In poetry, the dominant emotion typically is the theme. Read the poem over and over, and see what kind of strong emotion you feel afterwards: happy, sad, angry or resigned. Can you describe your feelings using a few adjectives, such as despair, disillusionment, depression, futility, hopelessness, frustration, resignation or impotence? Next, try to compose a sentence using these adjectives like this, for example: “The theme of the poem is hopelessness of modern life after World War I.” Use this theme as the thesis of the essay. Without first identifying the theme, you cannot explicate a poem: you must have a central theme so you can analyze how others parts support this unifying theme.
Start with the most obvious: see how the lines or stanzas are arranged. In concrete poems, for example, a poem might mimic, say, a wing or a tombstone with deliberate line breaks, to reflect the visual shape of the object it describes. Explain how such line breaks enhance the overall theme of the poem. Next check the line length: is it rendered in iambic pentameter or in natural rhythm, and to what end? Again explain how such rendition helps heighten the theme. Now consider word choice: connotation, denotation, Latinate or Anglo-Saxon. For example, identify if the speaker of the poem uses, say, monosyllabic words, and then provide such textual evidence by listing them with line numbers. Next illustrate how such monosyllabic words help intensify the overall theme of the poem: what could have happened if the speaker had used polysyllabic words, instead?
Figures of speech consist of the schemes, such as antithesis, alliteration, assonance, climax, anastrophe and apposition; and the tropes, such as metaphor, simile, synecdoche (part standing for whole), metonymy (suggestive words), puns, personification, hyperbole, irony, rhetorical question, onomatopoeia and oxymoron. Never stop with a simple identification of these devices found in the poem; rather, explain how these specific devices are deliberately employed as a vehicle to reinforce the overall theme. Always cite the textual evidence and the line number in doing so. Without such explanation, your identification alone will be meaningless: illustrate “so what?”
The tone means the speaker’s attitude toward the listener. The attitude of the speaker can be officious or casual, personal or impersonal, loud or quiet, simple or perplexing, serious or playful and sincere or ironic. Similarly, the voice means the unique presence of a person behind the scene -- “the sense of pervasive presence with a determinate intelligence and moral sensibility,” according to M.H. Abrams' "A Glossary of Literary Terms." While discussing the tone and voice of the speaker, you should demonstrate how the careful choice of the tone or voice in the poem further enhances the overall theme of the poem: “Had the speaker used different tone and voice, the impact to the overall theme would have been weaker,” for example.