Poetry

The aspect of poetry that seems to give me the most difficulty is poetry with a lot of complex syntax and figurative language. Often times what happens to me is I will begin reading a poem loaded with difficult language, and I will start off not really understanding the first stanza. The rest of the poem normally builds off from its intro, and I end up not understanding any of the poem during my first reading. What I find helps a lot though is not only re-reading the poem, but also looking at the questions before giving the poem a second read. I find that the questions not only tell you what to look for, but they also narrow down options of what certain words or phrases could symbolize or mean. For example, if you look at question 10 on page 121 of the Peterson’s AP English book, the question asks, “What does the word ‘bark’ mean?” Upon my first reading of the poem, I was not sure what that word meant in this context, but looking at the options I decided choice E, “a type of boat”, made the most sense. Without the question and options, I definitely would have had more trouble deciphering the poem.