1. Start by narrowing the list of questions to the ones that are most useful.

• Privilege the questions that require you to correctly identify and engage with formal aspects of the poem (so ignore the “Begin” section and bracket the final question re: your opinion).
• Don’t look to “basic connections” of form for easy access to themes. It is important to identify the basic type of poem you are reading (c.f., the third question under the “proceed” section), but you can’t say anything meaningful about the poem’s structure if you aren’t already well-versed in poetic form.
• Do look to specific elements all poems possess (a speaker, diction, occasion or dramatic situation, and imagery).
• Focus on the questions you can find the most evidence for in the poem.

2. Select two or three questions that require you to identify evidence you can easily find in the poem. This evidence is your observation of the poem. 

3. Shift this factual observation to the realm of an interpretive claim by asking simple questions.

• Why was what you observed included?
• How was what you observed created or achieved?
• What was the effect of the element you identified/observed?

4. Generate more than one plausible answer to the simple questions.

If you cannot generate more than one claim from your textual evidence, you are likely still in the realm of observation.

5. Finish by asking what this all means.

You’ve observed something about the poem and offered some explanation for why what you observed is there. Now you want to consider how this observed element helps the poem to convey a particular message or idea.

Putting this into action, using Wordsworth

One of the great questions on “Experiencing a Poem” is:

• Does the poet make use of alliteration (repetition of consonant sounds) or assonance (repetition of similar vowel sounds) to achieve a certain effect?

The answer, as far as Wordsworth’s famed poem goes, is “yes” and “yes.” I’m most interested in alliteration, so I’m going to highlight the first line (which is also the title): “A slumber did my spirit seal.” I’m also going to give a shout-out to the start of the seventh line: “Rolled round.”

So, alliteration is evident, and I want to move this observation to a claim (a claim that can answer the last part of the question—the achieved effect). Wordsworth could have used a host of other words to convey the same message of the first line. He chose to use three distinct words with “s” sounds (which linguists call sibilants). Why?

Well, he could have just liked the musical effect of the recurrent sound (poetry, after all, relies on rhythm and repetition). He may have wanted to convey a particular mood (we equate sibilants with snakes, and the sound does seem to take longer to make, so it might remind us of slithering creatures or slow us down for some important reason). He may also have wanted to link those particular words together for a specific purpose. 

Ok, so I have more than one possible explanation for the textual evidence I observed, so I have successfully moved from observation to claim. Now I need to tie these claims to a theme. (Note: not all claims need to be shifted into the support of a specific theme. We’re taking this interpretative turn because our “Meme the Theme” assignment requires a theme.)

A theme, as you recall, is a literary work’s take on a particular topic. One of the topics “A Slumber did my Spirit Seal” addresses is death. The poem starts with a reference to sleep overtaking (“sealing”) a spirit and relays the thoughts of a speaker, who has “no human fears.” We then hear of a “She” who does not feel, has no motion or force, and no ability to see or hear. Sleep is often metaphorically allied with death, and the description of a “she” does seem like a description of a life-less corpse. What we need to determine is what the poem might be saying about death.

Let’s consider the role alliteration could play in our determination. The musical effect of the repeated sounds could be said to lull us into the poem. This could suggest a sense of peace and quiet. Fears are gone, and the “she” isn’t feeling. A loss of feeling, as we know, can be a blessing. If we consider the final stanza to reflect being “at one with the earth,” then we can say that the poem represents death as a transition into peaceful nothingness. (Such a view of death can dissipate grief.)

The same sibilance could also be said to convey a sense of unease. We’re being lulled—but into what? Is this slow movement necessarily shifting us into something good? Not feeling doesn’t just register an alleviation of pain. It can reflect a loss of everything good as well. Being thrown about the earth, unfeeling and unmoving, is hardly a pleasant image of an afterlife (arguably, it’s no afterlife at all). Might this poem be expressing a sort of nihilism? (Such a view of death does nothing to allay grief, and it might even work to activate “human fears.”)

From another perspective, the alliteration could be said to unite the three words in the first line, creating an even tighter “seal,” like a tomb. The entire first stanza is one enjambed line, itself “sealed” by the period in line four. To get to line 5, we have to jump forward, over space (which is left blank on the page), and into the present tense. The “she” has no force, but there is a force moving, in a “diurnal course,” which is more rumbling (“Rolled round”) than soothing. The final line of the poem also repeats “s”es, but this repetition is largely consonance of end sounds. So the poem begins with a lulling alliteration that binds and ends with a rocky consonance that cycles forward. Might this juxtaposition, offered after an obvious break in form, show us that death can never be “the” end because time carries on?