How to Analyze a Poem In Under 5 Minutes! #2 LANGUAGE & IMAGERY

Here's how to analyze a poem in under 5 minutes! This is the 2nd video. In the 1st video we looked at how to analyze the structure of a poem first, BEFORE you read it and crucially before you start to get into the CONTENT, LANGUAGE and IMAGERY.
All this is to help you with the unseen poetry analysis that many of you say is really challenging.
In this video we look at a Siegfried Sassoon poem, Suicide in the Trenches and go through the steps so that you identify the most important techniques and points that you can then write about in your essay.
Please let me know if you have any questions or want follow-up videos on poetry analysis.

[@rupertdennison6167]

Would you say in unseen poetry the analysis is the most important thing to get high marks? Or do we need to have a high variety of techniques?

[@mrpollardenglish]

Hi Rupert. Apologies for the slow reply. Hope this isn't too late for you. It's a great question. In poetry (and arguably drama & prose) the depth of analysis scores is very important. So for example, analysing how the poet LAYERS meaning in a poem: this might be how the simple, nursery-rhyme structure and rhyme scheme in this poem reinforce the diction of 'boy' to reinforce or amplify the theme of the wastefulness of war and the tragedy of the loss of very young lives in WWI. Use evaluative verbs to precisely explain the effects (e.g. reinforces, amplifies etc). Hope that kind of makes sense. Please ask if you would like further exaplanation. Here to help you #AceYourEnglish! 👊