empire chairs.

To understand a poem try to answer

these basic questions
1. Who is the speaker of the poem?
2. What is the occasion?
3. What is the central purpose of t

he poem?
4. By what means is that purpose a
chieved?

a. What kind of person is the

speaker?
b. To whom is the speaker
speaking? What kind of
person is he/she?

a. What is the setting in

time (time of day, season,
century, etc.)?
b. What is the setting in
place (indoors, outdoors,
city, village, etc.)

State the central idea or

theme of the poem.

a. What is the tone of the poem?

b. Outline the poem so as to show its
structure & development.
c. Paraphrase the poem.
d. Point out words that are particularly
well chosen & explain why.
c. What kinds of imagery are used?
d. Point out examples of metaphor, simile,
personification, metonymy, symbol,
allegory, paradox, overstatement,
understatement, irony & allusion.
e. Point out any sound repetition.
f. What is the genre of the poem?

Thank you