what does hypothesis mean in poetry

A Guide to Poetry Analysis: Understanding Poetry Terms & Techniques

• The Albert Team
• Last Updated On: February 16, 2024

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 Introduction to the Art of Poetry Analysis

Poetry analysis is a multi-step process of building and understanding of and appreciation for a poetic work. As a result, poems are not meant to be skimmed over or only read in part. Rather, in the words of Billy Collins, poets want readers to “take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive.” True poetry analysis treats the poem as a work of art to be inspected up close while also appreciating the beauty in the form.

Poetry Terms: A Glossary for Poem Analysis

There are several poetry terms that are essential knowledge when it comes to poem analysis. Some of these poetry terms are: form, structure, line, stanza, pattern, rhyme scheme, poetic devices, sound devices, imagery, metaphor, simile, and symbolism to name a few. Albert has entire posts dedicated to defining each of these poetry terms in detail, and those can be found here.

Step-by-Step Guide to Analyzing a Poem

When analyzing a poem, there are several key steps to the process. This is why teachers will often ask students to read a poem multiple times, each time looking out for a different key element.

First, in a poem analysis it is helpful to identify the poem’s form and structure. What is the rhyme scheme? What is the rhythmic pattern?

Next, the reader should examine the language and imagery in the poem, including the poet’s diction or word choice and the breadth of poetic devices and imagery, including but not limited to similes, metaphors, and symbolism to name a few.

Once the reader has established the poetic form and structure as well as taken note of the different types of poetic language in the poem, this will allow the reader then to establish the theme and tone of the poem. Often, the theme reflects the poem’s historical and cultural context, while the tone reflects the poet’s personal and cultural connection to the poem. 

Identifying the Poem’s Structure and Form

First, it is helpful to identify the poem’s form and structure. You can accomplish this by asking a series of questions such as:

• What is the rhyme scheme or rhythmic pattern?
• How many stanzas are in the poem?
• Do any of the lines or stanzas break from the established pattern in the poem?

All of these are important questions to consider when identifying the poem’s structure and form. Some poetry forms, such as sonnets, are typically written on the topic of love. If the poem you are analyzing is written in the form of a sonnet, you can safely anticipate that the subject will be love.

It is also helpful to note that when a poet decides to divert from an established pattern in a poem, it is on purpose. Typically poets break from a normal pattern in a poem when they want to indicate a shift, whether a shift in tone, mood, or topic. 

Examining the Language and Imagery by Looking for Symbolism and Metaphors

Next, readers should look for the poetic devices chosen by the writer. For example, how does the author incorporate imagery into his or her poem: is it through primarily metaphors, or is it through primarily similes, or, is it an even mixture of both?

Sometimes students new to analyzing poetry want to take a poem at face value without considering poetry terms. However, in poetry one thing almost always stands for or symbolizes something else.

For example, Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird” poem isn’t really about a bird; it’s about our experience as humans as feeling trapped or contained in circumstances that we do not want to be in. We can see others living and experiencing life in ways that we wish we could, but it is seemingly always out of reach. 

Understanding the Poem’s Theme and Tone

Once you have a basic understanding of what poetic devices are used and how these devices are used to represent something greater, you can determine both poem themes as well as the author’s tone. The poet’s choice of words clearly determines their tone.

If a poet uses words like “harsh” or “cruel” to describe their subject, the poem clearly has an offended or unhappy tone. However, if a poet uses words like “dream-like” or “fantastical”, their tone is imaginative.

The theme is the message that the author wants to convey within the poem. It can derived from everything that the reader has established so far, from the structure of the poem, the use of poetic devices within the poem, and the tone of the author.

Going back to Billy Collins and his poem, “Introduction to Poetry”, Collin’s theme or message to the reader is to never analyze poetry so intensely that you forget to enjoy the beauty of the work. Even though Collins begins his poem with the beautiful imagery of holding a poem up to the light like a color slide, he ends his poem with a very harsh image of the reader “tie[ing] the poem to a chair with rope and tortur[ing] a confession out of it.” This stark contrast serves a warning to the reader that true poem analysis seeks meaning without ignoring the artistry of the work. 

Considering the Poem’s Historical and Cultural Context

It would seem that poetry analysis could stop at determining the theme; however, every poem that was ever written and will be written was created within a moment in time, and these moments in time influence a poet’s work whether a poet intends for it to or not.

For example, Walt Whitman’s poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” is a response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. The tone of the poem indicates that Abraham Lincoln was highly respected by his fellow Americans, and his loss was considered a great tragedy. 

Interpreting the Poem’s Personal and Universal Significance

Not only do poems carry deep personal significance to the author, but as humans we also experience many of the same emotions or struggles in our lives. Consequently, this allows poems to carry universal significance, even across centuries.

For example, consider Maya Angelou’s “Caged Bird.” Even though Angelou wrote this poem about her personal experience, her poem is still appreciated several decades later by readers who can relate to her experiences of feeling trapped in her circumstances. 

Case Studies: Applying Analysis to Famous Poems | Ode to a Nightingale

Let’s apply what we’ve learned about poetry analysis to the poem, “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats. Remember to keep in mind what you have learned about poetry terms.

Analyzing the Poetic Structure

First, let’s determine the form and structure of this poem. In this poem, Keats listens to the immortal song of a nightingale and bemoans the frailty of human life.

Here is the first stanza to analyze: 

“My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains          My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains          One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,          But being too happy in thine happiness,—                 That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees                         In some melodious plot          Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,                 Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”

The poetic structure follows an ABABCDECDE format. Additionally, the rhythmic structure is primarily iambic pentameter with some minor variations in certain lines. 

Interpreting Symbolism and Metaphor in “Ode to A Nightingale “

Next, let’s look for examples of poetic language and interpret these devices. The second stanza is highly imaginative and uses devices such as alliteration, allusion, symbolism, and personification to express the narrator’s desire to leave his life behind to follow the nightingale into immortality.

“O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been          Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green,          Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South,          Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,                 With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,                         And purple-stained mouth;          That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,                 And with thee fade away into the forest dim.” 

Keats uses alliteration to describe the unique and special nature of this “vintage” or wine he wishes to drink. This wine clearly has supernatural powers as indicated by the allusion to the Greek Hippocrene, a mythological fountain that gives the one who drinks from it poetic inspiration.

This wine is also symbolized as the “warm South”, a drink promising to provide comfort to whoever drinks it. Lastly, the wine is personified as having “beaded bubbles winking at the brim” and as having a “purple-stained mouth”. This drink that he imagines is tempting him and luring him to forget his human life and follow the nightingale to a better existence.

Unraveling the Tone and Mood of a Poem

As seen above, the author’s tone is highly imaginative, but his tone is also melancholy, especially when he looks back at how quickly men grow old and die in this life. The third stanza shifts to this mournful tone: 

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget          What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret          Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,          Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;                 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow                         And leaden-eyed despairs,          Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,                 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.”

As you can see, the speaker clearly despises his current state, claiming that “to think is to be full of sorrow”. The mood of the poem is also revealed through these shifting stanzas: while the forest where the nightingale sings is full of flowers and music and magical creatures, his personal life is full of pain, old age, and disappointment. 

Exploring Themes in “Ode to a Nightingale “

By contrasting these two moods, Keats underlines the vanity of human imagination and pursuit of the unattainable. This is the theme of Keats’ poem: as hard as we try, ultimately, we all grow old and pass away. Myths are merely myths, and fairy tales are merely sprung from someone’s imagination and have no place in reality. 

Conclusion: Enhancing Appreciation through Poetry Analysis

Even though poetry analysis can be a time-consuming task, it is often a rewarding one. So much thought and effort go into the formation of a poem, so it is only natural that as readers we would likewise engage thought and effort into understanding these poems. 

For more practice analyzing poetry, check out our Poetry course! Albert’s Poetry course offers questions about poetry terms, poem themes, and much more. Use our practice questions with detailed explanations to grow in your understanding and appreciation of poetry!

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by Kerry Sayers & Natalie Hitchin

A poem is written on a piece of paper which has parallel sides and right angles. A good poem must have a firm circumference and good reflexes. A poem must be acute as well as obtuse. The divisions of a poem can be added, multiplied or subtracted. You should always consider symmetry. As Einstein would say: Isosceles, isosceles, isosceles. The odd poems that do not make sense should be reconsidered as a fraction of a diagram. Even poems can be divided easily. However, beware of the average poem,. It has no area, no angle, no meaning at all. A good poet should count and answer the problems of the universe.

Related poems

• Dancing Thomas Yates Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
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• Composed on a Futon Martin McGann Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
• When the World Ends This is How It Will Be H.H. Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
• Refugees Martha Sprackland Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
• One Night Stand Matthew Shoard Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
• Kestral Poppy Mitchell Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
• Tweed Sestina Daisy Hirst Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
• My Grandmother’s Purse Katie Dunn Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
• Alexandria Bridget Collins Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
• On Top of the Hill Adnan Chowdhury Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
• Staring Strangers Caroline Bird Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
• Big Apple Shamima Begum Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets of the Year
• Scattering Joanna Batch Winner, 1999, Simon Elvin Young Poets fo the Year

Module 1: Reading and Interpreting Literary Texts

Approaching poetry, introduction.

This reading is designed to develop the analytical skills you need for a more in-depth study of literary texts. You will learn about rhythm, alliteration, rhyme, poetic inversion, voice and line lengths and endings. You will examine poems that do not rhyme and learn how to compare and contrast poetry.

By the end of this reading you should be able to:

• have an awareness of the role of analysis to inform appreciation and understanding of poetry;
• be able to identify and discuss the main analytical concepts used in analyzing poetry.

Click on  William Blake’s “Tyger”  to read and compare the two versions of the poem. The one on the left is a draft; the other is the final published version.

The most obvious difference between the two is that stanza 4 of the draft does not survive in the published version, and an entirely new stanza, “When the stars threw down their spears,” appears in the finished poem. Significantly, this introduces the idea of “the Lamb,” a dramatic contrast to the tiger, as well as the idea of a “he” who made the lamb. One similarity between the draft and final version is that each is made up entirely of unanswered questions. But if you look at the manuscript stanza 5, you can see revisions from “What” to “Where,” and the struggle with the third line, where Blake eventually decided that the idea of an arm was redundant, subsumed in the notions of grasping and clasping. The two rhyme words are decided—grasp/clasp—but in which order should they come? ‘Clasp’ is a less aggressive word than ‘grasp’; ‘clasp’ is not quite as gentle as an embrace, but it is closer to embracing than ‘grasp’ is – so it must be for deliberate effect that we end up with ‘What dread grasp/Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

It is rare to have manuscript drafts to examine in this way, but I hope that this convinces you of the kind of attention writers pay to word choice. Let us take one more example. Think about this first stanza of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Neutral Tones’ (1867):

We stood by a pond that winter day,

And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,

And a few leaves lay on the starving sod;

—They had fallen from an ash, and were gray. (Gibson, 1976, p. 12)

Notice that, in the last line, ‘oak’ or ‘elm’ would work just as well as far as the rhythm or music of the line is concerned, but ‘ash’ has extra connotations of grayness, of something burnt out, dead, finished (‘ashes to ashes’, too, perhaps?), all of which contribute to the mood that Hardy conveys in a way that ‘oak’ or ‘elm’ wouldn’t.

