Analyzing Lyric Poetry
In this lesson, you'll learn how to analyze a specific kind of poetry.
Objectives
Students will:
Skills Needed
Students must be able to:
- Identify figurative language in a poem.
Key Words
- lyric poetry
- sonnet
- meter
- rhyme scheme
Do Now:
Respond in the chat:- What emotion do these lines create?
- What words or images help create that feeling?
- What do you think the speaker’s mood is?
Say It With Feeling
What's unique about lyric poetry?
Think about the lyrics to popular songs. What are they usually about? From high hopes to broken hearts, most song lyrics focus more on expressing feelings than on telling stories. Likewise, lyric poetry is poetry that focuses on expressing a speaker's thoughts and feelings. The word lyric comes from lyre, a U-shaped instrument used by ancient Greek poets, who would play music while reciting their poems. Unlike pop singers--or the ancient Greeks--lyric poets rely on the music of words to set the beat.
The Music of Free Verse
How do contemporary lyric poets make words musical?
Before the 20th century, most poets writing in English used very regular patterns of rhyme and repetition to make their poems "sing." Today's poets, though, usually write free verse--poetry that doesn't follow strict rules about rhythm and rhyme. Instead, free verse poetry makes its music with subtler sound effects such as the use of repetition, parallelism, assonance (repeated vowel sounds), and alliteration (repeated consonant sounds). To hear what fee verse sounds like, read this lyric poem by Claudia Serea:
Sleep
The Music of Shakespeare
How did lyric poetry get its start?
To hear how traditional, metered poetry differs from free verse, you can listen to the music of one of the greatest lyric poets ever, William Shakespeare. Even in Shakespeare's plays, which are narratives, lyric poetry is everywhere. (After all, Shakespeare's tragedies, especially, are all about feelings.) In Act I of Romeo and Juliet, we meet poor, heartsick Romeo. All he wants in the world is to find love, but he is surrounded by fighting, indifference, and rejection. His cousins keep feuding with another family (the Capulets), his parents are distant and out of touch, and worst of all, Rosaline wants nothing to do with him. While everyone is dancing and having fun, there's Romeo, standing in the corner, feeling sorry for himself. Then, he sees her. All of his feelings for Rosaline disappear in an instant as the bright light of Juliet's beauty washes over him. Although they've never met and he has no idea who she is, Romeo decides then and there to walk up to this girl and hold her hand. This is a daring gamble, but after Romeo and Juliet say just fourteen lines to each other, it's clear that they are destined to be together. These fourteen lines illustrate a very special type of lyric poem--one that Shakespeare mastered so completely that they named the form after him.
Fourteen Lines
What form did Shakespeare's lyrics take?
A sonnet is a type of poem with fixed rules about the number of lines and syllables, rhyme scheme, and story structure. Shakespeare wrote so many sonnets, both within and outside of his plays, that his particular way of writing sonnets became know as Shakespearean. Read and listen to the words that Romeo and Juliet say when they meet. These lines form one of the most famous Shakespearean sonnets. Don't worry about what the meaning of this poem is yet--we'll get to that. For now, just focus on the sound of the words and how they flow from line to line.
Do you hear an inner beat or structure? Do you notice anything about the rhyme pattern or number of syllables per line?
Clap Your Hands
The first step to hearing the rhythm of Shakespeare's poetry is to count up the syllables in every line.
As you may already know, syllables are the basic building blocks of words. For example, Ro-me-o has three syllables, Ty-balt has two, and Fri-ar Law-rence has four. You might have learned to clap your hands at each syllable to help you count them. This is useful because sometimes words with lots of letters have only one syllable (like strengths or scratched), while small words can have high syllable counts (the letter w has three--dou-ble-you).
You can bet that Shakespeare spent a lot of time counting syllables. Try this experiment: Pick any line from the conversation between Romeo and Juliet and count the syllables. In fact, you can pick almost any line from Romeo and Juliet--or any Shakespeare play-- and get the same result. Unless the character who speaks is an uneducated servant or musician, you should begin to see a pattern. Try it with the examples that follow.
Lighten Up!
How can syllables get stressed?
