Teachers Help Middle School Students Analyze Poetry

Middle school students often shy away from reading poetry. They feel poetry is either inaccessible or unrelated to their lives. Teachers can help elicit enthusiasm for poetry reading by providing students with guidelines and familiar questions which can be applied to any poem. The heart of an effective lesson that helps students connect with poetry consists of the good questions teachers ask. Here’s how to analyze poetry using ten specific questions that can apply to any poem.
Create Collaborative Groups to Study Poetry
In order to form collaborative groups, teachers can provide students with a limited list of poems and ask students to select one poem that piques their interest. Once each student has selected a poem, the teacher can arrange students in pairs or groups according to the poem they selected. Students can first practice reading the poem aloud, and then move on to analyzing it by asking questions to one another.
Students will answer specific questions to assist them in better understanding the poem. Once each group has answered these questions, students should prepare a brief presentation when they will read the poem and share their answers to the class. Here is a list of questions used to analyze poetry. Teachers can limit questions to five per group or encourage students to try to answer them all.
Questions to Analyze Poetry
Teachers may want to review key literary terms before distributing the following list of analysis questions.
Who is the speaker? Students must realize that the poet often creates a narrator to communicate the poem. One should not assume that the speaker is the poet.
What is the author’s attitude towards the topic? This explains how the author feels about the subject.
What is the author’s overall tone? The tone of a poem must be inspiring, depressing, intriguing–or any feeling in between.
How does the author’s attitude contribute to the mood? While the attitude of the poem relates to the poet, the mood describes how readers feel when interacting with the poem.
What is the main idea? This statement might be a summary of the poem.
What is the primary theme? Theme describes the central message of the poem.
What are some examples of specific imagery that contribute to the theme? Images are created with descriptive language.
What are some difficult vocabulary words? Students should be encouraged to try to determine the meaning of difficult words by using context clues provided in the poem.
How does the diction affect the overall tone? Students may need to be reminded that diction refers to the poet’s word choice.
Which line(s) serve as the heart of the poem? This line can be considered the essential quote which communicates the main idea, or primary theme, of a poem.
A primary goal in this lesson is for students to realize that a pattern emerges when students analyze poetry systematically. All poems, for instance, have a narrator, a specific tone, and a theme that is communicated to readers. Teachers should ensure that all students understand the meaning of these terms before students apply them to poetry. It is also very important for teachers to allow sufficient wait time for this activity. Students need time to process the question, conjure up a response, and determine how to articulate their answer within a group of peers. With sufficient time and practice, students will successfully analyze a variety of poetry.

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