how does paraphrasing help readers to understand poetry

Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing a poem means to simplify it down to its most basic elements, clarifying along the way and choosing less complicated language. This, in turn, makes it easier to understand.

Through paraphrasing, readers come to understand the meanings behind different kinds of figurative languages, such as metaphors , similes , and allusions . There is a huge list of poetic techniques a writer can employ within a verse that can confuse and complicate the meaning. For example, let’s consider syntax . Syntax is the arrangement of words or phrases that creates a sentence. It’s often regarded as a set of normal rules for how a sentence, depending on the language, comes together. Often in poetry, especially that of the Victorian and Elizabethan ages, the syntax can appear jumbled. This is either because it is or because the speech patterns were different. Nowadays, it is less common, but poets do sometimes reverse the order of words to conform to a specific metrical pattern or make a statement of some kind.

Explore Paraphrasing

• 1 Example of Paraphrasing
• 2 Defining Unknown/Unusual Words
• 3 Paraphrasing as an Exercise

Example of Paraphrasing

Take a look at these lines from the fourteenth and fifteenth-century poet Ben Jonson ’s poem ‘ Song: to Celia ’:

Drink to me only with thine eyes, And I will pledge with mine; Or leave a kiss but in the cup, And I’ll not look for wine.

Not the most complicated of verses , but it serves as a standard example of how poetry from a different time period in which meter and rhyme were much more important than they are today, can become complicated. If I were to paraphrase this piece I might write it out as:

Use your eyes to pledge yourself to me, and I’ll use my eyes to pledge myself to you; Or, leave me a kiss only in the cup and I’ll look for the kiss instead of the wine.

There is still plenty of room for poetic interpretation in this rephrasing of Jonson’s verse, but it makes the lines a little clearer. Read more poetry from Ben Jonson .

Defining Unknown/Unusual Words

Another aspect, aside from the syntax, that a reader should keep in mind is the poet’s word choices.

Sometimes it feels as though you know what a word means but when you look it up, it actually means something quite different. This can be an important part of paraphrasing a poem. Particularly helpful if a word feels completely out of context . More often than not there is a secondary definition, one that was applicable at the time the poem was written but is no longer in use today. Sometimes, this makes all the difference and can lead you down a clear path to the subject and major themes of a text.

Paraphrasing as an Exercise

As you become a keen analyzer of poetry you will grow accustomed to automatically rearranging the syntax to make sense of the lines, but it is a good strategy, especially with the more complicated verses, of poets such as Milton , or the poetry of Spenser , to paraphrase as an exercise in your own ability to interpret. Ask yourself, what does this line really mean, and then see if you can mirror it in contemporary language.

Additionally, paraphrasing can come in handy when a poem is less narrative than it is emotional or evocative. Let’s take Guillaume Apollinaire ’s ‘Zone’ as an example. This is an incredibly complex poem. It lacks narrative, consistency, or plot . More than anything else it is a barrage of images that seek to take a reader from one place, state of being, and mindset to another. Take a look at these lines to get a feeling for the text:

You in Amsterdam with a girl you find pretty who is ugly She’s engaged to marry a student from Leyden Where you can rent rooms in Latin Cubicula locanda I remember spending three days there and three in Gouda

This is only one small part of the poem, but on a larger scale, paraphrasing might help. There are a huge number of images and themes to this text, but a few provide a reader with unifying strands of thought. Seek these out, collect them, and see how they all relate. In the case of ‘ Zone ,’ there are themes of memory, religion, spirituality, poverty, story-telling, and more.

What might the poet want to convey through the compression and expansion of these themes into a plotless string of images? Which lines stick out and how can you simplify them? Can they become representatives of larger sections of verse rather than a single line among dozens? While in the case of ‘ Zone ’ you might lose some detail, it will allow you to get to the heart of the larger connecting themes of Apollinaire’s poetry .

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A Guide to Paraphrasing Poetry, With Examples

Paraphrasing poetry is a common creative and academic exercise that helps you gain a greater understanding of the art form. Paraphrasing, or rewriting, a poem is often necessary for essays, research papers, exams, or other academic writing to analyze or demonstrate an understanding of the original work.

Poetry is deceptively complex for typically consisting of such short texts. Words and punctuation are used economically, and devices like syllable count, sound, and rhyme often play bigger roles than in other writing. Knowing how to write a poem takes a certain skill, and paraphrasing a poem is no different.

Capturing the essence of a poetic verse is no easy task, so in this article, we explain how to paraphrase a poem and offer techniques, tools, and examples to get you started.

