How to "Get" a Poem

We’ve all had the experience of reading a poem and not quite “getting” it. Before the written word, poets used certain tools that facilitated memorization and live performance, and also directed the reader toward "getting it." Early set forms of poetry were pleasing to the ears and their appearance on a page delightful to see. Today poems are still performed, but “writing poetry” has become the norm, and the forms more fluid and free. Formal or free, poems have certain elements that have stood the test of millenniums and give poems their power and effectiveness. 

Just like certain rhythms make people want to get up and dance, rhythm in a poem can waltz or samba a reader through the poem.

Here are five of those elements to look for, and questions to ask, to enrich your reading of any poem.

I Rhythm and Meter

Just like certain rhythms make people want to get up and dance, rhythm in a poem can waltz or samba a reader through the poem. Rhythm in language is essentially how the accents in words are spaced out, and the pattern those stressed points in a line form. English has a natural rhythmic pattern, which changes over time and and among subcultures. 

Shakespeare wrote in “iambic pentameter,” with five stresses per line determined by iambs, which are “metrical foots,” consisting of one short syllable followed by a stressed one. In this case, the poet measures out the rhythm, and it becomes “meter,” better heard than described:

“di-DAH di-DAH di-DAH di-DAH di-DAH” 

Five stresses, next line, like a measure of music — with of course, many variations using more unstressed syllables, and other arrangements of the stress pattern. Iambic pentameter was said to follow the natural rhythm of speech, perhaps “discovered” when they began writing down the old poetic stories from the oral traditions.

Even free verse will often have a rhythm, or it may intentionally have no rhythm. Poems with no rhythm can be hard to read or understand, but even a prose poem will often make use of the rhythmic pattern of common speech and writing.

Questions to ask: 

Does this poem have a recognizable rhythm? What is it? Does it help you appreciate the poem? Or detract from it?

II Sound Patterns

Partners with Rhythm, Sound Patterns include rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, and any other kind of pattern a poet might create inadvertently or intentionally. 

In the oral traditions, from which modern poetry arose, rhyming helped with both remembering words, as well as memorizing the stories they told. Rhyming structure in a written poem most often follows “end rhyme,” which means the rhyming words appear at the end of a line forming a pattern. This kind of rhythmical rhyming can be pleasing to the ear. But there can also be internal rhymes, words that rhyme within the lines, which also determine how a poem sounds.

Even the simple 3-line structure of a haiku, whether following a strict syllabic count or a loose short-long-short structure, with the right amount of skill, can be astonishing. 

Alliteration makes use of repeating consonants, most easily understood by example — “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” The repetitive “p” sound, which repeats in different ways throughout the other three lines, creates a certain effect in the poem, maybe of exasperation or impatient perplexity. In this nursery rhyme as well as others, you can also hear the rhythm, not iambic, but a kind of doubled trimeter. Can you hear the rhythmic pattern line to line as well as the alliteration? Alliteration might also lead to imperfect rhyme, like the words “duct,”  “dipped” and “fact” could be considered subtle rhymes using clipped consonants.

More difficult to hear than alliteration, assonance is the existence of repeating vowel sounds. Once again, easier to hear.

The squeaky thief creeps with sleek feet.

Go slow over the old flow

Don’t pass at the last cat’s flat grab.

There’s an element of rhyming in these examples as well, because a perfect rhyme requires a degree of assonance. Assonance can be much more subtle and appear in the scope of the whole poem, using words that do not rhyme perfectly, or maybe not even at all. A perfect example can be seen with Nicole Sealy’s “And,” which is available to read here on the Poetry Foundation’s website.

Note the masterful repetition of the “a” sound in words like “withstand,” “scandalous,” and “commanding candlelight.” These are not really rhyming words at all, but have a similar effect to rhyme using repeating vowels.

Questions to ask: 

If a poem sounds pleasing to you, what sound patterns did the poet implement? To what effect on the reader?

III Structure

Line breaks, often said to distinguish poetry from prose, determine structure to a large extent. For many poets, to “see” a poem carefully structured inspires awe. Even the simple 3-line structure of a haiku, whether following a strict syllabic count or a loose short-long-short structure, with the right amount of skill, can be astonishing. 

With longer poems, a reader will find comfort in “breaks” in the form of stanzas, which give them a chance to breathe and assimilate the poem. The word “stanza” comes from the Italian “room,” or “stopping place.” Formal poems, like sonnets, are highly structured, depending on the type of sonnet. The common Shakespearian sonnet, for example, has three quatrains (4-line stanzas) followed by a rhyming couplet (2-line stanza), which often provides a kind of resolution to the three preceding quatrains.