To return to my original question then, ‘what is the point of analyzing poetry?’, one answer is that only an analytical approach can help us arrive at an informed appreciation and understanding of the poem. Whether we like a poem or not, we should be able to recognize the craftsmanship that has gone into making it, the ways in which stylistic techniques and devices have worked to create meaning. General readers may be entirely happy to find a poem pleasing, or unsatisfactory, without stopping to ask why. But studying poetry is a different matter and requires some background understanding of what those stylistic techniques might be, as well as an awareness of constraints and conventions within which poets have written throughout different periods of history.

You may write poetry yourself. If so, you probably know only too well how difficult it is to produce something you feel really expresses what you want to convey. Writing an essay presents enough problems – a poem is a different matter, but certainly no easier. Thinking of poetry as a discipline and a craft which, to some extent, can be learned, is another useful way of approaching analysis. After all, how successful are emotional outpourings on paper? Words one might scribble down in the heat of an intense moment may have some validity in conveying that intensity, but in general might they not be more satisfactory if they were later revised? My own feeling is that a remark Wordsworth made 200 years ago has become responsible for a number of misconceptions about what poetry should do. In the Preface to a volume of poems called Lyrical Ballads (1802) he wrote that ‘all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ (Owens and Johnson, 1998, p.85,11.105–6). The second time he uses the same phrase he says something that I think is often forgotten today: ‘poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity’ (my italics) (ibid., p. 95, ll.557–8). Notice the significant time lapse implied there – the idea that, however powerful or spontaneous the emotion, it needs to be carefully considered before you start writing. He goes on:

The emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation is gradually reproduced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this mood successful composition generally begins.

You don’t have to agree with Wordsworth about what poetry is or how best to achieve it. (Would you always want a poem to express powerful emotion, for example? I referred to Hardy’s ‘Neutral Tones’ above, where the whole point is that neither of the two characters described feels anything much at all.) But the idea of contemplation is a useful and important one: it implies distance, perhaps detachment, but above all re-creation, not the thing itself. And if we try to re-create something, we must choose our methods and our words carefully in order to convey what we experienced as closely as possible. A word of warning though: writers do not always aim to express personal experiences; often a persona is created.

The poet Ezra Pound offered this advice to other poets in an essay written in 1913: ‘Use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something’ (Gray, 1990, p. 56). And in the 1950s William Carlos Williams advised, ‘cut and cut again whatever you write’. In his opinion, the ‘test of the artist is to be able to revise without showing a seam’ (loc. cit.). That sewing image he uses appeals to me particularly because it stresses the notion of skilled craftsmanship. Pound and Williams were American, writing long after Wordsworth, but, as you can see, like countless other poets they too reflected very seriously on their own poetic practice. I hope this helps convince you that as students we owe it to the poems we read to give them close analytical attention.

Note About Organization

In what follows, section headings like ‘Rhyme’, ‘Rhythm’, ‘Line lengths and line endings’, ‘Alliteration’, and so on, are intended to act as signposts to help you (if terms are unfamiliar, look them up in the glossary at the end). But these headings indicate only the  main technique being discussed. While it is something we need to attempt, it is very difficult to try to isolate devices in this way – to separate out, for example, the effects of rhythm from rhyme. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t look for particular techniques at work in a poem, but we need to be aware that they will be interdependent and the end product effective or not because of the way such elements work together.

As you work through this reading, don’t be discouraged if your response to exercises differs from mine. Remember that I had the advantage of choosing my own examples and that I’ve long been familiar with the poems I’ve used. On a daily basis, we probably read much less poetry than we do prose. This is perhaps one reason why many people say they find poetry difficult – unfamiliarity and lack of practice. But, like anything else, the more effort we put in, the wider the range of experiences we have to draw on. I hope that when you come across an unfamiliar extract in the discussions that follow you might decide to look up the whole poem on your own account, widening your own experience and enjoying it too.

Remember that language changes over the years. I’ve deliberately chosen to discuss poems from different periods, and given dates of first publication. Do keep this in mind, especially as you may find some examples more accessible than others. The idiom and register of a poem written in the eighteenth century will usually be quite different from one written in the twentieth. Different verse forms are popular at different times: while sonnets have been written for centuries, they were especially fashionable in Elizabethan times, for example. Don’t expect to find free verse written much before the twentieth century.

If you prefer to work on your computer, you can do a similar thing by using an annotation tool on your word processor.

Whatever you do, always ask yourself what the effect of a particular technique that you identify is. Noticing an unusual choice of words, a particular rhyme scheme or use of alliteration is an important first step, but you need to take another one. Unless you go on to say why what you have noticed is effective, what it contributes to the rest of the poem, how it endorses or changes things, then you are doing less than half the job. Get into the habit of asking yourself questions, even if you can’t always answer them satisfactorily.

All speech has rhythm because we naturally stress some words or syllables more than others. The rhythm can sometimes be very regular and pronounced, as in a children’s nursery rhyme – ‘JACK and JILL went UP the HILL’ – but even in the most ordinary sentence the important words are given more stress. In poetry, rhythm is extremely important: patterns are deliberately created and repeated for varying effects. The rhythmical pattern of a poem is called its meter, and we can analyze, or ‘scan’ lines of poetry to identify stressed and unstressed syllables. In marking the text to show this, the mark ‘/’ is used to indicate a stressed syllable, and ‘x’ to indicate an unstressed syllable. Each complete unit of stressed and unstressed syllables is called a ‘foot’, which usually has one stressed and one or two unstressed syllables.

The most common foot in English is known as the iamb, which is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one (x /). Many words in English are iambic: a simple example is the word ‘forgot’. When we say this, the stresses naturally fall in the sequence:

Iambic rhythm is in fact the basic sound pattern in ordinary English speech. If you say the following line aloud you will hear what I mean:

The next most common foot is the trochee, a stressed syllable (or ‘beat’, if you like) followed by an unstressed one (/x), as in the word

Both the iamb and the trochee have two syllables, the iamb being a ‘rising’ rhythm and the trochee a ‘falling’ rhythm. Another two-syllable foot known as the spondee has two equally stressed beats (/ /), as in

Other important feet have three syllables. The most common are the anapest (x x /) and the dactyl (/ x x), which are triple rhythms, rising and falling respectively, as in the words

Here are some fairly regular examples of the four main kinds of meter used in poetry. (I have separated the feet by using a vertical slash.) You should say the lines aloud, listening for the stress patterns and noting how the ‘beats’ fall on particular syllables or words.

Iambic meter

Trochaic meter

Anapestic meter

Dactylic meter

The other technical point that you need to know about is the way the lengths of lines of verse are described. This is done according to the number of feet they contain, and the names given to different lengths of lines are as follows:

By far the most widely used of these are the tetrameter and the pentameter. If you look back at the four lines of poetry given as examples above, you can count the feet. You will see that the first one has five feet, so it is an iambic pentameter line; the second one has four feet, so it is a trochaic tetrameter line; the fourth and fifth also have four feet, so are anapestic and dactylic tetrameter lines respectively. Lines do not always have exactly the ‘right’ number of beats. Sometimes a pentameter line will have an extra ‘beat’, as in the famous line from  Hamlet , ‘To be or not to be: that is the question’, where the ‘tion’ of question is an eleventh, unstressed beat. (It is worth asking yourself why Shakespeare wrote the line like this. Why did he not write what would have been a perfectly regular ten-syllable line, such as ‘The question is, to be or not to be’?)

Having outlined some of the basic meters of English poetry, it is important to say at once that very few poems would ever conform to a perfectly regular metrical pattern. The effect of that would be very boring indeed: imagine being restricted to using only iambic words, or trying to keep up a regular trochaic rhythm. Poets therefore often include trochaic or anapestic or dactylic words or phrases within what are basically iambic lines, in order to make them more interesting and suggestive, and to retain normal pronunciation. Here is a brief example from Shakespeare to show you what I mean. I have chosen a couple of lines spoken by Rosalind in As You Like It , Act 1, scene 2, and have marked this first version to show you the basic iambic meter:

If you say the lines out loud in this regular way you can hear that the effect is very unnatural. Here is one way the lines might be scanned to show how the stresses would fall in speech (though there are other ways of scanning them):

It must be emphasized that there is no need to feel that you must try to remember all the technical terms I have been introducing here. The purpose has been to help you to become aware of the importance of rhythmic effects in poetry, and it can be just as effective to try to describe these in your own words. The thing to hang on to when writing about the rhythm of a poem is that, as Ezra Pound put it, ‘Rhythm MUST have meaning’: ‘It can’t be merely a careless dash off with no grip and no real hold to the words and sense, a tumty tum tumpty tum tum ta’ (quoted in Gray, 1990, p. 56). There are occasions, of course, when a tum-ty-ty-tum rhythm may be appropriate, and ‘have meaning’. When Tennyson wrote ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, he recreated the sound, pace, and movement of horses thundering along with the emphatic dactyls of ‘Half a league, half a league, half a league onward / Into the valley of death rode the six hundred’. But for a very different example we might take a short two-line poem by Pound himself. This time there is no fixed meter: like much twentieth-century poetry, this poem is in ‘free verse’. Its title is ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (the Metro being the Paris underground railway), and it was written in 1916:

Here you can see that the rhythm plays a subtle part in conveying the meaning. The poem is comparing the faces of people in a crowded underground to petals that have fallen on to a wet bough. The rhythm not only highlights the key words in each line, but produces much of the emotional feeling of the poem by slowing down the middle words of the first line and the final three words of the second.

For our final example of rhythm I’ve chosen a passage from Alexander Pope’s  An Essay on Criticism (1711).

Take a look at this excerpt from  An Essay on Criticism . Read it aloud if you can. Listen to the rhythm, and identify why the rhythm is appropriate to the meaning.

