PO2 - Lesson: Word Choice and Imagery

New York City skyline at dawn.Word Choice and Imagery

Analyzing a poem can be a daunting task, especially when figuring out where to begin. Once you've determined whether the poem follows a closed or open form, a sensible starting point is delving into how individual words and imagery impact the poem's overall meaning. In this lesson, we'll explore a straightforward strategy and writing template to facilitate the analysis of word choice and imagery, understanding their role in shaping the poem's meaning.

Image note: a photograph by Alessandro Colle of the New York City, NY skyline in the early morning hours. Photo taken on Sept 13, 2009.

Word Choice

The following lesson is a strategy that can help you get to immediately analyzing poetry and more importantly writing about it. As you read a poem, simply make a list of what you feel are the five more important words or simple phrases in the poem.

Consider the first 14 lines of the 2021 Prompt “The Man with the Saxophone” by Ai. Five potentially important words/phrases have been put in bold:

New York. Five A.M.
The sidewalks empty.
Only the steam
pouring from the manhole covers seems alive,
as I amble from shop window to shop window,
sometimes stopping to stare, sometimes not.
Last week’s snow is brittle now
and unrecognizable as the soft, white hair
that bearded the face of the city.
I head farther down Fifth Avenue
toward the thirties,
my mind empty
like the Buddhists tell you is possible
if only you don’t try.

Analyzing Poetry Through Word Choice

Once you have determined which words are important, your next task is to show how at least 2-3 contribute to either the overall meaning or atmosphere of the poem. You might begin an analysis in the following way:

For example, the word choice “empty” helps to establish the desolate atmosphere of the setting. This is ironic because the “New York” setting should be considered a vibrant and alive place. The speaker seems to...

In the above example, each word the student writer selected was able to generate two sentences that go beyond summary. If you start to think of your essays as collections of related sentences about specific words, you can always generate more ideas.

Practice Activity

To complete the following activity, you will need to use the Poetry Essay Prompts for AP English Literature Exams Links to an external site. handout. Poems in the activity are listed by their title.

Start to explore imagery and word choice by looking at five poems that have been used on the AP Exam (the year of the AP exam is included in parenthesis):

  • "XIV" by Derrick Walcott (2015)
  • "Icarus" by Edward Field (2009B)
  • "Elegy for Jane" by Theodore Roethke (1970)
  • "Sow" by Sylvia Plath (1987)
  • "The Great Scarf of Birds" by John Updike (1989)

In addition to word choices, you can employ the same strategy with imagery. Imagery is sensory language - if the phrase applies to one of the five senses, then you have imagery. Try to describe the following poetry lines with their imagery. Read the lines of the poem on the front of the card, write out your own assessment of the imagery, and then turn the card over for an example explanation. Compare your description to the example.

Notice that the examples don’t just list the types of imagery, but also explain how the image contributes to the overall meaning of the poem as a whole. Also notice that just because one type of imagery is used, that others might exist in the same passage.

Reflection

If you are stuck writing a timed analysis of a poem, the simplest and most direct way to get unstuck is to start writing about it. By focusing on specific words and phrases, you can get beyond just summarizing the poem and getting directly to analysis. Remember that the more you write, the better your chances of saying something insightful about the poem. Readers have been trained to reward you for what you do well, so starting and exploring tangents can be a helpful way to develop your essays.

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Alessandro Colle/Shutterstock.com. Image used under license from Shutterstock.com and may not be repurposed.