Structure can also, like English haiku, incorporate a certain number of syllables per line. A quinzaine, for example, is a three line poem with a syllabical structure of 7-5-3, the first line being a statement, questioned by the concluding two lines.

Structuring a poem often involves the incorporation of sound patterns, most often rhyming. Again, as an example, the traditional Shakespearian sonnet requires an end rhyme scheme of 

ABAB CDCD EFEF GG

When a poet chooses to ignore a natural caesura, or pause, at the end of a line and instead continue a syntactical unit onto the next line, this is called enjambment. It’s both structural and also related to syntax, which I'll get to. Enjambment quickly brings the reader to the beginning of the next line to complete the line of thought. It speeds the poem up.

The many variations of syntax and diction (or word choice), possible in a poem can give the reader a sense of who the poet is.

Perhaps the most radical example of poem structuring can be found with “picture poems,” where the horizontal lines form a 2-dimensional image through line breaks. Or there is a clear diagrammatical structuring that plays with flush left and flush right margin settings, or other page manipulations made easier by writing on computers. The possibilities in this realm are endless. Excellent modern examples can be observed with poets like EE Cummings and CAConrad.

Questions to ask:

To what degree is the poem structured? If not in stanzas, are the lines of varying lengths? All long? All short? Mixed? How much does the poet use enjambment. How does the structure or lack of structure in the poem support its subject matter?

IV Syntax and Diction

Syntax is the arrangement of words in a particular order so that they create meaning for the reader. Syntax in poetry often inverts the normal or expected order of words in order to enhance some of its other elements, like sound, meter, or structure. This can often result in sentences that feel unnatural or forced, particularly with modern English. Without any knowledge of 17th century English syntax, people often find the work of Shakespeare and other English writers of his time difficult to comprehend. From Richard III:

"Now in the deep bosom of the ocean buried" 

This creates a kind of heightened language that emphasizes “deep” and then “buried” at the end of the line, and has a more rhythmic and deeply descriptive effect, as compared to the “normal” syntax:

Now buried in the deep bosom of the ocean.

But to most who practice conversational English, it can come across as awkward when out of context. Read the full Shakespeare speech from the Poetry Foundation here. 

The many variations of syntax and diction (or word choice), possible in a poem can give the reader a sense of who the poet is. These writing elements in cultures evolve over time. Generally, the older the writing, the more difficult for modern people to understand. Even within subcultures syntax and diction vary. A poem by an African American poet like Langston Hughes’ Mother to Son shows how diction can reveal character and mood in poetry, and perhaps speak more clearly to certain subsets within a culture. Here’s the end of that poem:

So boy, don’t you turn back.

Don’t you set down on the steps

’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.

Don’t you fall now—

For I’se still goin’, honey,

I’se still climbin’,

And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

Read the full poem at Poetry Foundation.

There are many examples of this, perhaps better suited to a modern context than this one, but the extreme-ness of Hughes’ break from standard word choice gets the point across.

Questions to ask:

Does the poem follow a common syntax? Are there inversions? Do the inversions help the poem flow better? Or simply make it seem archaic and unnecessarily poetic? What kinds of unexpected words has the poet used? And to what effect?

V Theme

Writing poetry challenges a poet to convey, through an economy of words, an insight about life, an image, or an experience. Thematic elements range from an ekphrastic approach (where the theme a response to a non-written creative work) to the narration of a story, common to some of the oldest poetic forms known. Poets can reveal a theme through repetition of words and lines, also called anaphora, or the use of symbols and imagery, or even through tone, such as in political poetry. When it comes to theme, the possibilities for a poem are endless, and arise, in the best circumstances, from the heart of the poet.

Questions to ask:

What does the poem seem to be trying to convey? Is it an image? An experience? A message? If there are larger encompassing metaphors, what do the metaphors stand for? And how do they reveal a thematic through-line better than a standard prose approach might?

Remember that when you have a hard time “getting” a poem, reading it aloud will help you understand it better, and reveal the emphasis or glaring absence of some of these elements.

To comprehend rhythm and sound in a poem, I highly recommend Robert Pinsky’s The Sounds of Poetry. For a full explanation of syntax, and how it works in tandem with many of these other elements, read Ellen Bryant Voigt’s The Art of Syntax.