Pope here uses a basic structure of iambic pentameters with variations, so that the lines sound as if they have a different pace, faster or slower, depending on what is being described. It is not just rhythm that contributes to the effect here: rhyme and alliteration (successive words beginning with the same sound) recreate smooth, rough, slow and swift movement. Rhythm is entirely dependent on word choice, but is also influenced by other interdependent stylistic devices. Pope’s lines enact what they describe simply because of the care that has gone into choosing the right words. It doesn’t matter if you don’t recognise the classical allusions: from the descriptions it is clear that Ajax is a strong man and Camilla is quick and light. If you count the beats of each line, you’ll notice that, in spite of the variety of sound and effect, all have five stresses, except the last, which has six. Strangely enough it is the last and longest line that creates an impression of speed. How is this achieved? Try to hear the lines by reading them again out loud.

There is really only one way, and that is through the words chosen to represent movement: the repeated ‘s’ sounds associated with Camilla trip swiftly off the tip of the tongue, whereas Ajax’s lines demand real physical effort from mouth, lips, and tongue. You will get a much stronger sense of this if you form the words in this way, even if you are unable to say them out loud. In an exam, for instance, silent articulation of a poem will help you grasp many poetic techniques and effects that may otherwise be missed.

This extract from Pope’s  An Essay on Criticism , like the whole poem, is written in rhyming couplets (lines rhyming in pairs). They confer a formal, regular quality to the verse. The punctuation helps to control the way in which we read: notice that there is a pause at the end of each line, either a comma, a semi-colon, or a full stop. This use of the end-stopped line is characteristic of eighteenth-century heroic couplets (iambic pentameter lines rhyming in pairs), where the aim was to reproduce classical qualities of balance, harmony, and proportion.

Get into the habit of looking at rhyme words. Are any of Pope’s rhymes particularly interesting here? One thing I noticed was what is known as poetic inversion. The rhyme ‘shore’/’roar’is clearly important to the sound sense of the verse, but the more natural word order (were this ordinary speech) would be ‘The hoarse rough verse should roar like the torrent’. Had he written this, Pope would have lost the sound qualities of the rhyme ‘shore’/’roar’. He would have had to find a word such as ‘abhorrent’ to rhyme with ‘torrent’ and the couplet would have had a very different meaning. He would also have lost the rhythm of the line, in spite of the fact that the words are exactly the same.

Before we leave  An Essay on Criticism , did you notice that Pope’s subject in this poem is really poetry itself? Like Wordsworth, Pound, and William Carlos Williams, all of whom I’ve quoted earlier, Pope too was concerned with poetry as a craft.

Alliteration

Alliteration is the term used to describe successive words beginning with the same sound – usually, then, with the same letter.

To illustrate this I would like to use a stanza from Arthur Hugh Clough’s poem, ‘Natura naturans’. There is not enough space to quote the whole poem, but to give you some idea of the context of this stanza so that you can more fully appreciate what Clough is doing, it is worth explaining that ‘Natura naturans’ describes the sexual tension between a young man and woman who sit next to each other in a railway carriage. They have not been introduced, and they neither speak nor exchange so much as a glance. The subject matter and its treatment is unusual and also extraordinarily frank for the time of writing (about 1849), but you need to know what is being described in order to appreciate the physicality of the lines I quote.

Read the attached stanza from Arthur Hugh Clough’s poem  “Natura Naturans”  and consider the following questions:

• What is the single most striking technique used, and what are the effects?
• How would you describe the imagery, and what does it contribute to the overall effect?
• Visually the use of alliteration is striking, particularly in the first line and almost equally so in the second. If you took the advice above about paying attention to the physical business of articulating the words too, you should be in a good position to discriminate between the rapidity of the flies and the heavier movement of the bees, and to notice how tactile the language is. The effect is actually to create sensuality in the stanza.
• Notice that though we begin with flies, bees and rooks, all of which are fairly common flying creatures, we move to the more romantic lark with its ‘wild’ song, and then to the positively exotic gazelle, leopard, and dolphin. From the rather homely English air (flies, bees, birds), we move to foreign locations ‘Libyan dell’ and ‘Indian glade’, and from there to ‘tropic seas’. (Cod in the North Sea would have very different connotations from dolphins in the tropics.) Air, earth, and sea are all invoked to help express the variety of changing highly charged erotic feelings that the speaker remembers. The images are playful and preposterous, joyfully expressing the familiar poetic subject of sexual attraction and arousal in a way that makes it strange and new. Notice that in each case the image is more effective because the alliteration emphasizes it.

If a poem rhymes, then considering how the rhyme works is always important.

Rhyme schemes can be simple or highly intricate and complex; it will always be worth considering why a particular rhyme pattern was chosen and trying to assess its effects.

Read “Love from the North”  (1862) by Christina Rossetti. What is the poem about, and how does the rhyme contribute to the meaning and overall effect?

‘Love From the North’ tells a simple story. A woman about to marry one man is whisked away by another, just as she is about to exchange vows. The form of the poem is very simple: the second and fourth lines of each of the eight 4-line stanzas rhyme. More significantly, because the last word of each stanza is ‘nay’, there is only one rhyme sound throughout. There are more internal rhymes relying on the same repeated sound, however, aren’t there? Look at the last lines of stanzas 1, 2, 6, 7 and 8 where ‘say’ ‘nay’; ‘nay’ ‘nay’; ‘say’ ‘nay’; ‘yea’ ‘nay’; and ‘say’ ‘nay’ appear. In the second stanza, ‘gay’ occurs twice in line 2; stanza five and six both have ‘yea’ in line 3. What is the effect of this?

Do you think the effect might be to help over-simplify the story? Clearly the woman has doubts about the man from the south’s devotion: he ‘never dared’ to say no to her. He seems to have no will of his own: he ‘saddens’ when she does, is ‘gay’ when she is, wants only what she does. On her wedding day she thinks: ‘It’s quite too late to think of nay’. But is she any happier with the strong man from the north? Who is he? Has he carried her off against her will? And what exactly do you make of the last stanza? Do the ‘links of love’ imply a chain? This strong-minded woman who imposed her will on the man from the south has ‘neither heart nor power/Nor will nor wish’ to say no to the man from the north. Is that good, or bad? And what do you make of the ‘book and bell’ with which she’s made to stay? Certainly they imply something different from the conventional Christian marriage she was about to embark on in the middle of the poem – witchcraft, perhaps, or magic? And are the words ‘Till now’ particularly significant at the beginning of line 3 in the last stanza? Might they suggest a new resolve to break free?

How important is it to resolve such questions? It is very useful to ask them, but not at all easy to find answers. In fact, that is one of the reasons I like the poem so much. The language is very simple and so is the form – eight quatrains (or four-line stanzas) – and yet the more I think about the poem, the more interesting and ambiguous it seems. In my opinion, that is its strength. After all, do we always know exactly what we want or how we feel about relationships? Even if we do, is it always possible to put such feelings into words? Aren’t feelings often ambivalent rather than straightforward?

It is also worth bearing in mind the fact that the poem is written in ballad form. A ballad tells a story, but it does only recount events – part of the convention is that ballads don’t go into psychological complexities. It is likely that Rossetti chose this ancient oral verse form because she was interested in raising ambiguities. But perhaps the point of the word ‘nay’ chiming throughout ‘Love From the North’ is to indicate the female speaker saying no to both men – the compliant lover and his opposite, the demon lover, alike? After all, ‘nay’ is the sound which gives the poem striking unity and coherence.

Keats’s ‘Eve of St Agnes’ (1820) also tells a tale of lovers, but it isn’t a ballad, even though the rhyme scheme of the first four lines is the same as Rossetti’s quatrains. The stanzas are longer, and the form more complex and sophisticated. The rhyme pattern is the same throughout all 42 stanzas, the first two of which are reproduced for the following activity:

Read the first two stanzas of Keats’s “Eve of St Agnes.” How would you describe the rhyme scheme, and does it seem appropriate for the subject matter?

In comparison to the Rossetti poem the rhyme sounds form complex patterns, don’t they? While ‘was’/’grass’ in the first stanza and ‘man’/’wan’ in the second do not quite produce a full rhyme (depending on your accent), the first and third lines do rhyme in subsequent stanzas. Using a letter of the alphabet to describe each new rhyme sound, we could describe the pattern like this: a b a b b c b c c (imagine sustaining that intricate patterning for 42 stanzas). This kind of formula is useful up to a point for showing how often the same sounds recur, and it does show how complicated the interweaving of echoing sounds is. But it says nothing about how the sounds relate to what is being said – and, as I have been arguing all along, it is the relationship between meaning and word choice that is of particular interest. To give a full answer to my own question, I’d really need to consider the function of rhyme throughout the poem. It would not be necessary to describe what happens in each stanza, but picking out particular pertinent examples would help me argue a case. With only the first two stanzas to work with, I could say that, if nothing else, the intricate rhyme pattern seems appropriate not only for the detailed descriptions but also for the medieval, slightly gothic setting of the chapel where the holy man prays.

Read the extract from Tennyson’s “Mariana” (1830). Again, this comes from a longer poem, so it would be useful to look it up and read the rest if you have the opportunity.

Read the extract and consider the following questions:

• Describe the rhyme in the stanza from Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’.
• What is the first stanza about?
• As with the Keats poem, the rhyme scheme here is quite complicated. Using the same diagrammatic formula of a letter for each new rhyme sound, we could describe this as ‘a b a b c d d c e f e f. You might notice too that indentations at the beginning of each line emphasise lines that rhyme with each other: usually the indentations are alternate, except for lines 6 and 7, which form a couplet in the middle of the stanza. It is worth telling you too that each of the stanzas ends with a variation of the line ‘I would that I were dead’ (this is known as a refrain) so – as in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Love From the North’ – a dominant sound or series of sounds throughout helps to control the mood of the poem.
• We may not know who Mariana is, or why she is in the lonely, crumbling grange, but she is obviously waiting for a man who is slow in arriving. The ‘dreary’/’aweary’ and ‘dead’/’said’ rhymes, which, if you read the rest of the poem, you will see are repeated in each stanza, convey her dejection and express the boredom of endless waiting. As with the stanzas from Keats’s ‘Eve of St Agnes’, there is plenty of carefully observed detail – black moss on the flower-plots, rusty nails, a clinking latch on a gate or door – all of which description contributes to the desolation of the scene and Mariana’s mood. Were the moated grange a lively, sociable household, the poem would be very different. Either Mariana would be cheerful, or her suicidal misery would be in sharp contrast to her surroundings. It is always worth considering what settings contribute to the overall mood of a poem.

