I know we’ve all been in this situation. You read through a piece of poetry then sit dumbfounded trying to figure out what it is saying. Sometimes the message is obvious and sometimes it is not because a poem is based on its author’s thoughts and feelings. If you ask four people what they think a poem means, you may get four different answers and all of them may be correct in some way. The reasoning behind this is that every person has different experiences, knowledge, and other factors that they call upon to help them analyze a poem’s meaning.
The hardest part of analyzing a poem is determining a starting point. What do I consider first about the poem to determine its meaning? This process can be daunting to most people and can be especially so for students who have never done it or who are new to poetry in general. When faced with a group of fifth graders who had very little or no experience with poetry, I had to come up with a plan of how to get them started along the path of considering deeper meaning in what they were reading. So, I developed a guideline to follow that I hoped would help them find meaning in the poetry they read.
Sheet Provided to Students:
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Instructions: Chose a poem from the attached page. Once you have chosen your poem, please read it and analyze it using the following points for thinking. You must provide examples to back up your observations and feelings.
Title: Think about the title before reading the poem. What does it mean to you?
Paraphrase: Re-state what the poem is saying in your own words.
Meaning: What do you think the writer is trying to say? Why? Use examples from the poem.
Attitude: How do you think the author felt when writing this poem? How do you feel now that you have read the poem? Why? Use examples from the poem.
Title: Think about the title now that you have read the poem. Does the meaning change? How does the title fit with what the poem is about?
Connections: How do you feel about this poem? Was there anything that really meant something to you? Did you like the poem? Why or why not?
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The first thing I did for this lesson was model how to use the guidelines that I had provided by analyzing a poem with them. We talked through a poem together and came up with ideas together. Then, I separated the students into groups of six or less and had them think about a poem on their own. Instead of a poem, I decided to choose a song and play it for the class; because “yes songs can be poetry too”, I informed them. I then provided each student with a printout of the lyrics and asked them to work in their groups to figure out what they thought the song was saying using my guidelines. I stressed that my paper was only guidelines and if they could think of anything else to add that was perfectly fine. Once the small groups had worked through the process together, we came together as a large group and discussed what meanings they had found in the poem.
For homework, I provided the class with a listing of five different poems and asked them to think about the title of each one and write down their thoughts about the title. The students were then to read each poem and choose the one that they felt the best connection to and asked them to follow the process we had learned in class to help them find what they felt the poem was trying to say. Imagine my surprise when my students seemed excited about figuring out the poems as homework. This lesson ended up working out much better than I had expected. The resulting homework that the students turned in was wonderful and most of my students showed excellent understanding, referred back to specific passages in the poems, and also could provide me with their own personal connections to the message.
Poems I Used:
Demonstration In Class: “A Minor Bird” by Robert Frost
Group Assignment: “Just a Dream” by Nelly
Homework:
“Smart” by Shel Silverstein,
“In the Event of My Demise” by Tupac Shakur,
“My Pig Won’t Let Me Watch TV” by Kenn Nesbitt
“Weird Bird” by Shel Silverstein
“Things You Don’t Need to Know” by Kenn Nesbitt