When we think about a poem, it’s useful to write out its sentences in ordinary prose order, and then see what has been done to them in verse. For each sentence, it’s indispensable to identify the grammatical subject — the person, place, or thing in charge of the verb, so to speak — and the predicate — the verb telling what the grammatical subject is or does (present tense), was or did (past tense), or will be or will do (future tense). In the course of a poem, subjects can change (the poet can say, “I love you” and then say, “You love me”), predicates can change (the poet can say, “I love you” and then, “I hate you”), and tenses can change (the poet can say, “I love you now,” and later say, “But I will not love you tomorrow”). By tracking these changes of subject, predicate, and tense, you can see the dynamic of the poem: where and with whom it began, what’s happening to it, where it’s going, and where it ends up.
The more complex the poem, the more necessary this tracking is, if you’re to get a firm sense of who is doing (or saying) what when, in each part. But even a “simple” poem repays attention of this sort. In Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the grammatical subject alone changes from “I” to “house” to “he” (the owner) to “horse” to “he” (the horse) to “sound” to “woods” to “I.”
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
One can imagine a version of this poem (I apologize for its crudeness) in which the subject never changes, and is “I” throughout:
I know these woods, their owner too,
I feel in watching them some fear,
I sense my little horse’s rue,
Pausing without a farmhouse near.
I hear his harness bells now shake
In wonder at my strange mistake.
I hear the sound of falling snow,
All easy wind and downy flake.
I love the woods so dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Why does Frost, do you think, give a subject-position not only to himself but also to the owner of the woods and to his horse? And why does he also give it to inanimate things (the woods that fill up with snow, the sound of the wind)? The short answer is that everything in a poem that has subject-position is “alive” and can “do things”: the owner of the woods is alive enough to see (but won’t) the trespasser; the little horse is alive enough to query his master’s odd behavior; the woods are alive enough to be “lovely, dark and deep”; and the silence in the snowy woods is deep enough to make the sound “of easy wind and downy flake” come alive, too. The whole world of the poem, in short, is animate and animated. This is far more interesting, at least in Frost’s view of nature, than to make the speaker the only live person in the scene.
Sentences are, grammatically speaking, made up of words that function in different ways. Some words can function in several different ways: for instance, the word “stage” can be either a noun (“Have you built the stage yet?”) or a verb (“Will they stage a Shakespeare play this season?”). The poet intends you to notice how each word functions, as well as what it means.
There are conventional names in grammar for words in their functions. You probably remember the basic names of most of the “parts of speech” (as they are called); if not, you might want to turn to the appendix “On Grammar” to refresh your memory.
In clarifying the function of each word in a poem, you can see the parade of main statements (nouns plus verbs) making up the logical skeleton of the poem, and you can distinguish these main clauses from the poet’s ornamental or explanatory additions. Ask yourself, about each main piece of the skeleton, “What would be lost if I deleted this statement?” (What would be lost if we left out the little horse’s query in “Stopping by Woods,” for instance?) Then ask yourself what purpose is served by the pieces outside the noun-verb skeleton — explanations, additions, and ornaments. Sometimes, as in Dickinson’s “The Heart asks,” the “add-ons” to the main skeleton are of crucial importance. Here is the poem with its add-ons printed in italics:
The Heart asks Pleasure – first –
And then – Excuse from Pain –
And then – those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering –
And then – to go to sleep –
And then – if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The privilege to die –
Think what the bare skeleton would be: “The heart asks pleasure and excuse and anodynes and to go to sleep and the privilege to die.” It is the adjectives and adverbs that punctuate the poem into its successive phases of torture.