Find a poem from www.poets.org or poetryfoundation.org that you like Read it. What is the central metaphor? Consider its sound, rhythm, voice, form/shape, imagery, symbolism. Which elements are most provocative? What is the meaning of the poem? Analyze it, examining the text carefully for various levels of meaning. Read it aloud again and again, on different days.
For your paper, free-write four to five pages that interpret the poem you have selected, then edit your analysis down to about one and half pages of interpretation of the poem. Allow yourself to dig into the poem, to write about it without stopping for about forty minutes. Generate ideas that are connected to the language in the poem. Identify the central metaphor of the poem, and determine how the metaphor or symbol fits in to the poems focus. In your free-write, use the first person if it helps you think more about the poem. Then, edit, removing the Is so that your paper is more objective in tone. Collect your pages, type them and edit out redundancies; combine sentences; remove excess verbiage. You should end up with a page and a half, approximately, of polished work, i.e., of sentences that are substantial, succinct, and well-crafted.
The paper should contain no biographical information regarding the poet; it should center on the theme of the poem itself. Th
e paper should contain quotations that come directly from the poem, but the amount of quotations should not exceed thirty words (or 5% of the paper).
Every paper that you write for this course asks that you analyze some form (poetry, fiction, drama) of literature. Your papers should meet these nine standards:
Identify the author and title within the first three sentences.
State and develop your theme in the introductory paragraph. The theme is that Esteban changes the village is a simplification. Avoid using the phrase The theme is
.; instead, be specific, as in Esteban changes the village by delighting the villagers imaginations, etc
.
Write in the present tense.
Avoid I and you.
Use quotations around titles of short stories and poems; italicize longer works.
Make sure the selections from the text that you use to illustrate your interpretation are in quotation marks.
Keep the quotations to a minimum; quote only what you need. and paraphrase the rest (avoid using quotations as filler). Do not quote in the introduction.
Introduce quotes; incorporate them into your sentence (avoid dropped or hanging quotations).
Provide a contextual summary (introduce characters relevant to your thematic analysis) that relates to theme in the introduction.
Have a thesis statement that, in a nutshell, argues your interpretation of the story.