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Analysing poetry: voice, imagery and form

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Poems pack meaning into few words. To write well about a Part 2 poem, look at who is speaking, the images, and how form and structure shape the meaning.

Key areas

Voice: who speaks? First person, a character, an observer?
Imagery: similes, metaphors, personification, symbols.
Sound: rhyme, rhythm, alliteration, repetition.
Form and structure: stanzas, line length, enjambment (a sentence running over a line break), caesura (a pause mid-line), and how the poem changes from start to end.

Practice poem

An original poem, written to practise the skills.

Example: Owen's 'Disabled'

In Wilfred Owen's 'Disabled', a young soldier who has lost his legs, and his arms below the elbow, in the First World War sits in a wheelchair waiting for dark. The poem contrasts his memories of life before the war, when he was admired, with his present loneliness and the pity of others. It ends with his question: 'Why don't they come?'
Notice the method: contrast between past and present carries the poem's anger about war.
Worked example

How does the structure of the practice poem develop the speaker's feelings?

  1. Stanza 1: the hands as a record of a life.
  2. Stanza 2: what the hands did, in a list of actions.
  3. Stanza 3: the present, the hands still; the speaker sees the same shape in their own hands.

Answer: It moves from the hands' past to their stillness now, ending with the speaker seeing their grandmother in their own hands, which turns grief into connection.

Key idea

Look at voice, imagery, sound, form and structure. Track how the poem changes from start to end, and explain how each choice shapes the meaning and the reader's response.

The interactive lesson includes the diagrams for this topic.

Check you have got it

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