DAY ON THE FARM

BY LUIS G. DATO
• I’ve found you fruits of sweetest taste and found you
Bunches of duhat growing by the hill,
I’ve bound your arms and hair with vine and bound you
With rare wildflowers but you are crying still.
• I’ve brought you all the forest ferns and brought you
Wrapped in green leaves cicadas singing sweet,
I’ve caught you in my arms an hour and taught you
Love’s secret where the mountain spirits meet.
• Your smiles have died and there is no replying
To all endearment and my gifts are vain;
Come with me, love, you are too old for crying,
The church bells ring and I hear drops of rain.
HE WISHES FOR THE CLOTHS OF HEAVEN 
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
• Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
LOVE STORY
BY CONRADO S. RAMIREZ

• I walked last summer into the barrio of Niyugan.

• A pretty girl was singing at a lighted door;
• Now a woman sits weeping at my darkened window:
• I walked last summer into the barrio of Niyugan…
SPEAKER

A. Speaker The poem's speaker is the created narrative voice of the poem, i.e., the
persona the reader is supposed to imagine talking or speaking in the
poem. The speaker is NOT necessarily the poet. When the poet creates
a character to be the speaker, that character is called the persona, and
the poet imagines what it is like to enter someone else's personality.
The poet reveals the identity of the speaker in various ways. Choice of
words, focus of attention, and attitudes will indicate the speaker's age,
perspective, and identity.
AUDIENCE

B. Audience The audience in the poem is the person or people to whom the speaker is
speaking. Identifying the audience within a poem helps you to understand the
poem better. There are different people the speaker can address in the poem:
 The speaker can address another character in the poem.
 The speaker can address a character who is not present or is dead.
 The speaker can address you, the reader.
CONTENT

C. Content The poem's content is the subject or the idea or the

 
thing that the poem concerns or represents. Poetry
often tells a story, describes a scene, event, or
feeling, or otherwise comments on the human
predicament. The content is contained in
description, narration, and assertions.
THEME

D. Theme The theme of the poem relates to the general idea or ideas continuously
developed throughout the poem. The poet presents a thought or an idea to the
reader that may be deep, difficult to understand, or even moralistic. Generally,
a theme has to be extracted as the reader explores the passages of a work. The
poet utilizes the characters, content, and other poetic or literary devices to assist
the reader in this endeavor. A poem may have one or more themes depending on
the poem's subject the persona deals with and the feelings or experiences the
persona undergoes. The theme may also be suggested by the title of a poem or
by a segment of the poem. It may also be stated explicitly by the poet, or it may
be stated impliedly. 
SHAPE

• Basically, the actual shape and form of

poems can vary dramatically from poem to
poem.
FORM

• When poets sit down to write, they have the option of following a form. A form is a pattern for
making the poem. Some poems come with rules about the number of lines, line length, rhyme
scheme, meter, refrain. Some poems, such as the ode and the elegy, can only be written about
specific themes. Other forms, like spoken word, have a distinctive approach to both theme and
delivery. Free verse is really a non-form and might be the most popular type of poetry written
today. In poetry, you will encounter two forms: structured or closed-form and free verse or open
form. Structured poetry has predictable patterns of rhyme, rhythm, line length, and stanza
construction. In free verse, the poet experiments with the form of the poem. The rhythm, number
of syllables per line, and stanza construction does not follow a pattern.
STRUCTURE

F. Structure The structure used in poems varies with different types of poetry. The
  structural elements include the line, couplet, strophe, and stanza. Poets
combine the use of language and a specific structure to create
imaginative and expressive work. The structure used in some poetry
types is also used when considering a finished poem's visual effect. The
structure of many different types of poetry results in groups of lines on
the page, enhancing the poem's composition.
TONE

G. Tone A poem's tone is the attitude you feel in it — the writer's attitude toward the
  subject or audience. The tone in a poem of praise is approval. In a satire, you
feel irony. In an anti-war poem, you may feel protest or moral indignation.
Tone can be playful, humorous, regretful, anything — and it can change as the
poem goes along. When you speak, your tone of voice suggests your attitude. In
fact, it suggests two attitudes: one concerning the people you're addressing
(your audience) and one concerning the thing you're talking about (your
subject). That's what the term tone means when it's applied to poetry as well.
Tone can also mean the general emotional weather of the poem. Sometimes the
tone is fairly obvious. Sometimes you can pick up the tone from clues in what a
person says or writes. Other times, the tone can also reside in the images and
how they are presented, the implications of a statement or story, or the poem's
very music and rhythms.
IMAGERY

H. Imagery In a literary text, imagery occurs when an author uses an object that is not really there to
create a comparison between one that is, usually evoking a more meaningful visual
experience for the reader. It is useful as it allows an author to add depth and
understanding to his work, like a sculptor adding layer and layer to his statue, building it
up into a beautiful work of art. So, it should usually have more than one description. It
refers to the "pictures" that we perceive with our mind's eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and
how we experience the "duplicate world" created by poetic language. The imagery evokes
the meaning and truth of human experiences not in abstract terms, as in philosophy, but is
more perceptible and tangible forms. This is a device by which the poet makes his meaning
strong, clear, and sure. The poet uses sound words and words of color and touch in
addition to figures of speech. As well, concrete details that appeal to the reader's senses are
used to build up images.
DICTION

I. Diction Diction refers to the writer's or the speaker's distinctive vocabulary

choices and style of expression in a literary work. The poet chooses each
word carefully so that both its meaning and sound contribute to the
poem's tone and feeling. The poet must consider a word's denotation -
its definition according to the dictionary and its connotation - the
emotions, thoughts, and ideas associated with and evoked by the word. 
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

J. Figurative Figurative language is a type of language that varies from the norms of literal language, in
Language which words mean exactly what they say for the sake of comparison, emphasis, clarity, or
freshness. Also known as the "ornaments of language," figurative language does not mean
exactly what it says. Instead, it forces the reader to make an imaginative leap to
comprehend an author's point. It usually involves a comparison between two things that
may not, at first, seem to relate to one another and can facilitate understanding because it
relates something unfamiliar to something familiar. It will require you to use your
imagination to figure out the poet's point or meaning to comprehend figurative language.
Examples of speech figures include allusion, antithesis, apostrophe, asyndeton, chiasmus,
hyperbole, irony, litotes, metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, paradox, personification, pun,
simile, synesthesia, symbol, synecdoche, and understatement.
SOUND-EFFECT DEVICES

K. Sound- The poet, unlike the person who uses language to convey only information,
effect Devices chooses words for sound as well as for meaning and uses the sound as a means
of reinforcing meaning. Sound-effect devices or verbal music are important
resources that enable the poet to do something more than communicating mere
information. The poet may indeed sometimes pursue verbal music for its own
sake; more often, at least in first-rate poetry, it is adjunct to the total meaning
or communication of the poem. Here are some examples of the most common
sound-effect devices: alliteration, anaphora, assonance, cacophony, consonance,
euphony, onomatopoeia, repetition, rhyme, and rhythm.