ELEMENTS OF POETRY

• Speaker/ Persona
• the speaker, or teller, of the poem; rarely the poet himself/herself.
• Addressee
• refers to the receiver or the one being talked to by the persona. It is the entity as to
whom the message of the poem is addressed.
• Theme
• it is the significant truth about life which a story attempts to communicate to its
readers. It points out the writer’s possible purpose for framing the poem.
• Diction
• the language used in poetry.
• Tone
• the emotion being conveyed by the language used of the writer.
• Imagery and Symbolisms
• the use of figurative language to create connections between the poem and its
readers making them see, hear, taste, smell, and feel whatever the poem presents.
• Words used may also be symbolic. In this sense, words may bear other constructs
aside from their literal meanings.
• Figurative Language
• the words or phrases used go beyond their literal meaning and convey a different
set of meanings to the reader. For example, simile, etc.
• Rhythm
• the beat and pace of a poem.
• Rhyme Scheme
• a pattern of rhyme/ words have the same ending sound in a poem.
• For example: a quatrain—a stanza of four lines in which the first and third
lines rhyme, and the second and fourth lines rhyme—has the following
rhyme scheme: abab
When in disgrace with the fortune and man’s eyes a
I all alone beweep my outcast state b
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries a
And look upon myself, and curse my fate b
• Meter
 • a pattern of stressed and unstressed (accented and unaccented) syllables (known as
a foot) in a line of poetry.
• Stanza
the division of lines into groups