Poetry is meant to be read aloud, which is perfect for stage plays like Romeo and Juliet. When you speak lines from Shakespeare out loud, you will begin to notice a hidden pattern inside the words that you can't get just by reading them on a page. To hear what we're talking about, read some of the lines from Romeo and Juliet's meeting aloud. The internal beat in a line of poetry is called meter, and it's caused by the emphasis of a word's syllables. When people speak to each other, they don't say all syllables with exactly the same volume and tone, or else they would sound like robots. Instead, people stress--or emphasize--certain syllables. For example, in the word volcano, which syllable is stressed? Move your cursor over each syllable to find out.
You Got The Beat
Can you identify the stressed syllables in a word or phrase?
In almost any word you encounter, one syllable receives more stress, or emphasis, than the others. You can usually identify the stressed syllable just by saying the word out loud--or by imagining how the word sounds when spoken aloud.
Look through these examples to see how it works.
You Got The Beat
Can you identify the stressed syllables in a word or phrase?
Whichever syllable is pronounced the strongest is stressed, so you might have to say the word aloud a few times to figure out where the emphasis is. If you're not sure, look it up! Dictionaries will tell you which syllable is stressed. For example, the entry for the word lasagna will include a pronunciation guide that looks like this: [luh-zahn-yuh]. The bold syllable gets the stress.
See if you can pick the stressed syllable in each of the following examples:
You Got The Beat
You Got The Beat
You Got The Beat
You Got The Beat
Five Feet
What gives a line of Shakespearean poetry its regular rhythm?
Shakespeare not only arranges almost all his lines into ten syllables each, he also alternates the stressed and unstressed syllables to add a musical rhythm to his characters' words. This pattern, which is called iambic pentameter, is almost always the same: It takes some practice to hear this rhythm in Shakespeare's verses, so let's look more closely at a few lines and begin to break them down into stressed and unstressed syllables.
Iambic pentameter includes five groups of two syllables--the first one is soft and the second is strong. It's a lot like a heartbeat: da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM. Notice how these lines always start with an unstressed syllable and end on a stressed one.
Five Feet
What gives a line of Shakespearean poetry its regular rhythm?
Since changing from capital letters to lowercase in the middle of a word gets confusing pretty quick, we're going to mark the beat using an "x" for unstressed syllables and a "/" for stressed ones, like this:
You Are A Pirate
An easy way to remember what iambic pentameter sounds like is to use the mnemonic "I am a pirate with a wooden leg."
Just as clapping your hands can help you count the syllables in a word, here's a trick to help you find the iambic pentameter in a line of Shakespeare: Just become a pirate. *Watch video in textbook For each line of iambic pentameter, use the phrase "I am a pirate with a wooden leg" to find whether the selected syllable is stressed or unstressed.
Counting Sounds
How can you identify the rhyme scheme in a poem?
When most of us consider what makes a poem different from other kinds of writing, the first thing we think of is rhyming. While many poems (especially modern ones) don't rhyme at all, ending lines with words that sound alike adds to the musical quality of the poem's language. One of the rules of Shakespearean sonnets is that the words have to rhyme in a particular order, and this order is called the sonnet's rhyme scheme.
To map a rhyme scheme, simply assign a letter in alphabetical order to each new sound at the end of the line. Rhyming sounds get the same letter.
Sonnet 18
Sonnet Rhyme Scheme
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Map the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet.
Let's apply this same technique to a Shakespearean sonnet.
Grow Your Vocabulary
Review the vocabulary here before you read the 14 lines on the next page.
Before you dive into the sonnet and find out what Romeo and Juliet say to each other on the dance floor of the Capulet ball, review these vocabulary words and complete the activities that follow. Then watch the lecture on the next page to find out how this brief meeting forever changes the destiny of these two lovers.
- profane
- shrine
- fine
- pilgrim
- mannerly
- devotion
- palmer
- despair
What Are They Saying?
Put together all we've learned about rhyme scheme, iambic pentameter, and stanzas in order to understand what Romeo and Juliet say to each other when they first meet.
It's finally time to dive into the sonnet and find out what Romeo and Juliet say to each other on the dance floor of the Capulet ball. *Watch Video in textbook What makes this sonnet a lyric poem? What aspects of the sonnet add to the music of the lines?