Poetic Inversion

Poetic inversion, or changing the usual word order of speech, is often linked to the need to maintain a rhythm or to find a rhyme. We noticed Pope’s poetic inversion in  An Essay on Criticism and saw how the rhyme was intimately linked to the rhythm of the verse. The song ‘Dancing in the Street’, first recorded by Martha and the Vandellas in the 1960s, does violence to word order in the interests of rhyme – ‘There’ll be dancing in the street/ A chance new folk to meet’ – but, because the words are sung to a driving rhythm, we are unlikely to notice how awkward they are. There’s a convention that we recognise, however unconsciously, that prevents us from mentally re-writing the line as ‘a chance to meet new people’. (‘People’ rather than ‘folk’ would be more usual usage for me, but, as with the Pope example, this would mean that the rhythm too would be lost.)

Poems That Don’t Rhyme

Are poems that don’t rhyme prose? Not necessarily. Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), a novelist rather than a poet, and T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), known particularly for his poetry, both wrote descriptive pieces best described as ‘prose poems’. These look like short prose passages since there is no attention to line lengths or layout on the page, as there was, for example, in ‘Mariana’. When you study Shakespeare you will come across blank verse. ‘Blank’ here means ‘not rhyming’, but the term ‘blank verse’ is used specifically to describe verse in unrhyming iambic pentameters.

Although iambic pentameters resemble our normal speech patterns, in ordinary life we speak in prose. You’ll notice if you look through Shakespeare’s plays that blank verse is reserved for kings, nobles, heroes and heroines. They may also speak in prose, as lesser characters do, but commoners don’t ever have speeches in blank verse. Shakespeare – and other playwrights like him – used the form to indicate status. It is important to recognise this convention, which would have been understood by his contemporaries – writers, readers, and audiences alike. So choosing to write a poem in blank verse is an important decision: it will elevate the subject. One such example is Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1667), a long poem in twelve Books describing Creation, Adam and Eve’s temptation, disobedience and expulsion from Paradise. It sets out to justify the ways of God to man, so blank verse is entirely appropriate. This great epic was in Wordsworth’s mind when he chose the same form for his autobiographical poem, The Prelude .

Read and compare these extracts . One is from Book XIII of The Prelude , where Wordsworth is walking up Mount Snowdon; the other is from “The Idiot Boy,” one of his Lyrical Ballads . What effects are achieved by the different forms?

Both poems use iambic meter – an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable. The extract from  The Prelude uses iambic pentameters, five metrical feet in each line, whereas ‘The Idiot Boy’ (like the ballad, ‘Love From the North’) is in tetrameters, only four, establishing a more sing-song rhythm. Other stylistic techniques contribute to the difference in tone too: the language of The Prelude is formal (Wordsworth’s ‘Ascending’ rather than ‘going up’), whereas ‘The Idiot Boy’ uses deliberately homely diction, and rhyme. Three simple rhyme words ring out throughout the 92 stanzas of the latter: ‘Foy’, ‘boy’ and ‘joy’ stand at the heart of the poem, expressing the mother’s pride in her son. The moon features in each extract. In The Prelude , as Wordsworth climbs, the ground lightens, as it does in The Old Testament before a prophet appears. Far from being a meaningless syllable to fill the rhythm of a line, ‘lo’ heightens the religious parallel, recalling the biblical ‘Lo, I bring you tidings of great joy’: this episode from The Prelude describes a moment of spiritual illumination. Wordsworth’s intentions in these two poems were quite different, and the techniques reflect that.

Other poems that don’t use rhyme are discussed later (‘Wherever I Hang’; ‘Mona Lisa’; ‘Poem’). Notice that they use a variety of rhythms, and because of that none can be described as blank verse.

Wordsworth’s  The Prelude was written as an autobiographical poem, but there are many instances where it is obvious that poet and persona are different. Charlotte Mew’s poem, ‘The Farmer’s Bride’ (1916) begins like this:

Three summers since I chose a maid, Too young maybe – but more’s to do At harvest-time than bide and woo. When us was wed she turned afraid Of love and me and all things human;

(Warner, 1981, pp. 1–2)

Mew invents a male character here, and clearly separates herself as a writer from the voice in her poem. Some of the most well-known created characters – or personae – in poetry are Browning’s dramatic monologues.

Consider the opening lines from three Robert Browning poems . Who do you think is speaking?

Well, the first speaker isn’t named, but we can infer that, like Brother Lawrence whom he hates, he’s a monk. The second must be a Duke since he refers to his ‘last Duchess’ and, if we read to the end of the third poem, we discover that the speaker is a man consumed with such jealousy that he strangles his beloved Porphyria with her own hair. Each of the poems is written in the first person (‘ my heart’s abhorrence’; ‘That’s my last Duchess’; I listened with heart fit to break’). None of the characters Browning created in these poems bears any resemblance to him: the whole point of a dramatic monologue is the creation of a character who is most definitely not the poet. Charlotte Mew’s poem can be described in the same way.

Line Lengths and Line Endings

Read the following prose extract taken from Walter Pater’s discussion of the  Mona Lisa , written in 1893, and then complete the activity:

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

When W.B. Yeats was asked to edit  The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 (1936), he chose to begin with this passage from Pater, but he set it out quite differently on the page. Before you read his version, write out the extract as a poem yourself. The exercise is designed to make you think about line lengths, where to start a new line and where to end it when there is no rhyme to give you a clue. There is no regular rhythm either, though I’m sure you will discover rhythms in the words, as well as repeated patterns. How can you best bring out these poetic features?

Of course, there is no right answer to this exercise, but you should compare your version to Yeats’s, printed below, to see if you made similar decisions.

She is older than the rocks among which she sits; Like the Vampire, She has been dead many times, And learned the secrets of the grave; And has been a diver in deep seas, And keeps their fallen day about her; And trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants; And, as Leda, Was the mother of Helen of Troy, And, as St Anne, Was the mother of Mary; And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, And lives Only in the delicacy With which it has moulded the changing lineaments, And tinged the eyelids and the hands.

View the document as a PDF.

I wonder whether you used upper case letters for the first word of each line, as Yeats did? You may have changed the punctuation, or perhaps have left it out altogether. Like Yeats, you may have used ‘And’ at the beginnings of lines to draw attention to the repetitions: nine of the lines begin in this way, emphasising the way the clauses pile up, defining and redefining the mysterious Mona Lisa. Two lines begin with ‘She’: while there was no choice about the first, beginning the third in the same way focuses attention on her right at the start of the poem. Yeats has used Pater’s punctuation to guide his line endings in all but two places: lines 13 and 14 run on – a stylistic device known as enjambment. The effect is an interesting interaction between eyes and ears. While we may be tempted to read on without pausing to find the sense, the line endings and white space of the page impose pauses on our reading, less than the commas and semi-colons that mark off the other lines, but significant nevertheless.

Yeats’s arrangement of the words makes the structure and movement of Pater’s long sentence clearer than it appears when written as prose. The poem begins with age – she is ‘older than the rocks’ – and refers to ‘Vampire’, death, and ‘grave’ in the first lines. The decision to single out the two words ‘And lives’ in a line by themselves towards the end of the poem sets them in direct opposition to the opening; we have moved from great age and living death to life. The arrangement of lines 8–11 highlights her links with both pagan and Christian religions: the Mona Lisa was the mother of Helen of Troy and the Virgin Mary. The wisdom and knowledge she has acquired is worn lightly, nothing more than ‘the sound of lyres and flutes’, apparent only in the ‘delicacy’ of colour on ‘eyelids and hands’.

The aim of the preceding exercise was to encourage you to think about form and structure even when a poem does not appear to follow a conventional pattern. Because you have now ‘written’ a poem and had the opportunity to compare it with someone else’s version of the same words, you should begin to realise the importance of decisions about where exactly to place a word for maximum effect, and how patterns can emerge which will control our reading when, for example, successive lines begin with repetitions. It should have made you think about the importance of the beginnings of lines, as well as line endings. What has been achieved by using a short line here, a longer one there? How do these decisions relate to what is being said? These are questions that can usefully be asked of any poem.

Earlier, discussing the extract from Pope’s  An Essay on Criticism , I asked you to concentrate on the sound qualities of the poetry. Here, I want you to consider the visual impact of the poem on the page. It is a good thing to be aware of what a complex task reading is, and to be alive to the visual as well as the aural qualities of the verse.

Activity 10

Further exercise: taking Grace Nichols’s ‘Wherever I Hang’, discussed in  Activity 10 , you could reverse the process carried out in the previous exercise by writing out the poem as prose. Then, covering up the original, you could rewrite it as verse and compare your version with the original.

Comparing and Contrasting

Often you will find that an assignment asks you to ‘compare and contrast’ poems. There’s a very good reason for this, for often it is only by considering different treatments of similar subjects that we become aware of a range of possibilities, and begin to understand why particular choices have been made. You will have realised that often in the previous discussions I’ve used a similar strategy, showing, for example, how we can describe the rhyme scheme of ‘Love From the North’ as simple once we have looked at the more intricate patterning of Keats’s ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ or Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’. Anne Brontë’s ‘Home’ and Grace Nichols’s ‘Wherever I Hang’ treat the subject of exile in quite different ways, and looking at one can sharpen our understanding of what the other does.

Activity 11

Read the opening lines from these two poems commemorating deaths . What can you explain why they sound so very different?

If I had to identify one thing, I would say that the first begins more elaborately and with a more formal tone than the second. ‘Felix Randal’ tends to use language in an unusual way, but you would probably agree that the first sentence is quite straightforward and sounds colloquial (or informal), as if the speaker has just overheard someone talking about Randal’s death and wants to confirm his impression. ‘Lycidas’ opens quite differently. It is not immediately apparent what evergreens have to do with anything (in fact they work to establish an appropriately melancholy atmosphere or tone), and it isn’t until line 8 that we learn of a death. The word ‘dead’ is repeated, and the following line tells us that Lycidas was a young man. While ‘Felix Randal’ has an immediacy, the speaker of ‘Lycidas’ seems to find it hard to get going.

Both poems are elegies – poems written to commemorate death – and both poets are aware of writing within this convention, although they treat it differently.

Activity 12

What do the titles of the poems used in  Activity 13 tell us about each poem, and how might they help us understand the different uses of the elegiac convention?

If you were making a special study of elegies, there would be a great deal more to say. That’s not the idea here, though. The point is that by comparing and contrasting the tone of the opening lines and the titles, and considering when the poems were written, we have come up with a number of significant differences.

Activity 13

Read this  poem by Robert Browning  carefully. Who is speaking, and who is being addressed?

From the evidence of the poem we know that the speaker once walked across a moor, found an eagle’s feather, and has a high regard for the poet Shelley (1792–1822). The person being addressed is not named, but we discover that he (or she) once met Shelley, and this alone confers status by association. The word ‘you’ (‘your’ in one instance) is repeated in 6 out of the first 8 lines. ‘You’ becomes a rhyme word at the end of the second line, so when we reach the word ‘new’ in line four – one of the two lines in the first stanzas that doesn’t contain ‘you’ – the echo supplies the deficiency. ‘You’ clearly represents an important focus in the first half of the poem, but who exactly is ‘you’ ?

