PoeticTone

Tone involves the active interplay of speaker, subject (spoken about), and listener (spoken to). To analyze the tone of a poem, answer the following four questions and discuss their interrelationships:

1. Who is presented as speaking in this poem?
   • Is the narrator implicit or explicitly identified?
   • Is the narrator a participant or an observer?
   • Is the narrative voice explicitly or implicitly gendered, or ungendered/gender-neutral?
   • Is the narrative first-person or third-person? If first-person, is the poet speaking through a character in the poem or through a persona—a first-person speaker who seems to be the author but is actually a “mask” for the author, a personality created for the poem?
   • Is the narrator omniscient (narrator knows everything about all characters, events, etc.) or limited (narrator has a personal perspective and does not know everything)?
   • Is the narrator intrusive (narrator comments on and evaluates characters and actions; establishes what counts as facts and values in the narrative) or impersonal/objective (narrator “shows rather than tells”; does not explicitly comment on or evaluate the actions)?
2. To whom is the poem addressed? (Is the poem addressed to a specific person or a generalized audience? If the former, is this person a participant or an observer?)
3. About whom or what is the poem written? (What are the relationships between the subject matter of the poem and the speaker and addressee?)
4. How do the form and structure of the poem relate to its subject matter? (What is the relationship between the emotions expressed and the manner of their expression? Does the form of the poem mimic these emotions, or does it contradict, belie, or stand in tension with them? Is this subject matter typical or atypical for this genre of poetry?)