Homework
Read "Nothing Gold Can Stay' by Robert Frost
After reading the poem, Lyric Analysis Response (one paragraph, 6–8 sentences): Include:
- The speaker’s main emotion or feeling
- One example of imagery or figurative language
- The poem’s tone
- How the word choice helps create the mood
- The overall message or theme
Rubric
20 points
Exit Ticket
Take the Analyzing Lyric Poetry Quiz
Group: Analyzing Lyric Poetry
Ashley Campion
Created on February 6, 2026
Start designing with a free template
Discover more than 1500 professional designs like these:
View
Memphis Presentation
View
Blackboard Presentation
View
Florida Neon Presentation
View
Genial Storytale Presentation
View
Historical Presentation
View
Psychedelic Presentation
View
Memories Presentation
Explore all templates
Transcript
Analyzing Lyric Poetry
In this lesson, you'll learn how to analyze a specific kind of poetry.
Objectives
Students will:
Skills Needed
Students must be able to:
Key Words
Do Now:
Respond in the chat:- What emotion do these lines create?
- What words or images help create that feeling?
- What do you think the speaker’s mood is?
Say It With Feeling
What's unique about lyric poetry?
Think about the lyrics to popular songs. What are they usually about? From high hopes to broken hearts, most song lyrics focus more on expressing feelings than on telling stories. Likewise, lyric poetry is poetry that focuses on expressing a speaker's thoughts and feelings. The word lyric comes from lyre, a U-shaped instrument used by ancient Greek poets, who would play music while reciting their poems. Unlike pop singers--or the ancient Greeks--lyric poets rely on the music of words to set the beat.
The Music of Free Verse
How do contemporary lyric poets make words musical?
Before the 20th century, most poets writing in English used very regular patterns of rhyme and repetition to make their poems "sing." Today's poets, though, usually write free verse--poetry that doesn't follow strict rules about rhythm and rhyme. Instead, free verse poetry makes its music with subtler sound effects such as the use of repetition, parallelism, assonance (repeated vowel sounds), and alliteration (repeated consonant sounds). To hear what fee verse sounds like, read this lyric poem by Claudia Serea:
Sleep
The Music of Shakespeare
How did lyric poetry get its start?
To hear how traditional, metered poetry differs from free verse, you can listen to the music of one of the greatest lyric poets ever, William Shakespeare. Even in Shakespeare's plays, which are narratives, lyric poetry is everywhere. (After all, Shakespeare's tragedies, especially, are all about feelings.) In Act I of Romeo and Juliet, we meet poor, heartsick Romeo. All he wants in the world is to find love, but he is surrounded by fighting, indifference, and rejection. His cousins keep feuding with another family (the Capulets), his parents are distant and out of touch, and worst of all, Rosaline wants nothing to do with him. While everyone is dancing and having fun, there's Romeo, standing in the corner, feeling sorry for himself. Then, he sees her. All of his feelings for Rosaline disappear in an instant as the bright light of Juliet's beauty washes over him. Although they've never met and he has no idea who she is, Romeo decides then and there to walk up to this girl and hold her hand. This is a daring gamble, but after Romeo and Juliet say just fourteen lines to each other, it's clear that they are destined to be together. These fourteen lines illustrate a very special type of lyric poem--one that Shakespeare mastered so completely that they named the form after him.
Fourteen Lines
What form did Shakespeare's lyrics take?
A sonnet is a type of poem with fixed rules about the number of lines and syllables, rhyme scheme, and story structure. Shakespeare wrote so many sonnets, both within and outside of his plays, that his particular way of writing sonnets became know as Shakespearean. Read and listen to the words that Romeo and Juliet say when they meet. These lines form one of the most famous Shakespearean sonnets. Don't worry about what the meaning of this poem is yet--we'll get to that. For now, just focus on the sound of the words and how they flow from line to line.
Do you hear an inner beat or structure? Do you notice anything about the rhyme pattern or number of syllables per line?
Clap Your Hands
The first step to hearing the rhythm of Shakespeare's poetry is to count up the syllables in every line.
As you may already know, syllables are the basic building blocks of words. For example, Ro-me-o has three syllables, Ty-balt has two, and Fri-ar Law-rence has four. You might have learned to clap your hands at each syllable to help you count them. This is useful because sometimes words with lots of letters have only one syllable (like strengths or scratched), while small words can have high syllable counts (the letter w has three--dou-ble-you). You can bet that Shakespeare spent a lot of time counting syllables. Try this experiment: Pick any line from the conversation between Romeo and Juliet and count the syllables. In fact, you can pick almost any line from Romeo and Juliet--or any Shakespeare play-- and get the same result. Unless the character who speaks is an uneducated servant or musician, you should begin to see a pattern. Try it with the examples that follow.
Lighten Up!
How can syllables get stressed?
