How to Analyze a Poem: Themes, Figures of Speech

It's not easy to analyze a poem. After all, a poem is not a neatly constructed five-paragraph essay with a thesis statement at the beginning to tell you what it's all about. Poems usually do have themes, but they also try to create an emotional effect and make an association between things and ideas not often joined. Sometimes students faced with an assignment or test that requires analyzing a poem feel lost: what to make of all the words, images, patterns whirling around in the text?
There are some approaches that will help. Even though a poem does not usually tell you directly what it means ­ otherwise it would be prose ­ the poet leaves you a trail of clues, crumbs from the same thematic cookie. Here are some specific things you can try to collect those crumbs and find the trail.

1. The Title:
Don't ignore it. Poets don't always choose a title that states their theme, but they often do. It may help you find the theme of the poem, or at least identify the key image representing the theme. Of course, if the title is something like "Sonnet XVIII", you'll have to dig a little deeper. But if the title does see to be telling you something, it never hurts to relate that meaning to the rest of the poem. What parts of the poem seem to echo, expand on or "explain" the title?

2. Figures of Speech:
Poems can draw on a whole lexicon of figures of speech ­ ways to use language imaginatively, much as paintings use lines and colours creatively. But the most common figures of speech are the metaphor, its close cousin the simile, and the symbol. Focusing your attention on these can help you find patterns and meaning in the poem. Before we look at how to do this, let's define these terms.
A) Metaphor
A metaphor is a comparison or connection between two things not usually put together. It does not use "like" or "as to make the connection. We use metaphor all the time in everyday speech when we repeat sayings like "he really gets my goat" or "a stone's throw away". A metaphor can be fairly obvious or conventional: an old Rolling Stones song has the chorus "she's a rainbow" which evidently means that "she", like a real rainbow, is beautiful, colourful, rare. Or it can be more difficult or even surreal.
Suppose a poem begins "My friend is a refrigerator." It's possible the poet has a close emotional relationship with a kitchen appliance, but more likely that the poem will explore the character of the friend. To make meaning out of this metaphor, think of what a refrigerator is like. It might help you to brainstorm words and feelings connected with "a refrigerator." It's usually big, with a somewhat blank or bland exterior (which most people dress up with magnets, posters, etc.). Inside, though, there are good things to eat and drink; and there are different levels of heat: the freezer, the main compartment, the butter keeper, and so on. Sometimes people hide jewels or money (diamonds inside ice cubes, for example), assuming that burglars would never look there. They do.
So the poet might be saying through this metaphor something like ­ my friend does look all that interesting or unusual on the outside, but "open him up" and inside you'll find some things to savour, and a much more complex person than you might have guessed.
So, although this metaphor might seem more surreal or disconnected, it actually does hold some meaning. Some poets toss of metaphors almost at random, for the sheer fun of it ("you're a taboo tuba, a tub of Tab...") but few teachers would assign such a poem to students for analysis. It would be like trying to track ants through a sugar refinery.
B) Similes
The simile is also a comparison between things not usually connected, but it uses for glue the little words "like" or "as". You can explore similes the same way suggested above for metaphors: look for the qualities and associations of the second half of the simile, what the more familiar thing, person, emotion, etc. is being compared to. Finding what's common between the two parts of the simile may be easy, as in the Robert Burns line "My love is like a red, red rose," or more challenging. In the short poem "Dream Deferred," Langston Hughes asks: What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
Here he's saying "a dream deferred" might dry up like a raisin in the sun. The comparisons here are more complex, because we have a kind of before-and-after state for the subject "dream" and the thing is it compared to. A new dream is fresh, full of emotions like a shiny grape is plump with sweet juice; but a dream deferred (or put off until later) becomes old, wrinkled, discoloured.. Of course, being a good poet, Hughes took only three short lines to express what takes a full paragraph of prose to explain.
C) Symbols
a symbol is an object or pattern referred to several times throughout a poem. It may even be in the title. Obviously, the poet intends the symbol to stand for more than just its usual meaning as a tree, stone, drop of water, gun, etc. Many things in our world come , you might, say pre-loaded with symbolic weight because they have so often been used to convey certain meanings in the past. Burns wasn't the only one to use a rose as a symbol of romant ic love or a woman's beauty: Dante did the same thing in his epic poem "The Inferno", and so do the florists who stock their shevles with roses every Valentine's Day. Many birds, flowers, trees, gems, etc. are conventional symbols or emotions or other things: the robin symbolizes spring, the willow (especially the weeping willow) sadness, gold stands for wealth and endurance (gold doesn't rust or tarnish).
In Edgar Allen Poe's classic poem "The Raven," it's pretty obvious the raven doesn't symbolize good news or happy times, given that the writer "fears" it, and all the raven will say is "Nevermore!" But you could also note the fact that ravens and crows (in part because they're attracted to dead animals or people), are traditionally connected to omens of bad news or death. In Shakespeare's play Macbeth, for example, ravens are ill omens.
Now let's try the techniques on a short poems often fou nd in anthologies. It is William Blake's "A Poison Tree." A Poison Tree