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What is paraphrasing poetry?

Paraphrasing a poem is rewriting poetry in your own words while paying attention to word choice, rhythm, rhyming, and other poetic devices.

There are two ways to paraphrase a poem:

• Describe the poem in detail using prose or nonpoetic text to give readers a sense of what the original is like. Students employ this method of paraphrasing for academic writing assignments that call for both direct quotes and paraphrased prose in order to analyze a poem.
• Rewrite the poem line by line or stanza by stanza in a poetic style, retaining the ideas, themes, and structure of the original but using new words or metaphors. Paraphrasing a poem in this way can teach aspiring poets about advanced techniques and acts as a helpful creative practice.

No matter which method you use, you still need proper citations if you’re using someone else’s ideas—even if you use your own wording.

Summarizing poems vs. paraphrasing poems

When summarizing poems, you take the entire work or large portions of the work and describe them concisely . For example, a two-page poem could be summarized in just a few sentences. Conversely, a paraphrase of a poem is roughly the same length and uses the same level of detail as the portion you’re rewriting.

Paraphrasing a poem example

Original poem.

“Hope” (aka “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers ”), by Emily Dickinson

“Hope” is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all, And sweetest in the Gale is heard; And sore must be the storm That could abash the little bird That kept so many warm. I’ve heard it in the chillest land, And on the strangest sea; Yet, never, in extremity, It asked a crumb of me.

Prose paraphrase

In the first stanza, Dickinson compares the concept of hope to a bird, relentlessly singing, and sitting atop our soul rather than a tree. The second stanza continues the analogy, demonstrating the tenacity of hope by describing the rare type of storm that could silence this bird while underscoring the positive effects hope has had on numerous people. The third and final stanza concludes in the first-person point of view, as the author admits she too feels hopeful and expresses a seeming sense of gratitude that hope is effortless and free (Dickinson, 1891).

Poetic paraphrase

Hope is like a happy bird and to our souls it tends. It sings bird songs and melodies and that singing never ends [. . . ] (Dickinson, 1891)

Why paraphrasing a poem is different from other paraphrasing

Regardless of what type of poetry you’re paraphrasing, you have to pay close attention to the details. Paraphrasing poetry takes more than just swapping out words with synonyms—you also have to account for tone, mood, and even the sounds or number of syllables.

While other paraphrases focus more on word choice and order, paraphrasing poetry benefits from focusing on abstract elements like tone or atmosphere. Try to isolate the overarching meaning of the original poem and identify its key themes, metaphors, and other literary devices .

Step-by-step guide to paraphrasing a poem

1 read the poem multiple times for full understanding..

Before you start rewriting poems, it’s crucial to know them inside and out. Read and reread the poem to learn all you can about it, particularly its literary elements and structure. It also helps to take notes that you can use later.

2 Outline the major literary elements.

As you read the poem, try to identify the literary elements the poet uses: themes, events, imagery, metaphors, motifs, structure, etc. These literary devices will come in handy when you begin paraphrasing.

3 Rewrite or describe the poem from memory.

It can be difficult to get started with paraphrasing, especially when the original is right next to you. One helpful strategy is to rewrite or describe the poem from memory. This challenges you to come up with brand new phrasing to describe the poem because you probably won’t remember the original word-for-word.

4 Reread the poem and add missing parts or fix inaccuracies.

Rewriting from memory can help jump-start your creativity, but it shouldn’t be the final product. Chances are you missed some key parts from the original or perhaps made some minor mistakes that require fixing. In either case, take another look at the poem to find any issues with your paraphrase.

If you’re having trouble with certain parts of the rephrasing, you can also turn to Grammarly’s AI rewrites for suggestions on new phrasing. Grammarly’s free paraphrasing tool takes any excerpt under 500 characters and offers a few paraphrasing options for inspiration. Navigate responsible AI use with Grammarly’s  AI checker , trained to identify AI-generated text.

5 Revise the paraphrased poem.

Just like with other writing, the final step is to revise and proofread your work. Use Grammarly to check for clarity, conciseness, correct grammar, and more.

Paraphrasing a poem FAQs

Do you need to keep the same structure when paraphrasing poetry.

No, you can paraphrase a poem in prose writing, without worrying about lines, rhyming, or stanzas. However, rewriting poems line by line is a great creative writing practice, although it’s not necessary to do in formal writing.

How do you indicate the original lines or stanzas when rewriting poems?

