poetry

POETRY

Poetry is one of the areas of study tested in examinations. Students of language encounter poetry very often, and in higher levels of study, poetry forms part of the core competencies one has to fulfill to get the coveted qualification in Literature.

Many students harbor some difficult-to-explain attitude towards this sumptuous subject. The ones I have interacted with see poetry as a difficult-t0-understand discipline, what with its hidden meanings and hard-to-explain words. The question is, is poetry as difficult as we would want to imagine?

Many poems come with titles. And the title will guide one on what the poem is all about. Some titles are, mathematically-speaking, directly proportional to the content of the poem. This is to say that, for example, if a poem’s title reads LOVE, then the content of the poem will be love. Some titles are inversely proportional to the content. The title would read LOVE but the content talks about hatred. It is imperative for one to read the title and understand what it talks about. Think of the images revealed through it.

Having read the title, go to the content. This is the poem itself. Read it and as you read, immerse yourself into it; enjoy yourself. As you read, identify the storyteller – persona in poetry. Identify, through their choice of words, their likes, dislikes, and how they talk about them. This will help you deal with four common areas tested in poetry: attitude, tone, style and diction. Style goes deeper. There are figures of speech – the images used to make the poem as vivid, as living, and as real as possible; sound devices that make the poem crunchy or screechy if you like; and poetic devices that are peculiar to poems.

A poem does not just come. It has a message its writer wants to tell the world. This message is the theme of the poem.

In case the poem has people in it, it will have an analysis of their character traits. These are easy to get: just look for what these people say about themselves, what they do, what other characters say about them and, lastly, what the author, the poet, says about them.

The last bit is the vocabulary. What do the words used in the poem mean? And how do they contribute to the meaning of the poem?

These guidelines will go a long way to help one appreciate the beauty of poetry. With poetry, there is one thing to remember: if you don’t see it, it is not there. Success!