Remember the Where’s Waldo? books you used to look at as a kid? Do you think you’d be able to find Waldo—let alone take in all the other details—if you looked over the picture only once?
Definitely not.
What about a poem? Poems are relatively short. Could you read one once and understand the message that the poet was trying to communicate, while also noticing all the figurative language, diction, and details?
Probably not. But that’s not how most of my students view poetry. They want to read it once, declare they don’t understand it, and move on. To understand it on a deeper level, though, we must read and savor a poem multiple times. The best way to get this idea across to students is through a visual analogy.
In Deeper Reading, Kelly Gallagher recommends using Joan Steiner’s Look-Alike books, which are collections of pictures that, when viewed up close, are actually made up of hundreds of everyday objects from coins to corn chips. I project one of the pictures on my Smartboard and allow students to look at it for about five seconds. What did they notice? Students will usually offer up the major focus of the picture: a girl walking a dog, a building. I project the image once again and allow students to look for a few seconds longer. This time they notice more specific details: the girl’s dress is yellow, the dog is a Dalmatian, the building is actually a store. For the last and final viewing, I give students a color copy of the picture to examine in their table groups. Now students can see the details in picture for what they really are. The girl’s dress is actually a Dorito! The bricks of the building are actually dog biscuits! The students marvel at all the details that they hadn’t noticed until they looked up close.
This is when I make the comparison to poetry. Yes, you can read a poem once and get the gist of what it’s about. If you read it again, you might notice how the poet used language in beautiful and interesting ways. But when you keep reading it, the real discoveries happen—the “aha” moments when you realize, hey, this poem isn’t just about picking blackberries; it’s actually about how short life is!
I focus on multiple readings when I want my students to analyze and write about a poem in depth, and for each reading I provide a focus to help students get the most out of the poem. For these lessons, I focused on three poems, which I chose for their accessibility, use of figurative language, and deeper underlying messages:
“I Hear America Singing” by Walt Whitman
“Blackberry Picking” by Seamus Heaney
“On the Subway” by Sharon Olds
First Reading
Poems are meant to be enjoyed, so for the initial reading I just want students to sit back, relax, and take it all in. It’s easy to find audio versions of either the poet or a professional reader reciting the poems on YouTube. Students don’t even have to necessarily follow along on paper; they can just listen.
We focus our first discussion on these questions:
What did you notice?
What did you like or dislike?
Those are nonthreatening prompts for any student.
Second Reading
The purpose of the second reading is to clear up confusion and look for stumbling blocks that might get in the way of our understanding of the poem. For this reading, students have a pencil in hand to circle unknown words or underline confusing phrases. Afterward, we work through our confusion as a whole class. I have a copy of the poem on the board that I mark up with student suggestions as we go. This process can often take an entire class period, but it’s worth taking the time to do, because once the surface-level questions are addressed, students are ready to dig deeper and look more closely at what the poet is doing.
Third Reading and Beyond
For the next reading, we consider the speaker of the poem and what he or she is trying to accomplish by using the SOAPSTone acronym, which stands for speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, subject, and tone. This process helps students figure out the background story of a poem. Students are often surprised that there even is a background story or that it is something you could speculate about. In any subsequent readings, we annotate, focusing on anything and everything we notice. To support students who need more help with this process, I provide a list of annotation prompts. The freeing aspect of this exercise is that there is no wrong way to notice something in a poem. With all of these readings under their belts, students are ready to draw conclusions about the poem, to make an argument about its theme and message.
Here is a handout I use to help students reread poetry and reflect in new ways on what the imagery means.
Annotation Prompts for Poems
While reading a poem, consider some of the following and use the sentence starters to make your annotations.
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Imagery
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This makes me picture…
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Tone
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I imagine the speaker’s voice sounding…
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The tone seems to change to…here.
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Point of View
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The speaker must be…
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The reason the speaker is saying this is that…
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Paraphrase
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The speaker is saying…
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I think this means…
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Diction (Word Choice)
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This word is interesting because…
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This word is usually associated with…
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This word has a positive/negative connotation.
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Questions
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I am confused because…
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Figurative Language
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I wonder why the author picked…
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This seems like an allusion because it makes me think of…
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This simile/metaphor makes me think of….
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This simile/metaphor makes me associate…with…because…
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Patterns
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The rhyming pattern here goes…
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The poet is using repetition of…to…
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I am starting to see a pattern of [sounds, images, topics, etc.].
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The poet seems to break the pattern of…when…
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Line Breaks/Enjambment
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If the end of this line were the end of the sentence, the line would mean…
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Ending the line here emphasizes…
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Most lines seems to end with [nouns, verbs, etc.].
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Encouraging students to do multiple readings demystifies the process of understanding a poem. Many students have the mistaken idea that you either understand a poem or you don’t. Through this process I try to show that by putting in the time and effort, by looking closely at the small details, understanding will emerge. And just like when the students discover that the girl’s dress is really a Dorito, there is a feeling of surprise and the triumph of discovery when students see something in a poem that they didn’t the first time they looked.