Thinking about this apparently straightforward question of who is being addressed takes us into an important area of critical debate: for each one of us who has just read the poem has, in one sense, become a person who not only knows who Shelley is (which may not necessarily be the case) but lived when he did, met him, listened to him, and indeed exchanged at least a couple of words with him. Each of us reads the poem as an individual, but the poem itself constructs a reader who is not identical to any of us. We are so used to adopting ‘reading’ roles dictated by texts like this that often we don’t even notice the way in which the text has manipulated us.

Activity 14

Now read the  Robert Browning poem again, this time asking yourself if the speaking voice changes in the last two stanzas, and if the person who is being addressed remains the same.

If the first half of the poem is characterised by the repetition of ‘you’ and the sense of an audience that pronoun creates, then the second half seems quite different in content and tone. The speaker is trying to find a parallel in his experience to make sense of and explain his feeling of awe; the change of tone is subtle. Whereas someone is undoubtedly being addressed directly in the first stanza, in the third and fourth, readers overhear – as if the speaker is talking to himself.

At first the connection between the man who met Shelley and the memory of finding an eagle’s feather may not be obvious, but there is a point of comparison. As stanza 2 explains, part of the speaker’s sense of wonder stems from the fact that time did not stand still: ‘you were living before that, / And also you are living after’. The moor in stanza 3, like the listener, is anonymous – it has ‘a name of its own … no doubt’ – but where it is or what it is called is unimportant: only one ‘hand’s-breadth’ is memorable, the spot that ‘shines alone’ where the feather was found. The poem is about moments that stand out in our memories while the ordinary daily stuff of life fades. It also acknowledges that we don’t all value the same things.

Activity 15

Take another look at the  poem. How would you describe its form?

The structure of the poem is perfectly balanced: of the four quatrains, two deal with each memory, so, although the nature of each seems quite different, implicitly the form invites us to compare them. Think about the way in which Browning introduces the eagle feather. How does he convince us that this is a rare find?

To begin with, the third and fourth stanzas make up one complete sentence, with a colon at the end of the third announcing the fourth; this helps to achieve a sense of building up to something important. Then we move from the visual image of a large space of moor to the very circumscribed place where the feather is found, but the reason why this ‘hand’s-breadth’ shines out is delayed for the next two lines ‘For there I picked up on the heather’ – yes? what? – ‘And there I put inside my breast’ – well? – ‘A moulted feather’, ah (and notice the internal rhyme there of ‘feather’ with ‘heather’ which draws attention to and emphasises the harmony of the moment), and then the word ‘feather’ is repeated and expanded: ‘an eagle-feather’ Clearly the feather of no other bird would do, for ultimately the comparison is of eagle to the poet; Browning knows Shelley through his poetry as he knows the eagle through its feather, and that feather presents a striking visual image.

There is an immediacy about the conversational opening of the poem which, I have suggested, deliberately moves into a more contemplative tone, possibly in the second stanza (think about it), but certainly by the third. We have considered some of the poetic techniques that Browning employs to convince us of the rarity of his find in the third and fourth stanzas. You might like to think more analytically about the word sounds, not just the rhyme but, for example, the repeated ‘ae’ sound in ‘breadth’ ‘heather’ ‘breast’ and ‘feather’. What, however, do you make of the tone of the last line? Try saying the last lines of each stanza out loud. Whether you can identify the meter with technical language or not is beside the point. The important thing is that ‘Well, I forget the rest’ sounds deliberately lame. After the intensity of two extraordinary memories, everything else pales into insignificance and, to reiterate this, the rhythm tails off. While the tone throughout is informal, the last remark is deliberately casual.

Abrams, M.H. (1971)  A Glossary of Literary Terms , Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Barker, J.R.V. (ed.) (1985)  The Brontes: Selected Poems , Dent.

Bush, D. (ed.) (1966)  Milton: Poetical Works , Oxford University Press.

Bygrave, S. (ed.) (1998)  Romantic Writings , The Open University.

Clough, A.H. (1890)  Poems , Macmillan.

Gardner, W.H. (1953)  Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins , Penguin.

Gibson, J. (ed.) (1976)  The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy , Macmillan.

Goodman, L. (1996)  Literature and Gender , The Open University.

Gray, R. (1990)  American Poetry of the Twentieth Century , Longman.

Hutchinson, T. (ed.) (1936) (revised 1969 by E. De Selincourt)  Wordsworth: Poetical Works , Oxford University Press.

Jack, I. and Fowler, R. (eds) (1988)  The Poetical Works of Robert Browning , vol. III Bells and Pomegranates , Clarendon Press.

Matterson, S. and Jones, D. (2000)  Studying Poetry , Arnold. O’Hara, F. (1964) Lunch Poems , City Lights Books.

Owens, W.R. and Johnson, H. (eds) (1998)  Romantic Writings: An Anthology , The Open University.

Pater, W. (1893) (1998)  The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry , ed. Adam Phillips, Oxford University Press.

Regan, S. (1997) ‘Form and Meaning in Poetry: The Sonnet’, in  A103 An Introduction to the Humanities , Block 1 ‘Form and Reading’, The Open University.

Sisson, C.H. (1984)  Christina Rossetti: Selected Poems , Carcanet.

Trilling, T. and Bloom, H. (1973)  Victorian Prose and Poetry , Oxford University Press.

Wain, J. (ed.) (1990)  The Oxford Library of English Poetry , vol.II, Oxford University Press / Guild Publishing.

Warner, V. (ed.) (1981) Charlotte Mew: Collected Poems and Prose , Virago Press. Yeats, W.B. (1936) The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935 , Clarendon Press.

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Whether it’s true that the moth mistakes the candle’s flame  for the moon or the bioluminescent  pheromones of another moth,

I can’t say. I was the candle.  I was the flame

conceived in and by reason of  darkness, nibbling on a darkening wick.  When moth after moth after moth  swarmed me with their powdery wings,

I asked why.  I asked how.  I asked if

I could survive knowing that not everything has a reason,  that not everything is capable of or interested in reason.

Nothing answered.  Nothing spoke my language of smoke.

Copyright © 2021 by Paul Tran. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 24, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

More by this poet

Taurus sun, cancer moon, scorpio rising.

Sigh of the Santa Ana through the chaparral clinging to the mountain. Through the sunflowers at night, searching for the sun, along the river no longer a river. The wind kissing the river, its stone face, and making each stone a matchbook. A match. A book on fire. The river a library on fire. The wind a woman running through the valley on fire. Searching. The sunflowers turning toward her. Her nightgown a book turning its own bright pages in the wind. Smoke the color of chaparral. Smoke clinging to her, making her a mountain of smoke. A valley of light. A sigh.

I thought I could stop time by taking apart the clock. Minute hand. Hour hand.

Nothing can keep. Nothing is kept. Only kept track of. I felt

passing seconds accumulate like dead calves in a thunderstorm

Lamentation (Martha Graham, 1930) What shall I compare to you, that I may comfort you, virgin daughter of Zion? Lamentations 2:13

Wordless, ceaseless, a second, seamless skin, this blue refrain

Predictions of the Material

Before the wick rejects the flame; before the glass salts the waters, or the rental en route to your funeral stalls, I worry

the dog isn’t getting enough sun, & it is midnight but we step out anyway onto summer’s chow

Dear Exile,

Never step back    Never a last Scent of plumeria

When my parents left You knew it was for good 

     It’s a herd of horses never            To reclaim their    steppes

You became a moth hanging Down from the sun

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6.1: What is Poetry?

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What is Poetry?

Poetry is a condensed form of writing. As an art, it can effectively invoke a range of emotions in the reader. It can be presented in a number of forms — ranging from traditional rhymed poems such as sonnets to contemporary free verse. Poetry has always been intrinsically tied to music and many poems work with rhythm. It often brings awareness of current issues such as the state of the environment, but can also be read just for the sheer pleasure.

A poet makes the invisible visible. The invisible includes our deepest feelings and angsts, and also our joys, sorrows, and unanswered questions of being human. How is a poet able to do this? A poet uses fresh and original language , and is more interested in how the arrangement of words affects the reader rather than solely grammatical construction. The poet thinks about how words sound , the musicality within each word and also how the words come together.

Like fiction writers, poets mostly show rather than tell . They describe the scene vividly using as few words as possible and prefer to describe rather than analyze, leaving the latter to the people who read and write about poetry as you are doing in this class.

The Purpose of Poetry

If you’ve taken a composition or freshman writing course, you might recognize some familiar terms used above — summarizes, sources, persuades, ethos. These are all words you will rarely, if ever, use in reference to writing poetry. And why is that? Well, what’s the purpose of poetry? Perhaps this is not an easy question to answer. In fact, the answer might depend on time and culture. Epics such as Gilgamesh aided in memorization and preserved stories meant to be passed down orally. The British Romantics valued the pleasure derived from hearing and reading poetry. In some cultures poetry is important in ritual and religious practice. In contemporary times, many describe poetry as being a tool for self-expression.

In the excellent glossary in his book How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry , poet Edward Hirsch provides the following definition for a poem:

Poem: A made thing, a verbal construct, an event in language. The word poesis means “making;” and the oldest term for the poet means “maker.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics points out that the medieval and Renaissance poets used the word makers , as in “courtly makers,” as a precise equivalent for poets. (Hence William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers.”) The word poem came into English in the sixteenth century and has been with us ever since to denote a form of fabrication, a verbal composition, a made thing.

William Carlos Williams defined the poem as “a small (or large) machine made of words.” (He added that there is nothing redundant about a machine.) Wallace Stevens characterized poetry as “a revelation of words by means of the words.” In his helpful essay “What is Poetry?” linguist Roman Jakobson declared:

“Poeticity is present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the object being named or an outburst of emotion, when words and their composition, their meaning, their external and internal form, acquire a weight and value of their own instead of referring indifferently to reality.”

Ben Johnson referred to the art of poetry as “the craft of making.” The old Irish word cerd, meaning “people of the craft,” was a designation for artisans, including poets. It is cognate with the Greek kerdos , meaning “craft, craftiness.” Two basic metaphors for the art of poetry in the classical world were carpentry and weaving. “Whatsoever else it may be,” W. H. Auden said, “a poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.”

The true poem has been crafted into a living entity. It has magical potency, ineffable spirit. There is always something mysterious and inexplicable in a poem. It is an act—an action—beyond paraphrase because what is said is always inseparable from the way it is being said. A poem creates an experience in the reader that cannot be reduced to anything else. Perhaps it exists in order to create that aesthetic experience. Octavio Paz maintained that the poet and the reader are two moments of a single reality.

