The Role Of Tone In Poetry

Poetry can elicit various emotions from the reader, and not everyone will find the same meanings to the poems. For example The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, The Sky is low, The Clouds are Mean by Emily Dickinson, and Harlem Night Song by Langston Hughes all have different themes. Of the three my favorite is The Road Not Taken because it offers its audience a chance to make life choices.

The topic that chosen was to compare the way a short story treats death with the way a poem reveals death. The short story chosen was “The Story of an hour” by Kate Chopin and the poem chosen was “Ballad of Birmingham” by Dudley Randall. They each have their own way of expressing the nature of death.

Have you ever felt like you were born to do something? Since I was born I felt like I was born to play baseball, but after that I would love to be a broadcaster. That is why I have chosen to analyze “The Broadcaster’s Poem” by Alden Nowlan. Analyzing a poem is not an easy thing to accomplish for me. As I very rarely analyze anything I read, but you should try everything once.

Lorna Dee Cervantes' poem, “Poema para los Californios Muertos” (“Poem for the Dead Californios”), is a commentary on what happened to the original inhabitants of California when California was still Mexico, and an address to the speaker's dead ancestors. Utilizing a unique dynamic, consistently alternating between Spanish and English, Cervantes accurately represents the fear, hatred, and humility experienced by the “Californios” through rhythm, arrangement, tone, and most importantly, through use of language.

Throughout the poem, Frost uses a combination of tones to compose his points across.Going back to the first stanza, the traveler is very alert and contemplates on which crossroads to take. The persona feels unfortunate and sorry that he is not able to take both alleys; "Sorry I could not travel both". This line also reveals how in life, sometimes you can’t have everything and have to eliminate the negative things as possible.In the third stanza, the tone shift and the traveler change his mind and feels confident. The exclamation mark (!) in line 13 shows that he is certain with his decision by telling the readers that he'll doubt if he should ever come back. Frost’s tone helps readers understand the true meaning of the poem.

Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. Good morning Ms Linton and students, today I will be informing you on why you must choose these two poems for the poetry speaking contest. The poems I have chosen are ‘The Man from Ironbark’, by Banjo Patterson as well as ‘He Started the Cycling Craze’ by myself. Narratives help the readers enjoy and understand poetry as it is a way the poets can connect to their readers by using storylines that may relate to them or something that they enjoy.

The two poems I chose to analyze were “Curandera” by Pat Mora and “Loose Woman” by Sandra Cisneros. They were an interesting read and made sure to reread several times to make sure I got everything I could from them. Both poems are so unique from other poems I have read; they are also unique from each other yet share similarities as well.

In “One Art,” the tools of tone, tension, and repetition are used to portray the idea that significant

The power of the poet is not only to convey an everyday scene into a literary portrait of words, but also to interweave this scene into an underlying theme. The only tool the poet has to wield is the word. Through a careful placement and selection of words, the poet can hopefully make his point clear, but not blatantly obvious. Common themes of poems are life, death, or the conflicting forces thereto. This theme could never possibly be overused because of the endless and limitless ways of portraying life or death through the use of different words.

To narrow the assigned topic and to also pick a poem to write about, I first decided to search what interested me, for example, I started off with poems about music or poems written by musicians, then when I decided there were too many to choose from, I looked at cute love poems, but then I felt that was too childish for me. Somehow during the long and treacherous poem search, I came across Sherman Alexie hoping he had a poem about the movie Smoke Signals. I did not find one about the movie, but I did find something that had hit home with me, “The Powwow at the End of the World.” After reading the poem several times, I figured that I did not need to do much brainstorming for the essay because the poem was easy to understand and the key aspects of the poem was literally the whole poem. Furthermore, I felt like I did enough brainstorming due to the fact that the poem was simple and that the reasons why I would save the poem were at the tip of my tongue.

Many of the poems, I selected in the anthology reminded me of approaching death and the time fading. Seeing these different perspectives in other people helped me realize the different insight and angles at which poems can be understood.

The tone is used in the poem as well to prove the sea is remorseless and cruel. In addition it states, “She choked him and beat him to death for a joke”(L 15-16) The sea does not show mercy and beats the child to death for a “joke”. The sea begins to drown the child for a lesson, and opens up to be unpredictable ferocious. Furthermore another piece of evidence that shows that the ocean is dangerous is, “She shouted for joy, with one hand she strangled the strong little boy”(L 18-20) The sea finally holds captive of the boy and begins to drown him roughly. The boy’s fate with death is now upon him and he can not fight it, the sea is just too powerful.

In this portfolio you will gather your best poetry to create a portfolio. You will submit this along with a poetry analysis for instructor review.

Several poems in the anthology explore the intensity of human emotion. Explore this theme, referring to these three poems in detail and by referencing at least three other poems from your wider reading.’

Poetry allows the writer, the reader and even those listening to get a deeper sense of being. It gives us the opportunity to break free from simple and boring routine. If done correctly a poem will done correctly a poem will be able to stir emotion, and create wonder. In order to this however all the part that make up a poem must be in sync. Its tone, diction, imaginary, rhythm, symbolism and subject matter are all critical areas. A good poem will draw an emotional reaction from its audience, whether those are light and upbeat or darker more serious feelings they will come away with a new experience, changed by what they just experienced. Two such poems that embody what a good poem should be are “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath and “Harlem”, also published as “Dream Deferred” by Langston Hughes. These poems elevate the experience for reading, listening and writing poetry, and serve as an excellent reference for a poem should be.