IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature – Reading and Writing about Poetry Study Guide

This study guide teaches you how to read and write about poetry for IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature, at SL and HL. It follows the current IB subject brief (first assessments for SL and HL 2021). The brief does not number sub-sections, so this unit maps to the area of exploration Readers, writers and texts, and the skills apply equally at SL and HL. Every example uses a poem first published before 1929 or a short original text written for Marlbridge.

Course links: Language A: Literature hub · printable checklist. Once you have worked through this guide, use the poetry revision notes and the poetry practice questions. For the wider area of exploration, see Readers, writers and texts.

What this unit covers

Skill	What you must be able to do	SL/HL
Voice	Tell the speaker apart from the poet; describe tone and who is addressed	SL and HL
Form	Name the form (sonnet, quatrains, free verse) and explain why it suits the poem	SL and HL
Structure	Trace shifts, turns, repetition and line breaks through the poem	SL and HL
Sound	Hear metre, rhyme and sound patterns, and link them to meaning	SL and HL
Imagery	Explain metaphor, simile, personification and symbol, and what they carry	SL and HL
Meaning	Build a reading that connects features to an idea about the whole poem	SL and HL
Writing	Write a focused analytical paragraph with embedded quotation	SL and HL

Where poetry fits in the course

The subject brief lists three areas of exploration: Readers, writers and texts; Time and space; and Intertextuality: connecting texts. Each has 50 recommended teaching hours at SL and 80 at HL. Close reading of poems belongs most naturally to the first.

Two assessment objectives in the brief describe this unit exactly. You must know and understand “features of particular text types and literary forms”, and you must analyse “ways in which the use of language creates meaning”.

Paper 1 is a guided analysis of unseen literary passages “from different text types”: 1 hour 15 minutes at SL and 2 hours 15 minutes at HL, worth 35% at both levels. An unseen poem is therefore a real possibility. Poetry you study as a whole work can also feed Paper 2, the individual oral and, at HL, the HL essay. For the full assessment picture, see the assessment revision notes.

Voice: who is speaking?

The speaker is the voice inside the poem. It is not automatically the poet. Write “the speaker” unless you have a clear reason not to. Three questions open up voice:

• Who speaks? First person (“I”, “we”), or a detached observer?
• To whom? An addressee (“you”), an absent person or object (this is apostrophe), or no one?
• In what tone? Tone is the speaker’s attitude: bitter, tender, pleading, ironic, calm.

William Blake’s “London” (Songs of Experience, 1794; spelling modernised in the edition used here) opens with a first-person walker: “I wander through each chartered street”. The verbs that follow are verbs of noticing: the speaker will “mark” faces and “hear” cries. The voice is a witness, not a participant. That choice makes the poem feel like evidence gathered on a walk, which gives its accusations more weight.

Form: the shape the poem takes

Form is the poem’s overall shape: its type, stanza pattern, line length and rhyme scheme.

• Sonnet: 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The Petrarchan sonnet splits into an octave (8 lines) and a sestet (6 lines). The Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains and a closing couplet.
• Stanza types: couplet (2 lines), tercet (3), quatrain (4).
• Blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter.
• Free verse: no regular metre or rhyme. It still has form. The line breaks do the shaping.

Form matters when it connects to meaning. Christina Rossetti’s “Remember” (Goblin Market and Other Poems, 1862) is a Petrarchan sonnet. The octave rhymes abbaabba and the sestet cddece. A sonnet is a traditional form for love poetry, and this is a love poem, but it is about the speaker’s own death. The tight, familiar form holds a hard subject steady.

Structure: how the poem moves

Structure is the order in which the poem unfolds: where it begins, turns and ends.

• Volta (turn): a shift in argument or mood. In a Petrarchan sonnet it usually comes at line 9. In “Remember”, line 9 opens with “Yet”, and the speaker changes her request.
• Repetition: “Remember” returns five times across the fourteen lines. Anaphora is repetition at the start of lines, as in Blake’s “In every cry of every man, / In every infant’s cry of fear”.
• End-stopped line: the sense pauses at the line end, often at punctuation.
• Enjambment: the sentence runs over the line break, so the break creates a small suspense or a double meaning.
• Caesura: a pause inside a line, usually marked by punctuation.

Look at how lineation works in this short free-verse passage.

My grandfather mends nets in the kitchen, knotting the gaps his hands remember better than his name. Outside the boats lie tilted on the mud, waiting.

Original text written for Marlbridge.

Line 2 ends on “his hands”. For a moment, you read the hands as the thing being knotted. Then line 3 runs on: the hands “remember better than his name”. The enjambment delays the sad detail, so it lands with more force. The caesura after “name.” stops the thought short. “Outside” then hangs at the line end and pulls you out of the kitchen to the tilted boats.

Sound: metre, rhyme and sound patterns

Metre is the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. An iamb is unstressed then stressed (da-DUM). Five iambs make iambic pentameter; four make iambic tetrameter. A trochee is stressed then unstressed (DUM-da).