Of the many ideas provided here in this definition, perhaps the one to emphasize most is that the poem is “an event in language.” It is also one of the harder to understand concepts. “A poem creates an experience in the reader that cannot be reduced to anything else,” writes Hirsch. Especially not through paraphrase. This means that in order to “experience” a poem, a reader needs to read it as it is. The poem is itself a type of virtual reality.

Jeremy Arnold, a professor of philosophy at the University of Woolamaloo in Canada, likens the poem to the “pensieve” device in the Harry Potter series: “A poem allows someone to preserve a mental experience so that an outsider can access it as if it were their own.” When coming to poetry, there may be nothing more important to understand because nothing can shape your perspective more on how to write and for what purpose. Poetry requires a reader, an audience; therefore, the poet must learn how to best engage an audience. And this engagement doesn’t happen by sharing ideas, feelings, or experiences, by telling the reader about your experiences — it happens by creating them on the page with words that evoke the senses. With images . These, then, are how the literary genres speak. Images are their muscles. Their heart. Images are poetry’s body and soul.

Choose a poem from the Poetry Foundation’s featured poems and look again at Edward Hirsh’s definition of poem. How does this poem typify his explanation? Are there any ways in which it does not? Write a short response (300 words or less) explaining how you see your selected poem in relation to Hirsch’s definition.

Video: Billy Collins, A Poet, Speaks Out

Watch Billy Collins’ audio/visual poem:

Video 6.1.1 : Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

After watching the video above, read the poem here , and click on the link below to listen to a lecture by Billy Collins on his craft and how it relates to the reader.

Contributors and Attributions

Adapted from Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations by Michelle Bonczek Evory, sourced from SUNY, CC-BY-NC-SA

Finding Meaning in Poetry

by Melissa Donovan | Jan 12, 2023 | Poetry Writing | 18 comments

Finding meaning in poetry.

We humans are programmed to find meaning in everything. We find patterns where none exist . We look for hidden messages in works of art . We yearn for meaning, especially when something doesn’t immediately make sense.

Of course, art is open to interpretation, and some of the best works of art have produced a fountain of ideas about what they mean. From the nonsensical children’s story  Alice in Wonderland   to the complex historical fantasy series  A Song of Ice and Fire (aff links), we wonder what a story means — what it’s really about, at its core.

Finding Meaning in Abstract Poetry

The literary canon is home to countless poems with abstract meaning. One of my favorites is “ anyone lived in a pretty how town ” by E.E. Cummings. Here’s an excerpt:

anyone lived in a pretty how town (with up so floating many bells down) spring summer autumn winter he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Whenever I read this poem, I see a lot of imagery: bells; the changing of the seasons; people; the sun, stars, and moon. Phrases like “up so floating many bells down” are enigmatic. Cummings takes great liberty with grammar and punctuation, using all lowercase letters and eliminating spaces in some lines, which intensifies the poem’s ambiguity.

But what does it all mean? I can’t be sure. This uncertainty imbibes the poem with a sense of wonder. Each time I read it, the meaning changes ever so slightly. It’s almost an ethereal experience to revisit the poem every couple of years to see what it will be like this time.

Maybe Cummings had a particular idea in mind when he wrote this poem, or maybe he wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. Maybe the poem has no meaning and it’s just a nonsensical romp through language and imagery. I don’t think any of that matters. What matters is the act of Cummings writing the poem and the experience we get from reading it. With a poem like this, each reader will have a different experience. That’s quite a gift — one poem that can mean different things to different people.

Vague Meaning in Poetry

A poem’s meaning can be vague without being abstract or nonsensical. Consider this excerpt from “ The Road Not Taken ” by Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

It’s one of the most famous poems in world, and the lines above are often quoted and interpreted to promote individualism: think for yourself; be your own person; forge your own path. But an earlier stanza says that both roads are equally traveled:

Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same…

Did the poet really take the road less traveled? Were both roads equally traveled and only in later tellings of his adventures did one become less traveled than the other? Did the poet believe the roads were equally traveled until the journey was completed? Is the narrator unreliable?

Although the poem is often interpreted to promote individualism, we never learn whether taking the road less traveled turned out to be a good or bad decision. What was the outcome? Readers are left to draw their own conclusions.

Meaning Can Be Clear or Nonexistent

Plenty of poems make their meaning clear. Emily Dickinson’s “ Because I Could Not Stop for Death ” comes to mind (excerpt):

Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me – The Carriage held but just Ourselves – And Immortality.

The poet then takes a carriage ride with Death, ending their tour at a gravesite. The poem is clearly a statement on mortality and an examination of the big question: what happens after we die? There’s nothing ambiguous or cryptic about this poem. It might prompt you to contemplate the inevitable, but it’s not likely to confuse you or take on new meaning each time you read it.

Meaning in Poetry Writing

Meaning isn’t only found in the act of reading (and re-reading) poetry. Sometimes we start writing a poem with one idea in mind, but by the time we reach the end of the first draft, another idea or theme has emerged, maybe even something surprising or profound. Other times, we might write a poem and realize years later that there are layers of meaning in it; perhaps our subconscious produced something we weren’t aware of at the time the poem was composed.

The very act of writing poetry opens us to the meaning of our experiences and ideas, especially if we’re willing to give up control when we write and let ideas and words flow freely.

Freewriting is an ideal practice for generating enigmatic raw writing material. Sometimes a freewrite produces nothing but junk. Other times a freewrite contains a few captivating phrases, an interesting rhyme, or an unusual idea. Occasionally, if we’re lucky (and do a lot of freewrites), something almost magical emerges: a piece of writing — perhaps abstract, or maybe vague, possibly clear — worth polishing and sharing with others.

Analyzing poetry is always a good exercise for the mind, and searching for meaning is certainly an important part of poetry analysis. We cannot always know if we’ve inferred the correct meaning of a poem — or at least the meaning the author intended — but perhaps that doesn’t matter. If ten people come away from a poem with ten different interpretations, do we think a poem has failed to communicate clearly, or has it done something remarkable — provided ten different experiences from one source?

How often do you find yourself searching for deeper meaning in the poems you read? When you write poetry, how important is it that there’s a deeper meaning? Do you ever write a poem and later discover hidden meaning within it?

18 Comments

Excellent thoughts on some famous poems. Especially the Robert Frost one, the previous lines are so little known!

It’s a fun one to pick apart.

Melissa, your post makes me want to read more poetry and possibly explore learning to write it. I shy away from poetry because I don’t understand most of it and get frustrated. Do you have any recommendations for poetry books or collections for newbies?

I don’t think you really need to understand poetry at first. I recommend exploring poetry with an open mind. It’s kind of like music. If you listen to enough of it, eventually you’ll come across a song that resonates with you. As you listen to more and more songs, you gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for a wider range of music.

It’s almost impossible to recommend a collection for newbies, because so much will depend on your personal taste. To get started, you can visit the Poetry Foundation and poets.org online, where you can peruse thousands of poems online, for free. I also personally love Rattle for some more contemporary works. I would encourage you to purchase books of poetry once you get a sense of your tastes and preferences. This helps to support poets and it’s also beneficial to explore a single poets’ repertoire.

With regard to books on writing poetry, Perrine’s Sound and Sense is pricey but the most comprehensive book I know. The Practice of Poetry is more affordable and introductory and maybe a better starting place.

I wish you the best of luck. And hey, don’t be afraid to dive in. I spontaneously started writing poetry at thirteen with no idea what I was doing. Give yourself room to experiment, take risks, and write some bad poems. With practice, they’ll get better and better.

I liked a lot this poetry text. I write poems in my mother tongue Finnish, but, because there are no such blogs with writing prompts, analyzes and ideas, I follow your blog. Thanks for writing it!

You’re welcome. Thanks for sharing your comment, Johanna.

Your web address is the top one that came up when I looked for meaning in poetry. I write poetry in 3-dimensions – 4 Haiku all share same middle line form poetic cube in 3D space, outside 5 syllable lines show unexpected meaning only when seen in virtual space. Person I met in Starbucks this morning was surprised that poetry lines should have more than one meaning and that your writing should thus be more precise. Thanks for your discussion in “Writing Forward”, I feel a lot better now about poetry having multiple meanings dependent upon each reader’s interpretation.

That sounds interesting, Mike! I’m glad you found your way to Writing Forward and hope you find some other good articles while you’re here.

A really really good read! The nuisanced differences you delineated between the abstraction or vagueness and the embedded meaning or free interpretation of a poem come significantly with thoughts for readers to analyze poetry differently.

Thanks, Shahadat.

You have opened up a new world for me! I am a retired engineer whose life has been math and science. Thank you very much!!

You’re welcome!

Thank you for this excellent article and your thoughts!

Thank you, Melissa, for showing me whole new ways of looking at, interpreting poetry.

You’re welcome. Thanks for your comment.

The deeper meaning comes from how the reader interprets the poetry. It takes an excellent writer to write poetry with mental images that can travel in many directions. Terrific post!

Thanks, Jennie.

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What Does Freud Still Have to Teach Us?

By Merve Emre

There are more than thirty full-length biographies of Sigmund Freud in circulation today. Why keep writing them? Generally, there are two justifications for a new biography: an obscure archive may come to light, changing what is known about the subject, or it can become clear that earlier biographers have misunderstood—or even abused—existing sources. In the absence of a discovery or a scandal, what hangs in the balance for the second or third or thirtieth biographer must be a significant reinterpretation of the subject’s ideas—where they came from, what they mean, and how they have been transmitted to us from increasingly alien times and places.

With Freud, the possibilities for interpreting his life are limitless, as he well knew. In an 1885 letter to his wife, Martha, written when he was twenty-eight, he boasted that he had burned all his letters, notes, and manuscripts, “which one group of people, as yet unborn and fated to misfortune, will feel acutely. Since you can’t guess whom I mean I will tell you: they are my biographers.” He added, “Let each one of them believe he is right in his ‘Conception of the Development of the Hero’: even now I enjoy the thought of how they will all go astray.” Freud’s wish for the birth of his “unborn” biographers was also a curse laid upon them. Under his ferocious hubris ran an equally ferocious insecurity. He had yet to publish anything of significance, and the ideas that made him famous—repression, infantile sexuality, the libido, and the death drive—were still far in the future.

