How to Write About Poetry

• 1. Who is the speaker? What kind of person is the speaker?

  a widow who was married for 35 years

• 2. Is there an identifiable audience for the speaker? What can we know about it (her, him, or them)?

  no identifiable audience

• 3. What is the occasion?

  the widow is recollecting her loss in the face of the beauty of spring

• 4. What is the setting in time (hour, season, century, and so on)?

  springtime

• 5. What is the setting place (indoors or out, city or country, land or sea, region, nation, hemisphere)?

  the widow’s yard

• 6. What is the central purpose of the poem?

  to express the grief felt by the widow as she recollects her loss

• 7. State the central idea or theme of the poem in a sentence.

  A person who has lost a love of long duration may find grief even in the promise of new life.

• 8. What is the tone of the poem? How is it achieved?

  grieving – the use of words like sorrow and grief and images like “cold fire / that closes round me,” “turned away forgetting,” and “sink into the marsh.”

• 9.

  • a. Outline the poem so as to show its structure and development, or

  • b. Summarize the events of the poem.

    The poem begins with a reflection on the yard and moves on to a contrast with the natural meadows, woods, and a marsh. It also moves from a private reflection to a reaction to information delivered by her son.

• 10. Paraphrase the poem.

  Looking at my lawn with its new grown grass reminds me of the thirty-five springs I shared with my husband. The grass is beautiful but the pain of loss is bitter. The trees are in bloom, but their beauty cannot ease the sense of loss I feel. Once I took great pleasure in them, but now I want to forget them. My son reported that he had seen trees in the fields near the woods that were heavy with white blossoms. I almost want to go there and drown in the marsh nearby.

• 11. Discuss the diction of the poem. Point out words that are particularly well chosen and explain why.

  In the dull imagery that follows line 5: the abstractly named colors (“white,” “yellow,” “red”), the indistinguishable “masses” (denoting quantity, connoting heaviness), even the flatly anonymous “some bushes” have little image-making vividness or specificity. They support the tone of the poem.

• 12. Discuss the imagery of the poem. What kinds of imagery are used? Is there a structure of imagery?

  The most striking imagery in the poem occurs in the first five lines, when the widow expresses her sorrow directly: “new grass / flames” combines (paradoxically) the color and freshness of springtime’s first growth with the visual impression of flickering and leaping upward, and the tactile pain of fire. “[T]he old fire / that closes round me” compacts the paradox into an oxymoron, combining two contradictory tactile sensations with the suffocating sensation of being closed in. After that point in the poem, the imagery is generalized and flat (in imitation of the widow’s lack of responsiveness to what had formerly given her excitement through its visual impressions)