If you are paraphrasing a single line in a poem, you can refer to it by its line number. Stanzas are a little trickier since they’re not usually numbered, but you can still state directly which stanza you’re referring to, as in “the second stanza” or “stanza 2.”

How do you cite sources when rewording poems?

Whether you’re rewriting poems, describing them, or quoting them directly, you need both an in-text citation and a full citation. The in-text citation is typically a parenthetical citation with the author’s name, date of publication, or page number placed in parentheses at the end of the passage. The full citation goes in the bibliography at the end of the work.

A Guide to Paraphrasing Poetry, With Examples

• Posted on July 12, 2024

Paraphrasing poetry involves rephrasing poems in your own words while retaining the original meanings and emotional depth. Engaging with poetry paraphrasing sharpens comprehension and critical thinking skills, enabling readers to delve deeper into the poetic works. 

This practice is not just about altering the words; it’s about understanding the essence of the poetry and conveying it effectively. Mastery in this area helps students and educators appreciate literary nuances and enhances their ability to communicate complex ideas. 

Therefore, learning to paraphrase poetry is essential for anyone looking to develop a profound connection with literature and improve their interpretative and analytical skills.

Understanding the Basics of Poetry

Exploring poetry requires grasping its fundamental components and the tools poets use to weave meaning and emotion into their work.

What Are the Key Elements of Poetry?

Poetry is a form of art that uses language to create emotional and intellectual responses. It’s more than just words strung together; it’s a way of using language in a condensed, focused, and musical way to evoke feelings, ideas, and experiences.

Here are the key elements that make up a poem:

• Structure and Form: This refers to how the poem is visually arranged on the page. Poems can be written in free verse, which has no set form or rhyme scheme, or in a specific form, like a sonnet or haiku . Rhyme Scheme: Rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyming sounds at the ends of lines of poetry. It can add to the poem’s musicality and help create a sense of unity and structure.
• Sound and Rhythm: These elements create a musical effect and can be used to emphasize certain words or phrases. Some sound devices include alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia.
• Figurative Language: This language is used non-literally to create a more vivid image or to express a complex idea more concisely. Some familiar figures of speech include metaphors, similes, personification, and symbolism.

How Do Poetic Devices Influence Meaning?

Poetic devices like metaphors, similes, and alliteration add layers of meaning and help convey complex emotions succinctly. These tools beautify the text and deepen the reader’s engagement by invoking imagination and evoking specific feelings. 

When paraphrasing poetry, recognizing these devices allows you to preserve the original poem’s depth and impact in your rephrased version.

Why is Paraphrasing Poetry Important?

Paraphrasing poetry enhances our grasp of language and its expressive power. It challenges us to think critically about what we read and hear.

Deeper Understanding

Paraphrasing compels readers to interpret every line and metaphor, which deepens their connection to the text. As you explore various meanings and nuances, you gain a more intimate understanding of the poet’s intentions and the work’s cultural context.

Improved Analysis

This technique improves analytical skills by requiring the paraphraser to distinguish between subtle shades of meaning. By engaging deeply with the text, readers develop a keen eye for literary techniques and structures, which is invaluable in academic and personal pursuits.

Enhancing Communication

Mastering poetry paraphrasing can significantly improve one’s ability to communicate complex ideas succinctly and effectively. Translating poetic language into everyday speech without losing its original impact teaches valuable clarity and precision skills applicable to all forms of communication.

The Process of Paraphrasing Poetry

Paraphrasing poetry requires a deep engagement with the text to capture its essence in new words. This section explains how to approach this nuanced task effectively.

• Understanding the Concept of Paraphrasing in Literary Contexts: Paraphrasing in literature involves more than changing words. It requires immersing oneself in the emotional and thematic layers of the poem, ensuring that the rephrased version reflects the original spirit and intent.
• Reading for Comprehensive Understanding: Start by reading the poem several times. Focus on understanding every word and phrase. Consider the poem’s context and possible intentions, which will guide accurate paraphrasing.
• Identifying Key Themes and Messages: Highlight the central themes and messages of the poem. These are the core elements that your paraphrase should convey, ensuring that the transformed text remains true to the original meanings.
• Avoiding Over-simplification: Avoid stripping away the depth that characterizes poetry while simplifying the language. Maintain the complexity of the poem’s ideas and imagery to preserve its literary value.
• Preserving the Poetic Essence and Style: Keep the poet’s style and tone in your paraphrase. Whether the poem is sad, joyful, or ironic, your wording should reflect these nuances, honoring the poet’s unique voice.