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Nearly all Freud’s biographers have brandished this letter as proof of their daring in accepting his challenge. Like children, some have done so respectfully, others with contempt. His official biographer, the Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, met Freud in 1908, at the inaugural International Psychoanalytic Congress, in Salzburg, and never strayed far from his side. In the mid-fifties, Jones published a three-volume behemoth, “ The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud ,” which proceeded with the tender, painstaking, and sometimes misleading attention of an eldest child cataloguing his deceased father’s belongings. The historian Peter Gay’s “ Freud: A Life for Our Time ,” which appeared thirty years later, reads like the work of a clear-eyed younger son. Anchoring Freud’s origins in the unstable project of nineteenth-century Austrian liberalism and the vexed insider-outsider status of the Jewish bourgeoisie, Gay systematically linked each of Freud’s major writings to its historical epoch. Despite their differences, Jones, the disciple, and Gay, the scholar, were both completists. No one has improved on their essential and extraordinarily vivid books. Efforts to do so—for instance, Élisabeth Roudinesco’s “ Freud: In His Time and Ours ” (2014)—read like the imitative, if perfectly serviceable, remembrances of latecomers to a funeral.

After those two monumental works, the next wave of Freud biographies seemed to respond to a strong reciprocal impulse; after all, he had written the most influential biography of us—of man, a creature of pleasure who had been civilized into unhappiness, and of mankind, its members instinctively bound by Eros and aggression. Reciprocity, however, can take the form of gratitude or vengeance. Frederick Crews’s “Freud: The Making of an Illusion ” (2017) is a work of propaganda so savage that one cannot help but imagine its author as a disowned son. His Freud is lazy, insecure, abusive, and deluded, and the practitioners who have followed him are saps and chumps. In contrast, the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’s devoted and meandering “ Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst ” (2016) offers no new details about its subject’s life but meditates at length on the sibling rivalry between biography and psychoanalysis. He takes Freud’s allergy to biography so deeply to heart that he more or less talks himself out of writing one. Crews and Phillips occupy opposite ends of the love-hate spectrum of biography, but the result is the same. The biographer’s psychodrama prevails over the subject’s life.

Periodically, though, the call to biography is occasioned by an urge to construct a Freud “for our time,” a time that resembles Freud’s own in its apprehension and instability. This was an urge whose repetition was foreseen by W. H. Auden , in his 1940 poem “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”:

When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of a whole epoch the frailty of our conscience and anguish, of whom shall we speak?

“This doctor” was the poem’s answer—“an important Jew who died in exile,” and who spoke to all the “exiles who long for the future that lives in our power.” As Matt Ffytche observes at the beginning of his biography, “ Sigmund Freud ” (2022), “there has been a Freud for 1920s Bengal and 1930s Tokyo; a Freud for the early days of the Bolshevik revolution and for modernist poets; a Freud for apartheid South Africa.” The past few years have given us a Freud for the pandemic, a Freud for Ukraine and a Freud for Palestine, a Freud for transfemininity, a Freud for the far right, and a Freud for the vipers’ nest that is the twenty-first-century American university.

The latest biography, “ Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna, and the Making of the Modern Mind ” (St. Martin’s), is by Frank Tallis, a British clinical psychologist and a crime novelist. (His popular series, “ The Liebermann Papers ,” is set in an opulent fin-de-siècle Vienna, and features Dr. Max Liebermann, billed as “literature’s first psychoanalytic detective.”) Tallis is not the first to give us a Freud for Vienna—the intellectual historian Carl Schorske’s “ Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture ,” from 1980, remains the standard-bearer—but what Tallis lacks in novelty or political verve he makes up for in sheer entertainment, drawing inspiration from the briskly plotted intrigue of his crime fiction. Quotation is jettisoned in favor of dramatic paraphrase. Chapters are anchored by colorful Viennese personalities, including patients from Freud’s case studies—Anna O., Dora, Rat Man, Wolfman—and the melancholy aristocrats and philandering artists of his milieu. Reading “Mortal Secrets” is like waltzing around a crowded ballroom, past quivering gold leaf and sternly curved flowers, while your partner murmurs in your ear very elegant, very precise summaries of primal parricide and the topographical model of the mind.

The experience is not just entertaining. It is refreshingly honest. Tallis, to echo Freud, has no “hobby-horse, no consuming passion.” His biography intends to synthesize and clarify, and to dispel any baseless speculation about his subject. He uses his lifetime of professional expertise to adjudicate freely and fairly between the “Freud bashers” and the fanatics who “have treated his works like scripture.” Their battles, he points out, have made it difficult to assess the importance of a thinker who, though routinely debunked, indelibly shaped our ideas about the self. “He is obviously important,” Tallis writes. “But how important?”

Every biographer of Freud must contend with the gruff, withholding story that he told about his own life in “An Autobiographical Study,” which he published in 1925, at the height of his success. From the start, Freud adopts a tone of pure facticity. “I was born on May 6th, 1856, in Freiberg in Moravia, a small town in what is now Czecho-Slovakia,” he writes. “My parents were Jews and I have remained a Jew myself.” He describes his family’s move from Freiberg to Vienna, when he was three, without detail or emotion. His references to his early influences—the Bible, Darwin, Goethe—are glancing. The formative mentorships of Ernest Brücke and Jean-Martin Charcot, and his professional relationship with Josef Breuer, with whom Freud co-authored the 1895 book “ Studies on Hysteria ,” are swept aside after a few paragraphs. Martha makes a single, strange appearance, in a digression about how she persuaded Freud to stop experimenting with cocaine. “It is the fault of my fiancée that I was not already famous,” he complains. Their six children and eight grandchildren are largely absent. The faithful disciples are subordinated to the founding institutions of psychoanalysis; the unfaithful Carl Jung is dismissed in an icy parenthetical.

Militantly impersonal in his style, Freud narrates his life through a series of lucid and economic summaries of the ideas that defined his career: first, repression; then infantile sexuality; and, finally, the grand battle between Eros and the death instinct, within individuals and across civilization. It was the first of these ideas, he writes, that gave rise to all the others: “It is possible to take repression as a centre and to bring all the elements of psychoanalytic theory into relation with it.” The subject opened one of his earliest papers, “Screen Memories,” from 1899, which recounted a conversation that Freud had had with a patient, a thirty-eight-year-old man whose family had moved when he was three from the small town where he was born to a big city. They had suffered “long years of hardship,” the man confided. “I don’t think there was anything about them worth remembering.” He had thrown himself into his studies, achieving considerable intellectual and financial success. Only once, when he was seventeen, did he return to his home town, for the summer; on the trip, he fell in love with a daughter of a family that he was staying with, a girl who wore a striking yellow dress. His most perplexing childhood memory, he told Freud, was of picking bright-yellow flowers in a meadow with his two cousins, a girl his age and a boy slightly older, while a farmer’s wife and a nursemaid watched them. “The little girl has the nicest bunch, but we two boys, as if by prior agreement, fall upon her and snatch her flowers from her. She runs up the meadow in tears, and the farmer’s wife consoles her by giving her a big slice of black bread.”

Yet this patient did not really exist. He was, Tallis writes, “Freud’s invented doppelganger,” an immigrant who had left his home only to learn how solitary, how grim the reality of growing up was in comparison with childhood. He wondered, What if he had never left his home town? What if he had married the girl he had fallen in love with that summer? Freud knew that all people ask questions like these, and that, upon asking them, life suddenly appears in split screen, with one side drenched in color and the other black-and-white, with long interludes in which nothing much seems to happen. Human beings, Freud wrote, “find reality unsatisfying quite generally, and for that reason entertain a life of phantasy in which we like to make up for the insufficiencies of reality.”

These unrealizable fantasies, which were too melancholy to confront, had to be “repressed,” or pushed out of consciousness. Yet “the repressed wishful impulse continues to exist in the unconscious,” he explained. At opportune moments, the impulse sent “into consciousness a disguised and unrecognizable substitute for what had been repressed.” The screen memory, a substitute, emerged “almost like a work of fiction.” It was constructed out of superimposed fantasies of sex and satiation—in this case, the deflowering, as it were, of the little girl, whose flowers were the same vivid yellow as the dress of Freud’s first love, and also the bread, a source of material comfort. The screen memory, associated with the wish to return home and find love waiting there, represented a “compromise” between knowledge and illusion. It was a bearable sign of an unbearable disappointment.

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“Screen Memories” belongs to the earliest period of Freud’s writings, along with “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900), “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” (1901), and “Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious” (1905). All of them concern a repressed wish’s substitutive forms—memories, dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes, which Freud wrote about with great charm. An enthusiastic popularizer of his ideas, he imagined his audience as anyone who had not managed to turn “his wishful phantasies into reality”—not titans of industry or artists but ordinary people who longed for more than what they had. The act of attending to their substitutions—of fantasizing—provided a daily experience of creativity, surprise, humor, and interpretive activity. One needed to have only the “courage and determination,” Freud urged, to heed the minor poetry of the unconscious.

“The idea of repression makes Freud’s interest in sex logical,” Tallis writes. The realization, in “Screen Memories,” that the figure of the demanding, sexually aggressive child persisted in the psyche of the self-possessed adult put Freud on the scent of his next major discovery, infantile sexuality. His 1905 book, “ Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality ,” described how the child passed through a predictable series of relations—with his mother, his father, and his own body—that guided his libido. Sometimes, however, the pathway of the libido was disturbed—by an ailing parent, a harassing sibling—thereby releasing a desire that had to be repressed. The substitute was not a gratifying aesthetic experience, like a screen memory or a joke, but a disruptive symptom, “expressed in disturbances of other, non-sexual, somatic functions.” In Freud’s patients, symptoms ranged from an aversion to food and drink to migraines, a persistent cough, momentary aphasia, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

Infantile sexuality lent the child’s life a generic shape and a sense of fatedness. In “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Freud had noted the prevalence in his neurotic patients of the “Oedipus dream”—having sex with one’s mother—which he understood as an intense and agitated expression of natural filial love. “The persons who are concerned with a child’s feeding, care, and protection become his earliest sexual objects: that is to say, in the first instance his mother,” Freud wrote. The father, a rival for the mother’s attention, presented an obstacle. Indulging his libidinal attachment to his mother, a boy behaved in discomfiting ways—watching his mother undress, sleeping in her bed, proposing marriage, and wishing his father were dead. “One may easily see that the little man would like to have the mother all to himself,” Freud wrote. This behavior may have seemed mild in comparison with incest and patricide, but Freud held that it was “essentially the same”—a difference of degree rather than of kind.

Crucial to Oedipus’ story is that he did not realize that Queen Jocasta was his mother. His was a tragedy of misrecognition, and his eventual self-blinding literalized his blindness to the nature of his desire. A similar blindness afflicted Freud’s patients, he observed, and nowhere more powerfully than in their relationships with “persons who can revive in them the picture of the mother and the father”—lovers, teachers, bosses, priests, and, of course, psychoanalysts. The patient would act out the same patterns that had structured his encounters with his parents, often without understanding what he was doing or why. This displacement of emotion, which Freud called “transference,” manifested as a “stormy demand for love or in a more moderate form.” Some people “understand how to sublimate the transference, how to modify it until it attains a kind of fitness for existence,” he wrote. Others, failing to identify the source of their longings, would never solve the riddle of their need and their hostility.

