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Do you have any tips for analyzing poems? Sometimes I get confused by certain poems until someone explains them, then it really doesn't seem that confusing at all, but I'd like to know how to analyze them by myself. You are a beautiful writer, by the way. :)

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I am not very good at this, but maybe I could give you some sort of outline for analysis.

A few basic things you could start with are figuring out who is speaking, to whom they are speaking, what the poem is about (in general) and what kind of tone the writer has set. Then you can go on to more specific details/questions:

1. Check the poem’s visual details: Is it in a certain shape? Are there any unique forms of punctuation or line breaks? Does the number of lines indicate it is a certain form of poem, such as a haiku?

2. Look for lyric devices. Is there rhyming within each sentence (internal rhyme) or sight rhyme (when words look alike, such as “said” and “paid” but are pronounced differently). Is there repetition of words or phrases?

3. Look for figurative language: metaphors, similes, hyperboles, etc. Try to break them down and understand their meaning.

4. What is the theme of the poem?

5. Look for rhetorical devices such as alliteration (the repetition of the beginning sound of a word) or assonance (the repetition of a similar set of vowel sounds).

Those are a few specific ways of analyzing a poem, but of course there are many more. If you don’t understand the poem at first, just read it sentence by sentence. Break it down into manageable chunks. Don’t go line by line; this will only make it more confusing. Just go sentence by sentence. I hope that cleared some things up for you. :)


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