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A poem may be read for meaning, mood, entertainment, or appreciation of the author's technical skill.
Poems may be read silently to oneself, or may be read aloud solo or to other people. Although reading aloud to oneself may raise eyebrows in many circles, this restriction is waived in the case of poetry.
Some poems lend themselves most readily to appreciation through reading aloud, such as "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This poem tells a stirring patriotic myth of American opposition to British military and political domination. The engaging tale and regular poetic meter, as well as relative lack of subtler content or form, mean that its virtues are most apparent when the work is spoken or read.
Poems can have many forms. Some are highly defined, with required line counts and rhyming patterns, such as the sonnet or limerick. Poems can have less structure or indeed almost no apparent structure at all, perhaps little of that normally apparent in ordinary prose language, such as grammar. Alexander Pope gives a well-known example of how in the best poetry, "The sound should be an echo to the sense..."
English language poetic meter depends on vocal stress, rather than the number of syllables. It thus stands in contrast to poetry in other languages, such as French, where syllabic stress is not present or recognized and syllable count is paramount.
Analyzing Poetry
Poetry has long been an alternative to prose that authors have used to express their feelings. Allegory, connotation, metaphor, diction, syntax, onomatopoeia, rhyme scheme, tone, and myriad other factors may be used by the poet to form a statement of purpose and belief. All of these factors, as well as the symbolic meaning of their arrangements and appearance in a poem, should be considered when analyzing the poem.
A simple place to start is with the poet's diction. The use of specific words in the poem serve to depict a tone—an attitude taken towards the subject. For example, consider the words "slither" and "sneak." When used in a poem, the words conjure up images of a snake. The sibilant s sound reinforces the image. The denotations of the words relate the image of something surreptitious and undercover. A tone can be inferred that the author is suspicious or fearful of the subject.
Analyzing diction and connotation—the words' meaning and the feeling they carry—is a good place to start for any poem. Some poems lack a regular rhyme scheme and structure, inviting an analyses of other elements. A pattern in line indents may represent a number of things metaphorically (jumping, circling, falling). Authors may isolate a single line or a heroic couplet to give extra emphasis. Poets, like E. E. Cummings, experimented with punctuation and the words' layout on a page as well. Allegory and metaphor are often used in a poem to give an alternate point of view or perspective on a topic. A detached tone, or an opposite tone than the reader would expect, are sometimes purposely employed to elicit more of a response. Poetry is a complex art form and offers many options for analysis.
External link
An extensive, poetic, introduction of how to read a poem can be found in a book of the same name (How to Read a Poem - and fall in love with poetry) by Edward Hirsch, a biography of whom is found at:
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C070001
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