Poetry

1. Read it carefully! Look up the words…

2. The speaker (his/her point of view, the narrative voice reveals…)
- first person, second person, third person narration (third person limited awareness)
- Is it a poet or is he/she speaking through a persona?
Real or imagined, personal or impersonal, adult or child, man or woman, happy, lonely,
angry…
-Who is being addressed, who is the poet trying to reach?
3. The poem’s time and setting and does it influence the atmosphere of the poem?
- specific, real place or allegorical, abstract setting (light, dark, cold, warm, loud, calm)
- past, present, future
4. The Form
~ HAIKU – Japanese poem, 3 unrhymed lines (5-7-5 syllables)
no meaning attached to it, description
~ LIMERICK – short, humorous, 5 lines, 7-10 syllables, aabba
~ SONNET – 14 lines, lyric poems, 3 quatrains + couplet (Shakespearean style) or 2
quatrains + six line sestet (Petrarchan)
~ Ballad – a narrative poem, often has refrain, four-line stanzas
~ Villanelle – 19-line poem (5 tercets and a final quatrain), Italian and French ‘rustic’
poem, repeats the main feeling and adds some things

PROSE
- Fiction (imaginative narration) or faction (true, documentary prose based on facts)
- Fiction (Narrator/narrative persona/narrative voice is usually not the same as
AUTHOR), faction (Narrative voice usually is the same as author)
- Sources: author’s own experiences, memories, documents, ideas, stories, scientific
breakthroughs
- Most important: author’s own mind, his knowledge and understanding of the world,
society, culture… and himself! ( “Know thyself”)
- Archetypes (very old motives like: Hercules, Prometheus, Christ and Judas, Hamlet,
Lady Macbeth…)
- Poetry (what may happen, more philosophical possibility) and history (facts about
what has happened)
- Theme: What did you learn from this? Moral, teaching fabula
- Story and plot: Story is chronological, cause and effect, raw material. Plot doesn’t
have to be chronological (kretanje unapred, unazad, prisecanje dogadjaja…)
- Plot: narrative structure, realistic, romantic… The relation can be step-like, ring-like
or parallel.
- Most frequent conflicts: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. himself
- Motivation (connections between events): very old motives are archetypes (killing
the dragon; the king and his three sons; etc.) Motivation can be cultural,
psychological, philosophical…
- Narrative voice: authorial (knows all, follows everything, comments, interprets),
omniscient (Godlike, infinite knowledge, knows all – past, present, future), reliable
or unreliable (limited knowledge, interprets for us or keeps his mouth shut, or even
misunderstands the whole thing)
- Perspective: monochronic (one mind to follow), polychromic (perspective from one
to another), deepest perspective (internal monologue)
- Characterization: artistic shape of human personality or character. Characters can
be rounded (changes throughout the story – boy becomes a man or similar) or flat
(minor characters)