How do I analyse a poem?

When you first look at the poem, it's really important not to panic if you don't immediately understand. You're not meant to entirely understand it at first, the examiners want you to break it down and analyse each part.

You should begin by looking at the title: is it a metaphor? What ideas do you associate with it? By exploring the title, this will usually give you a clue as to what the poem is about, and you can refer back to the title to back up any ideas you have in the poem. Then go through stanza by stanza and write down any themes you see throughout, any lines which seem to suggest similar or contrasting ideas. Look at the rhyme scheme and the length of the lines, can you identify a pattern? If there is no clear pattern, think about whether that reflects the ideas of the poem itself - does the poem talk about confusion or something being unstable and constantly changing?

Then you can structure it: spend one paragraph commenting on the language used, another on the structure of the poem, another on alternative interpretations you could take from it. If you're comparing two poems, you can write about how all these things are similar or different across the two.