Annotating a Poem for Analysis

How can annotating a poem lead to interesting literary criticism?

I recently required my literature students to analyze a pair of poems for an exam. They were to write out the poems by hand and then annotate these as a step in their analysis. Those annotations typically took one of two forms:

1. Simple identification of ideas or formal elements
2. Attempts at interpreting or synthesizing

The first of these is a very primary level of analysis and reflects one's ability to understand and represent the content (paraphrase) or to identify basic components of literary form (character, setting, diction, rhythm, rhyme, imagery, metaphor, repetition, figures of speech, etc.). The trick is to move from the first to the second of these levels (on the way to more developed literary arguments). Here are some examples.Understanding a poem can begin with simply trying to paraphrase its parts. In this instance, Taylor made simple summaries of each stanza of a poem by Billy Collins. She boiled down this three-line stanza to three words, "force a meaning":

Besides identifying ideas, one identifies specific literary elements. In this annotation, Danielle focused on the word choice (or "diction") in the same poem:

But how, then, does one move from the simple identification of ideas or formal elements, to the interpretation of such things?

Let's see how Danielle does this with another poem. Here, she also observes diction, but in a short note on the side she observes an interesting disparity: the action words are concrete images, while the nouns are abstractions.

That observed difference in diction led to this interpretation within her essay:

Once again, here is Danielle observing a specific aspect of form -- in this case, meter:

She has circled the last syllables of the second and fourth lines because they contain an eleventh unstressed syllable (the meter of a traditional sonnet is iambic pentameter, or five feet of two-syllables in an unstressed-stressed pattern).

As such, this is merely identification. But even in her handwritten annotation she is making progress toward larger interpretations. If you look closely, her note about meter says "more escaping." What could this mean? Well, if one reads the content of the stanza -- which is all about the tight form of a poem not being able to control the "center stuff" -- then her annotation makes perfect sense: the meter is exemplifying the very idea of this first part of the poem by escaping the expected pattern. This is a great irony, of course, since meter is also something that is what makes a traditional sonnet so formally confined. This observation alone could have proven an ample basis for a complete essay.

There are many media and modes for annotating literature. But good analysis boils down to these two basic activities: identifying ideas and literary elements; and drawing some kind of conclusion or making some kind of claim based on these (especially as they are working together).