Poetry is meant to be read aloud, which is perfect for stage plays like Romeo and Juliet. When you speak lines from Shakespeare out loud, you will begin to notice a hidden pattern inside the words that you can't get just by reading them on a page. To hear what we're talking about, read some of the lines from Romeo and Juliet's meeting aloud. The internal beat in a line of poetry is called meter, and it's caused by the emphasis of a word's syllables. When people speak to each other, they don't say all syllables with exactly the same volume and tone, or else they would sound like robots. Instead, people stress--or emphasize--certain syllables. For example, in the word volcano, which syllable is stressed? Move your cursor over each syllable to find out.
You Got The Beat
Can you identify the stressed syllables in a word or phrase?
In almost any word you encounter, one syllable receives more stress, or emphasis, than the others. You can usually identify the stressed syllable just by saying the word out loud--or by imagining how the word sounds when spoken aloud. Look through these examples to see how it works.
You Got The Beat
Can you identify the stressed syllables in a word or phrase?
Whichever syllable is pronounced the strongest is stressed, so you might have to say the word aloud a few times to figure out where the emphasis is. If you're not sure, look it up! Dictionaries will tell you which syllable is stressed. For example, the entry for the word lasagna will include a pronunciation guide that looks like this: [luh-zahn-yuh]. The bold syllable gets the stress. See if you can pick the stressed syllable in each of the following examples:
You Got The Beat
You Got The Beat
You Got The Beat
You Got The Beat
Five Feet
What gives a line of Shakespearean poetry its regular rhythm?
Shakespeare not only arranges almost all his lines into ten syllables each, he also alternates the stressed and unstressed syllables to add a musical rhythm to his characters' words. This pattern, which is called iambic pentameter, is almost always the same: It takes some practice to hear this rhythm in Shakespeare's verses, so let's look more closely at a few lines and begin to break them down into stressed and unstressed syllables. Iambic pentameter includes five groups of two syllables--the first one is soft and the second is strong. It's a lot like a heartbeat: da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM. Notice how these lines always start with an unstressed syllable and end on a stressed one.
Five Feet
What gives a line of Shakespearean poetry its regular rhythm?
Since changing from capital letters to lowercase in the middle of a word gets confusing pretty quick, we're going to mark the beat using an "x" for unstressed syllables and a "/" for stressed ones, like this:
You Are A Pirate
An easy way to remember what iambic pentameter sounds like is to use the mnemonic "I am a pirate with a wooden leg."
Just as clapping your hands can help you count the syllables in a word, here's a trick to help you find the iambic pentameter in a line of Shakespeare: Just become a pirate. *Watch video in textbook For each line of iambic pentameter, use the phrase "I am a pirate with a wooden leg" to find whether the selected syllable is stressed or unstressed.
Counting Sounds
How can you identify the rhyme scheme in a poem?
When most of us consider what makes a poem different from other kinds of writing, the first thing we think of is rhyming. While many poems (especially modern ones) don't rhyme at all, ending lines with words that sound alike adds to the musical quality of the poem's language. One of the rules of Shakespearean sonnets is that the words have to rhyme in a particular order, and this order is called the sonnet's rhyme scheme. To map a rhyme scheme, simply assign a letter in alphabetical order to each new sound at the end of the line. Rhyming sounds get the same letter.
Sonnet 18
Sonnet Rhyme Scheme
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date. Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st, Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade, When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st. So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Map the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet.
Let's apply this same technique to a Shakespearean sonnet.
Grow Your Vocabulary
Review the vocabulary here before you read the 14 lines on the next page.
Before you dive into the sonnet and find out what Romeo and Juliet say to each other on the dance floor of the Capulet ball, review these vocabulary words and complete the activities that follow. Then watch the lecture on the next page to find out how this brief meeting forever changes the destiny of these two lovers.
What Are They Saying?
Put together all we've learned about rhyme scheme, iambic pentameter, and stanzas in order to understand what Romeo and Juliet say to each other when they first meet.
It's finally time to dive into the sonnet and find out what Romeo and Juliet say to each other on the dance floor of the Capulet ball. *Watch Video in textbook What makes this sonnet a lyric poem? What aspects of the sonnet add to the music of the lines?
Homework
Read "Nothing Gold Can Stay' by Robert Frost
After reading the poem, Lyric Analysis Response (one paragraph, 6–8 sentences): Include:
Rubric
20 points
Exit Ticket
Take the Analyzing Lyric Poetry Quiz