Tone is the attitude that the writer of the poem exhibits toward his subject or audience. We know that when others speak to us, their tone of voice suggests a particular attitude either toward us or the subject that they are discussing. Tone in a poem is no different. Objective attitude focuses on facts instead of emotions. An objective text will usually consist of longer sentences, higher-level vocabulary, fewer descriptive words, and statistics or evidence to back the claim.
Subjective attitude focuses on emotions. Its tone is more casual, so pieces with subjective attitudes often employ vernacular , colloquialisms , and slang.
These works are more likely to be written in first person. The second example has a subjective attitude about Disneyland, evident through the first-person point of view, descriptive words, and casual tone.
Readers can clearly tell what the writer thinks about the subject, whereas the first example states facts without providing an opinion on the theme park. If the mom is the narrator, her perspective will be based on elements like how many children she has, how quickly she can find another job, and whether she has a strong support system to help her in the interim. As such, her attitude will likely be subjective and colored with shock or worry.
Every piece of writing has an attitude. The tone of the poem may be formal, serious, ironic, angry, humorous, etc. You should approach interpreting the tone of a poem the same way you would try to interpret the tone of someone who is speaking to you. For example, the tone of someone selling a used car is different from the tone of someone who is collecting a bill. The tone of a used car salesman is complementary and pleasing to the person he is speaking to him while the tone of a bill collector is stern and demanding.
These differences in tone reflect the attitudes that the different speakers have toward their subjects. All this— was for you, old woman.
I wanted to write a poem that you would understand. For what good is it to me if you can't understand it? Williams admits in these lines that poetry is often difficult. He also suggests that a poet depends on the effort of a reader; somehow, a reader must "complete" what the poet has begun. This act of completion begins when you enter the imaginative play of a poem, bringing to it your experience and point of view.
If a poem is "play" in the sense of a game or a sport, then you enjoy that it makes you work a little, that it makes you sweat a bit. Reading poetry is a challenge, but like so many other things, it takes practice, and your skills and insight improve as you progress. Literature is, and has always been, the sharing of experience, the pooling of human understanding about living, loving, and dying.
Poems speak to us in many ways. Sometimes the job of the poem is to come closer to saying what cannot be said in other forms of writing, to suggest an experience, idea, or feeling that you can know but not entirely express in any direct or literal way.
Before you get very far with a poem, you have to read it. In fact, you can learn quite a few things just by looking at it. The title may give you some image or association to start with. You can also see whether it looks like the last poem you read by the same poet or even a poem by another poet. All of these are good qualities to notice, and they may lead you to a better understanding of the poem in the end.
To begin, read the poem aloud. Read it more than once. Listen to your voice, to the sounds the words make. Do you notice any special effects? Do any of the words rhyme? Is there a cluster of sounds that seem the same or similar? If you find your own voice distracting, have a friend read the poem to you. That said, it can still be uncomfortable to read aloud or to make more than one pass through a poem. Some of this attitude comes from the misconception that we should understand a poem after we first read it, while some stems from sheer embarrassment.
Where could I possibly go to read aloud? What if my friends hear me? What determines where a line stops in poetry? There is, of course, more than one answer to this question. Lines are often determined by meaning, sound and rhythm, breath, or typography. Poets may use several of these elements at the same time. Some poems are metrical in a strict sense. What if the lines are irregular? The relationship between meaning, sound, and movement intended by the poet is sometimes hard to recognize, but there is an interplay between the grammar of a line, the breath of a line, and the way lines are broken out in the poem—this is called lineation.
For example, lines that end with punctuation, called end-stopped lines , are fairly simple. In that case, the punctuation and the lineation, and perhaps even breathing, coincide to make the reading familiar and even predictable.
But lines that are not end-stopped present different challenges for readers because they either end with an incomplete phrase or sentence or they break before the first punctuation mark is reached. The most natural approach is to pay strict attention to the grammar and punctuation.
Reading to the end of a phrase or sentence, even if it carries over one or several lines, is the best way to retain the grammatical sense of a poem. But lineation introduces another variable that some poets use to their advantage. Robert Creeley is perhaps best known for breaking lines across expected grammatical pauses. This technique often introduces secondary meaning, sometimes in ironic contrast with the actual meaning of the complete grammatical phrase. Reading the lines as written, as opposed to their grammatical relationship, yields some strange meanings.
On its own, "eyes bite" is very disturbing.
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