I was angry with my friend.
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe.
I told it not, my wrath did grow.

And I water'd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles

And it grew both day and night
Till it bore a an apple bright.
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine.

And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.


Suppose you had to analyze this poem. What is it saying? And how do metaphors, similes and symbols support or help make that meaning?
We won't try a technical analysis of this poem, although that would be easy to do, given its four-line stanzas (quatrains) and regular rhyme scheme. First, there are no similes. This poem works with metaphors and symbols. The opening stanza is very simple and straightforward. It tells us that the speaker or narrator of the poem was angry twice ­ once with a friend and once with an enemy. With the friend, he shared his feelings ("I told my wrath") and that solved the problem and ended his anger. But with the enemy (or "foe,") he tried a different tactic: "I told it not, my wrath did grow."
In the second stanza, this process of hiding his anger and letting it grow becomes a series of metaphors connected with the idea that the anger becomes a "poison tree," Like a real tree, needs sun (smiles) and water (tears) and so on. The fact that this is, however, a symbolic tree, is made obvious by statements like "it grew both day and night."
A way to make all this obvious is to take notes as you read the poem and organize them under headings: put all the metaphors that relate to the tree under a heading: Tree of Wrath. Now look at what they suggest. Is it something negative or positive? Beautiful or frightening? The words connect with lying and trickery (deceitful wiles) and negative feelings like wrath and sorrow.
Eventually, the tree produces an apple. Now our tree symbol joins a long tradition, because Blake knew the Bible well, and Eve is supposed to have plucked an apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and given it to Adam. This caused their expulsion from Paradise, making that tree a kind of "poson tree" too. If you're wondering what other meanings a symbol has had in culture, look up in a dictionary of symbols or on the Internet.
So we know from this famous "first apple tree" that apples can be dangerous, even a kind of weapon. Remember the wicked witch/queen who gives Snow White a poisoned apple, putting her into a coma? And that's what happens here. Drawn by the beautiful fruit, the enemy steals and eats the apple, and then lies "outstretched beneath the tree."
So, if we add up all these tree and fruit metaphors and symbols, the poem can be interpreted to be echoing the saying "revenge is a dish best served cold." By taking his time, plotting and scheming and pouring all his fears and tears into the tree, the poem's narrator gets back at his enemy more effectively than he could have in a direct, face-to-face confrontation. And the fact that he is capable of taking this revenge shows that he, too, is in a way a "poison tree," or has eaten from one. Christians are supposed to love their enemy and turn the other cheek, but the speaker of this poem has more in common with the Borgias, who used to poison their enemies during elaborate banquets, or Montresor, the protagonist of Poe's story "The Cask of Amontillado," whose ingenious scheme condemns his former friend, Fortunato, to a horrible death.
In other words, a thorough analysis of this poem would show that its theme is human evil-through-revenge ­ of the narrator, who took such a secret and effective revenge on his enemy.