discuss the poem in terms of the following questions: What is the point that the poet is making? On other words, what is his or her claim or overall assertion? (This can be put into the opening sentence of your essay (along with the name of the author and the poem.)What evidence is offered in support of that claim? Here, you look at the choices the poet has made about specific words, about images or metaphors, even about how the rhythm or the sound of the poem works. You don’t have to necessarily get at everything, but what you want to understand is that every choice a poet makes is a way of affecting the meaning of the poem and that “meaning” is conveyed by particular pieces of evidence in the poem itself. That evidence is what you bring in as you try to show your readers why you think the poem means what you think it does.
