Write About Poetry

Getting to the Heart of a Poem

Steven Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000529098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How do we read poetry, compare poems, or generate observations into a thoughtful response? Write About Poetry is an invaluable reference book and skills guide for students of poetry. Featuring model essays, a glossary of technical terms, and additional practice for student engagement, this volume provides students with a clear and concise guide to:

• reading unseen poems with confidence

• developing general observations into formal, structured written responses

• fostering familiarity with some of the great poets and poems in literary history

Drawing on years of teaching experience, Steven Jackson delivers the background, progressive methodology, and practical essay writing techniques essential for understanding the fundamental steps of poetry analysis.

1 Who Is Involved?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003207511-2

Take for example, the following poem, ‘The Voice’, by Thomas Hardy (1840–1920), which was written in 1912:

The Voice

by Thomas Hardy

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

5 Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness

10 Travelling across the wet mead to me here,

You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,

Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,

Leaves around me falling,

15 Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,

And the woman calling.

After this first reading, we want to try to understand three things better: Who is the speaker? Who else is involved in the poem? What is the situation of the poem?

The first important words to annotate (to highlight and make note of) are pronouns. Personal pronouns are words like ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’, ‘him’, ‘her’, ‘we’, ‘us’ ‘you’ (in the plural sense), ‘they’, and ‘them’. These are a good starting point, but we can also consider other possessive pronouns like ‘my’, ‘your’, ‘his’, ‘her’, ‘its’, ‘our’, ‘your’ (in the plural sense), and ‘their’. There are many other types of pronouns – but the ones listed will form a good starting point.

Our detective work takes place in the early stages of the poem, typically the first verses (more commonly stanzas). We should read carefully the opening parts of the poem and try to piece bits of information together. So, let’s begin. Where are the first pronouns?

Let’s look at the first stanza:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me,

But as at first, when our day was fair.

In the opening line of Hardy’s poem, the notable pronouns are the personal pronouns ‘you’ and ‘me’. The ‘me’ pronoun indicates that the poem is written in the first-person perspective. When we evaluate the opening stanza in full and consider the other pronouns or figures involved, we see the pronoun ‘you’ is used again, twice in fact, on line 2. Reading on we find that ‘me’ is used again on line 3, but more importantly find that the pronoun ‘you’ is also used once more. With this series of ‘me’ and ‘you’ pronoun combinations we get a sense of a direct address, or a feeling that the speaker is talking to another person (technically termed ‘the addressee’) specifically.

By making logical connections in the poem we understand that the ‘you’ pronoun actually refers to one person specifically: the anonymous ‘Woman much missed’ who is addressed at the very start, in line 1:

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me

Therefore, we can imagine the speaker addressing his words to this one woman in, what some might deem, an intimate or private way. The words of the poem, after all, are ones which appear to be shared between the two figures alone. We get a sense of this intimacy if we look at the next notable pronoun in the poem ‘our’ – a plural possessive pronoun – which suggests that the two figures once shared a time together in their past in the phrase: ‘when our day was fair’ (line 4).

Still focusing on the first stanza of the poem, more important detective work can be done. We could argue that there is another pronoun present here, or a very revealing reference to another figure, at least. For example, on first reading, did you consider ‘the one’ as a type of pronoun? Well, yes, it is in a way – here it operates as a singular noun in the same way ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘it’ can be used.

Let’s look at line 3 carefully (the line in which ‘the one’ occurs) for a moment then:

When you had changed from the one who was all to me

Here, the woman much missed (the ‘you’ of the poem) is also ‘the one’ – more importantly, she is ‘the one’ who has ‘changed’; ‘the one’ who ‘was all’ to the speaker once before.

We might find now that the poem is already becoming more clear and that what we have, ultimately, is a scene between two central figures in the poem: the speaker and the addressee. We can then specify further and make the assertion that the speaker is a man who addresses a woman with whom he once shared a relationship – a woman whom he admits he misses. The speaker might become, then, in our minds, a melancholic or sad figure, while the addressee, in turn, becomes an absent figure in the poem.

If we continue on in this way and begin to highlight the pronouns in the second stanza, they typically arrive as a series of pairs in the fashion of the first stanza:

5 Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,

Standing as when I drew near to the town

Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,

Even to the original air-blue gown!

Here, we find further combinations of ‘me’ and ‘you’ (on line 5); ‘me’ and ‘you’ (at the beginning of line 7) and ‘I’ and ‘you’ (at the end of line 7). It is becoming clear that Hardy is building the poem around the relationship between these two figures.

With this groundwork completed, we can then focus on trying to understand the situation of the poem more precisely. It is clear that two figures are involved in the poem (the speaker and the woman) but now we need to examine this relationship specifically by reviewing the situation of the poem throughout. It is important to note that the situation of a given poem is not always entirely fixed throughout – the scene, the moment, or the action can potentially change at any stage. Therefore, further careful reading is needed.

For example, at the start of Hardy’s poem, the speaker states ‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me’ and so we might imagine her voice calling to him right from the beginning – we do not hear her exact words, but it is implied in the second line that she is communicating to him directly.

We can then start to comment confidently on some quite difficult passages of the poem, and pay particular attention to how the situation of the poem might change. Like, for example, the question which arrives in the opening of stanza 2: ‘Can it be you that I hear?’ (line 6). This is perhaps the first potentially confusing line of the poem, but, because we have some understanding of the speaker as a man who has experienced a difficult relationship and a lost love, we can start to contemplate now, as readers, why the speaker asks such a thing and we can question whether the speaker has even heard the woman’s voice at all – we may even begin to think he is, in fact, imagining it.

The situation of the poem is therefore drastically changing. We are trying to discover now whether the speaker is in the woman’s company at the start of the poem, or whether he is, more probably, alone. Let’s keep digging to find out.

As we enter the third stanza, it appears that Hardy changes the situation of the poem further to clarify the scene. For the first time, he gives ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Who Is Involved?
• 2 What Is the Situation?
• 3 What Is the Central Theme?
• 4 Practical Criticism and the 5-Part Essay
• 5 Three Essays
• 6 Answering an Essay Question
• 7 Comparing Poems
• 8 Exploring a Group of Poems
• Afterword
• Biographies of the Featured Poets
• Glossary of Key Terms
• Index