Comprehension of Poetry
ICSE Class 8 · English · Chapter 12
What this chapter covers
- Reading seen and unseen poems
- Theme, tone and mood
- Poetic devices
- Rhyme, rhythm and rhyme scheme
- Stanza forms
- Imagery
- Personal response and appreciation
- Answering questions on an unseen poem
Key points
- Read every poem at least twice: once for the general sense, once slowly by sentence rather than by line.
- The speaker is the voice in the poem and is not always the poet.
- Literal questions are answered from the words; inferential questions are answered from clues, which you must name.
- The theme is the central idea about life, stated as a full sentence.
- Tone is the speaker's attitude; mood is the atmosphere felt by the reader.
- For any poetic device, name it, quote it and explain its effect.
- A rhyme scheme is shown with letters, such as abab or aabb; rhyme depends on sound, not spelling.
- Rhythm is the beat of stressed and unstressed syllables; describe it and link it to meaning.
- Couplets have two lines, tercets three, quatrains four; free verse has no fixed rhyme or metre.
- Limericks rhyme aabba; haiku follow five, seven and five syllables; cinquains follow two, four, six, eight and two.
- Imagery appeals to the five senses and carries the poem's mood.
- A turn, often signalled by "but" or "yet", marks a change in the poem's direction.
- A personal response may disagree with the poem, as long as it gives reasons from the text.
Questions answered
What is the difference between a seen poem and an unseen poem?
A seen poem has already been studied in class. An unseen poem is new to the reader and must be understood during the test itself.
How is the theme of a poem different from its subject?
The subject is what the poem is about on the surface, such as rain. The theme is the idea or message the poem expresses about that subject, such as "rain brings both joy and hardship".
Explain the difference between tone and mood.
Tone is the speaker's attitude towards the subject, shown through word choice. Mood is the feeling or atmosphere the poem creates in the reader.
Work out the rhyme scheme: "The dog lies in the shade, / The sun is fierce and high; / The ice cream man has strayed, / And all the drains are dry."
shade/strayed (a), high/dry (b), so the rhyme scheme is abab.
Name the device in "The wind whistled through the window" and state its effect.
Alliteration of the "w" sound in "wind whistled... window" suggests the soft, steady blowing of the wind. "Whistled" is also onomatopoeia, because the word imitates the sound the wind makes, so naming either device, with its effect, is correct.
What is a quatrain, and what is a couplet?
A quatrain is a stanza of four lines. A couplet is a pair of lines, usually rhyming, that expresses one complete thought.
State the syllable pattern of a haiku and the rhyme scheme of a limerick.
A haiku has three lines of five, seven and five syllables. A limerick has the rhyme scheme aabba.
What kind of imagery is used in "the smell of wet earth after the first rain"? What feeling might it create?
Olfactory imagery, appealing to smell. It may create a fresh, joyful or relieved feeling, because the first rain ends the summer heat.