Rossetti’s first line scans as regular iambic pentameter:

re-MEM-ber ME when I am GONE a-WAY

Blake’s “London” is mostly iambic tetrameter (“I WAN-der THROUGH each CHAR-tered STREET”). But “How the chimney-sweeper’s cry” has only seven syllables and starts on a stress. A change in the pattern is worth noting when it falls on an important moment.

Rhyme: full rhyme (street/meet), half rhyme (a near match), internal rhyme (inside a line). The rhyme scheme is written with letters (abab).

Sound patterns:

• Alliteration: repeated initial consonant sounds.
• Assonance: repeated vowel sounds.
• Sibilance: repeated s and sh sounds.
• Onomatopoeia: a word that imitates its sound.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty” (written 1877, first published 1918) is dense with sound. Hopkins called his rhythm sprung rhythm, counting stresses rather than syllables, and he called this shortened form a curtal sonnet. Pairs such as “fickle, freckled” and “swift, slow; sweet, sour” join alliteration to contrast. The sound enacts the poem’s idea: praise for “dappled things”, where opposites sit side by side.

Never stop at “this creates rhythm” or “this makes it flow”. Say what the sound does to the meaning.

Imagery: pictures and what they carry

• Simile: a comparison using “like” or “as”.
• Metaphor: one thing described as another, with no “like” or “as”.
• Extended metaphor: a metaphor developed across several lines.
• Personification: human qualities given to a non-human thing.
• Symbol: a concrete thing that stands for something larger.
• Juxtaposition: two contrasting things placed side by side.

In “London”, “The mind-forged manacles I hear” is a metaphor. The chains are not made of iron but of thought, habit and fear. Blake then fuses sound and sight: the soldier’s “sigh / Runs in blood down palace-walls”. A sigh cannot run in blood. The impossible image makes the palace, the seat of power, look stained by the soldier’s suffering.

From features to meaning

A feature is only worth mentioning if it helps answer a question about the poem. Work in this order:

1. Read the whole poem twice. Decide what it is about in one sentence.
2. Find where it turns. What changes, and why?
3. Pick the two or three features that most shape that change.
4. For each, ask: what would be lost if the poet had written it differently?

That fourth question turns spotting into analysis. If Rossetti had written “Remember” in loose free verse, the pleading repetitions would lose the firm frame that makes her final release feel controlled rather than desperate.

Writing an analytical paragraph

A good paragraph has five moves. Here they are applied to “Remember”, with the guiding question: How does the speaker’s attitude to being remembered change?

Step 1: Claim. Answer the question in one sentence. The speaker moves from pleading to be remembered to releasing her beloved from that duty.

Step 2: Evidence. Choose short quotations and embed them in your sentence. “Remember me” (lines 1 and 5); “Yet if you should forget me for a while” (line 9).

Step 3: Technique. Name the method precisely. Imperative repetition in the octave; the volta at line 9; the closing antithesis of “forget and smile” and “remember and be sad”.

Step 4: Effect. Explain what the technique does to meaning. The imperatives sound urgent. The conditional “if” softens the tone. The antithesis places the beloved’s happiness above the speaker’s wish.

Step 5: Link. Return to the question and to the poem as a whole.

Model paragraph

Rossetti’s speaker moves from demanding to be remembered to letting that demand go. In the octave, the imperative “Remember me” opens lines 1 and 5, and the repetition makes the request sound urgent, almost anxious. The volta at line 9 changes the mood: “Yet if you should forget me for a while” replaces the command with a gentle conditional. The final lines then set “forget and smile” against “remember and be sad”, and the balanced antithesis shows the speaker weighing her wish against the beloved’s happiness and choosing happiness. The Petrarchan structure therefore carries the poem’s meaning: the turn in the form is also a turn from self-concern to selfless love.

Notice what the paragraph does not do. It never retells the poem. Every quotation is under ten words and sits inside a sentence. Each technique is tied to an effect, and the last sentence links form to meaning.

Common errors

• Writing “the poet says” for a speaker who is clearly a character, or who is imagining their own death.
• Naming a metre without checking it. Count the syllables and mark the stresses first.
• Saying enjambment “makes the poem flow”. Say what the delayed word gains or loses.
• Listing sound devices with no link to meaning: “there is alliteration in line 6” is not analysis.
• Treating a symbol as a code with one answer. Blake’s images can carry several readings; offer the strongest and say “may suggest”.
• Quoting whole stanzas. Choose the three or four words that carry the effect.
• Ignoring the ending. The last lines often confirm or overturn the poem’s argument.
• Discussing features in line order without a claim, so the paragraph describes but never argues.

Where to go next

• Condensed recall and a self-test: poetry revision notes.
• Original questions with model answers: poetry practice questions.
• How Paper 1 and Paper 2 work: exam preparation.
• Linking poems to other texts: intertextuality study guide.
• The whole course: syllabus guide and subject guide.

Official syllabus

International Baccalaureate Organization, Diploma Programme Subject Brief, Language A: literature, first assessments for SL and HL 2021 (2019).