The Oedipus complex, with its touch of mythological grandeur, has obscured more radical claims about infantile sexuality—and, by extension, sexuality in general—that Freud made in his mid-period writings, especially his 1909 lectures at Clark University. Against the fantasy of the innocent, angelic child, Freud insisted on a baby as a rapacious pleasure-seeker, a thumb-sucking, ear-pulling, cheerfully masturbating creature lacking “shame, loathing, and morality.” (Tallis summarizes Freud, wonderfully: “A baby is a promiscuous voluptuary with irregular tastes.”) The baby was all instinctual need, attending to his own body with profound concentration, deigning to allow his mother to tickle and stroke and nurse him while he mewled with contentment. He would enter a latency period before the onset of puberty, when the behaviors he exhibited as a child would be checked by adults. But his narcissism and his Oedipal grief would remain forever submerged in his unconscious.

Freud’s theory of infantile sexuality allowed him to pursue a startling critique of “ ‘civilized’ sexual morality,” as he called it, in his 1908 essay of the same name. It was a critique that he prosecuted subtly, at first, with an ironic and counterintuitive definition of the sexual as anything “improper.” Impropriety encompassed any sexual activity that had “given up the aim of reproduction” to pursue “the attainment of pleasure”—a child sucking his mother’s breast for comfort, oral sex between married people, anal sex between men. Civilization, Freud argued, did not teach people to repress specific sexual activities per se. It taught them to repress the inutile pleasure of sex—and to understand as sexual, or “improper,” any experience of pleasure that exceeded the act of reproduction. “All these crazy, eccentric and horrible things really constitute the sexual activity of people,” Freud observed. Laying the irony on thick, he suggested that all his readers were in thrall to the uselessness of pleasure; that they had been educated into heterosexual object choice, marriage, and having children; and that this education entailed a lifetime of repressing one’s unruly libidinal instincts. People “do not show their sexuality freely,” Freud wrote. “To conceal it they wear a heavy overcoat woven of a tissue of lies, as though the weather were bad in the world of sexuality.”

Among Freud’s biographers, there is much prurient speculation about his own sexuality. How erotic was his early relationship with the otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fliess, who propounded an intimate connection between the nose and the genitals? Did Freud have an affair with his sister-in-law Minna, who was prettier and more attentive to his research than Martha? On such points, Tallis is levelheaded where others have been foolishly excitable, like naughty boys peeking through keyholes. “The truth of the matter is that we can never know what really happened,” he writes. Instead, he stresses what Freud repeatedly stressed: that psychoanalysis, in its encounters with so-called perversions, “has no concern whatever with such judgments of value.” Freud made this point with increasing vehemence in his later work: “The demand for a uniform sexual life for all . . . disregards all the disparities, innate and acquired, in the sexual constitution of human beings, thereby depriving fairly large numbers of sexual enjoyment and becoming a source of grave injustice.” Psychoanalysis erased the difference between “perverts” of all stripes—gays, lesbians, sadists, masochists, fetishists, exhibitionists—and faithfully married heterosexuals. For all of them, Freud held, the aim was the same: “Transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”

The scandal of infantile sexuality and the Oedipal plot have distracted many of Freud’s biographers from the final phase of his career, when he broadened his fierce and unsettling gaze from the history of the individual to the history of humankind. His postwar writings—“ Mourning and Melancholia ” (1917), “ Reflections on War and Death ” (1918), “ Beyond the Pleasure Principle ” (1920), “ Civilization and Its Discontents ” (1930), and “ Moses and Monotheism ” (1939)—attempted to comprehend a world besieged by war and illness. Man was ensnared in a “battle of the giants”: Eros versus Thanatos, the libido against what Freud named the death drive. The libido drew people together. The death drive tore them apart, repeatedly, across every epoch, and with a bleak determinacy that led Freud to conclude that “the aim of all life is death.”

A strong pessimism had marked Freud’s work from the beginning, but it had been tempered by his quiet appreciation of the poetry of the unconscious. Yet the consolations of fantasy could not withstand the First World War, which sent his sons to the front and bankrupted his practice, leaving his family in Vienna starving. In 1915, he drafted a short and hopelessly poignant essay, “Transience,” on why people mourn. “Mourning over the loss of something that we have loved or admired seems so natural to the layman that he takes it quite for granted,” he wrote. “But for the psychologist, mourning is a great mystery.” The libido bound itself to objects—a lover, a homeland, a profession—that it absorbed into the ego, incorporating them into one’s sense of self. The loss of these objects freed the libido to seek substitutes. Yet it also provoked a wrenching displeasure, which, Freud marvelled, “we have at present no hypothesis to explain.” Mourning, he observed, compelled people to create more ferocious attachments to whatever objects were still present to them. His primary example was the war, which “made our fatherland small again, and made the rest of the world remote.” In the face of war’s losses “the love of the fatherland, the affection for our neighbors and pride in what we have in common have been suddenly reinforced.”

The preoccupation with death in his writings of the twenties and thirties was hardly surprising. The streets of Vienna teemed with veterans suffering “war neuroses” and civilians suffering “the traumatic neuroses of peace,” he observed in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” While he was writing that book, his daughter Sophie, his best-beloved child, died of the Spanish flu, at the age of twenty-six. A terrible pathos hangs over “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” which is concerned with absences that can and cannot be mastered. At its center is a diptych of loss. On one side of it, Freud tells the story of Sophie’s older son, Ernst, who delighted in playing a repetitive and apparently pointless game. He would take a wooden spool attached to a piece of string and throw it into his crib, out of sight. Then he would pull it back, cooing “O-o-o-o,” and shout “Da!” when it reappeared. Freud speculates that the game, “ fort-da ” (“gone-there”), is evidence of the child learning to renounce his instinctual need for his mother. He “compensated himself” by “staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach,” learning to win pleasure from his mastery of loss. On the other side of the diptych are situations in which people repeated painful relations passively and unconsciously, such as “the man whose friendships all end in betrayal by his friends” or “the lover each of whose love affairs with a woman passes through the same phases.” They presented no thrill of novelty, no compensating pleasures. Instead, they modelled the “compulsion to repeat,” leading Freud to conjecture that the death drive is “a need to restore an earlier state of things”—an annihilatory instinct that exceeded sex drives and ego drives.

As the psychoanalyst Ilse Gubrich-Simitis discovered, Freud inserted the death drive into “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” after Sophie’s death; the concept is the impersonal marker of a profoundly personal loss. More losses followed. In 1923, Sophie’s younger son, Heinz, died of tuberculosis; the same year, doctors found cancer in Freud’s mouth. No wonder, then, that his next book, “Civilization and Its Discontents,” stands as his most anxious and disordered work. It can be difficult to determine its central theme, so frantically does Freud shift his topic and tone. He begins by expressing his skepticism about religion, but he also avows interest in a sense of “oneness with the universe”—an “oceanic feeling” corresponding to a “more intimate bond between the ego and the world around it.” Some individuals pursue this bond through prayer. Others seek it in love, which Freud seems to have hardened his heart against. “We never have so little protection against suffering as when we are in love,” he warns. The greatest testament to the human sense of “oneness” is civilization itself, man’s “mastery over space and time” in the form of shared aesthetic and political projects—beauty, order, religion, nationhood.

Yet civilization had not “increased the amount of pleasure” that men could “expect from life.” The telephone that allowed one to hear the voice of a child thousands of miles away would not be needed had the railways not allowed the child to move far away. The ideas that united people in shared projects would not be necessary if civilization had not sacrificed both desire and aggression on the false altar of human perfectibility. Civilization contained within its structures the urge to destroy them. Whoever recalls “the people known as the Mongols under Genghiz Kahn and Tamerlane, the conquest of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or indeed the horrors of the Great War, will be obliged to acknowledge this as a fact,” Freud wrote. Existence was the struggle between “the life drive and the drive for destruction.” It was impossible to know which would win.

In a letter to Albert Einstein, written in 1932, the year before the Nazis came to power, Freud expressed his hope that “everything that promotes the development of civilization also works against war.” Yet he feared that he belonged to a minority. “How long must we wait before the others become pacifists as well?” he wondered. Shortly after the Anschluss, in 1938, the Gestapo detained and interrogated Freud’s youngest child, Anna, then raided the Freuds’ home. The family fled to London, where Freud died a year later, delirious, inarticulate, and in agony from the cancer that had eaten away at his jaw. The end of his story makes it difficult to disagree with his dejected assessment of civilization. “The life imposed on us is too hard to bear,” he wrote. “It brings too much pain, too many disappointments, too many insoluble problems.”

But it would be wrong to end on such unremitting pessimism. No matter his private grief, Freud always allowed the analytic pendulum to swing in the opposite direction. The smallest but brightest entry among the Freud biographies is “Writing on the Wall,” a 1944 tribute by the modernist poet H.D., who was treated by Freud in the thirties. Dedicated to “Sigmund Freud, blameless physician,” its chapters flit between H.D.’s memories of her sessions with “the Professor” and memories of her father and mother, her stillborn child, and her flight to Greece under a gathering mist of madness. The poetic spirit that animates psychoanalysis—the subterranean glow of fiction, of fantasy, of useless pleasure—finds its apotheosis in H.D.’s free-associative style. She had evidently watched Freud listening just as carefully as he had listened to her speaking. He was “like a curator in a museum, surrounded by his priceless collection of Greek, Egyptian, and Chinese treasures,” she wrote. She found him withdrawn, “quiet, a little wistful.” When he grew annoyed with her, he beat his hand on the headpiece of his famous couch. Re-creating Freud as a mixture of myth and reality, H.D. offered the reader a singularly intimate account of the method of a man who claimed intimacy with everyone but seemed to offer it to no one.

“Writing on the Wall” was published several decades after it was written, in a volume called “ A Tribute to Freud ,” along with excerpts from H.D.’s diaries and the letters that Freud wrote to her during and after her analysis. Her side of the correspondence is not included, but in May, 1936, she seems to have sent him an especially affectionate letter, for his eightieth birthday. His response was brief but tender. “I had imagined I had become insensitive to praise and blame,” he wrote. “Life at my age is not easy, but spring is beautiful and so is love.” This idea would stay with H.D., and later became a form of psychic protection when air-raid sirens screamed across the London sky: “The Professor himself proclaimed the Herculean power of Eros and we know that it was written from the beginning that Love is stronger than Death.” ♦

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