2. Poetry I

Figurative Language (FIG): Beyond Identification

The AP Literature exam does not reward identifying a metaphor. It rewards explaining what a specific metaphor does — what it compares, what that comparison implies, and how it contributes to the poem's meaning. The analytical question is always: why this image, in this poem, for this effect?

• Metaphor: Direct identification of one thing as another. Creates a conceptual merger that forces the reader to understand one term through the other's associations.
• Simile: Comparison using "like" or "as." More transparent than metaphor — the comparison is explicitly flagged — but still produces meaning through the associations it imports.
• Personification: Attributing human qualities to non-human things. Creates emotional identification and can make abstract concepts feel immediate.
• Imagery: Language that appeals to the senses. The most foundational category — almost all effective poetry works through sensory concreteness. Analyzing imagery means identifying what sense is invoked, what the image evokes, and how it contributes to tone and meaning.

Structure (STR): Form as Meaning

In poetry, structural choices are not arbitrary — they carry meaning. Line breaks control rhythm and create emphasis; the end of a line receives natural stress. Stanza divisions mark shifts in argument, scene, or mood. Formal choices (fixed vs. free verse, regular vs. irregular meter) signal the poet's relationship to tradition and control.

Ask of any formal choice: what does this structure do to the reader's experience of the poem? A short, isolated line after a long stanza creates emphasis through contrast. An irregular rhyme scheme that occasionally resolves produces a sense of tension and release. Analyzing structure means connecting form to effect.

Narration (NAR): The Speaker in Poetry

The speaker of a poem is a constructed persona, not the poet. Even in apparently autobiographical lyric poetry, the speaker is a voice the poet creates — shaped by the poem's rhetoric and craft. The speaker has:

• A situation: where they are, what has happened, what prompts the poem
• An attitude (tone): how they feel about the subject
• An audience: who they are addressing (themselves, a specific person, a general reader, an absent person — apostrophe)

Identifying the speaker's situation before analyzing individual images helps organize close reading into a coherent interpretation rather than a list of observations.

Sound Devices

Sound devices in poetry create emphasis, musicality, and meaning through sonic pattern:

• Alliteration: Repetition of initial consonant sounds. Creates rhythm and draws attention to the alliterated words.
• Assonance: Repetition of vowel sounds within words. Creates a more subtle sonic texture than alliteration; long vowels tend to slow the reading pace, short vowels speed it.
• Consonance: Repetition of consonant sounds within or at the end of words. Creates tonal color — harsh consonants (k, t, p) vs. soft ones (m, n, l).

Sound analysis earns credit on the AP exam only when connected to meaning — "the hard consonants in 'crack' and 'black' create a harsh, percussive effect that reinforces the violence of the scene."

Common Errors in This Unit

• Poet/speaker conflation: Attributing the speaker's feelings directly to the poet without textual justification. "Keats feels sad" vs. "the speaker expresses a melancholy that the poem gradually complicates."
• Device naming without effect: "The author uses imagery" — identifying the device without explaining what the specific image evokes or how it contributes to meaning.
• Inverted syntax misreading: Misreading formal verse's inverted word order as grammatical error — this produces inaccurate paraphrase and interpretation.
• Sound as ornament: Treating sound devices as decorative rather than analyzing how sonic patterns reinforce or complicate the poem's meaning.