Step-by-Step Guide to Paraphrasing Poems

Mastering poetry paraphrasing demands a systematic approach to maintaining the integrity and depth of the original poem. Follow these detailed steps to paraphrase poetry effectively.

Following these steps, you can effectively paraphrase poetry while retaining its essence and beauty. This method helps in academic and educational settings and enhances your appreciation and understanding of poetry.

Step 1: Close Reading and Analysis

Begin with a close reading of the poem. Pay attention to every word, phrase, and punctuation mark. Analyze how these elements contribute to the overall impact of the poem. Consider the poem’s structure, the flow of ideas, and the emotions it evokes. This thorough understanding is crucial for effective paraphrasing.

Step 2: Identify Key Themes and Ideas

Extract the central themes and main ideas from the poem. These should guide your paraphrasing process, ensuring the poem’s essence remains intact even as the words change. Make notes on the motifs and messages essential to the poem’s core.

Step 3: Deconstruct Figurative Language (Metaphors, Similes, etc.)

Figurative language , such as metaphors and similes, enriches a poem’s meaning and emotional depth. Identify and understand these elements in their specific contexts. Consider what these figures of speech convey in the poem and how they can be effectively translated into your paraphrasing.

Step 4: Rephrasing in Your Own Words

Now, start rephrasing the poem. Use your vocabulary to express the original ideas and themes. Ensure your words reflect the intensity and nuances of the poem. Keep your language clear, but maintain the literary quality of the original.

Step 5: Maintain the Overall Meaning and Tone

It is vital to preserve the poem’s original tone and overall meaning. Whether the poem is sad, joyful, or contemplative, your paraphrased version should reflect the same mood. This alignment ensures the poem’s original beauty and impact are preserved.

Step 6: Focus on Clarity and Conciseness

Strive for clarity and conciseness in your paraphrasing. Remove ambiguity and ensure each line conveys its meaning directly and efficiently. However, ensure you do not oversimplify to lose the poem’s richness.

Step 7: Consider Rhyme and Rhythm (Optional)

While only sometimes necessary, maintaining the rhyme and rhythm can be beneficial, primarily if the original poem heavily relies on these elements for its effect. If you keep these aspects, find ways to integrate them smoothly without compromising the meaning or sounding forced.

Step 8: Proofread and Revise

Finally, proofread your paraphrased poem. Check for errors in grammar, punctuation, and style. Ensure that your version stands on its own as a coherent and engaging piece of poetry. Revise parts that do not align perfectly with the original’s spirit or could be more precise or powerful.

Examples of Paraphrased Poetry

Exploring real examples provides a clearer insight into the art of poetry paraphrase. 

Below are two examples illustrating how to paraphrase poetry, covering simple and complex poems effectively.

Before and After Example 1 (Simple Poem)

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When, all at once, I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

• By William Wordsworth

Paraphrased:

Alone, I moved like a cloud

Hovering above valleys and hills,

Suddenly, I glimpsed a group,

Many bright daffodils;

Next to the lake, under the trees,

Swaying and twirling with the wind.

This example shows how you can maintain the original imagery and sentiment of the poem while changing the words and phrasing to make the text your own.

Before and After Example 2 (Figurative Language)

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;

And sore must be the storm

That could abash the little bird

That kept so many warm.

• By Emily Dickinson

Hope is a bird with plumes

That rests within the soul,

It hums a melody wordless,

It never ceases to echo,

Its voice most tender in the storm;

So fierce must be the tempest

That would dismay this small bird

That has warmed so many.

In this example, the paraphrase preserves the metaphor of hope as a bird, subtly alters the language, and maintains the essence and poetic devices that Emily Dickinson employs, like internal rhyme and rhythm. 

These adaptations demonstrate how to keep the poetic and figurative language rich and intact while rephrasing.

Relevance of Contextual Analysis in Paraphrasing Poetry

Integrating broader literary and historical contexts into paraphrasing can enrich your understanding and interpretation. This deeper analysis helps ensure that your rephrasing maintains the richness and depth of the original poem.

Understanding the Poet’s Historical Background

Gain insights into the poet’s life and era. This knowledge can profoundly impact how you perceive and convey the themes and imagery in your paraphrase. Familiarity with the poet’s background allows you to capture the essence of the poem’s message, offering a more authentic and grounded interpretation.

Analyzing the Poem within Its Literary Movement

Examine the defining features of the literary movement associated with the poem. Whether it reflects the emotional intensity of Romanticism, the disillusionment of Modernism, or any other style, recognizing these influences can guide you in preserving the integrity and stylistic nuances of the original work in your paraphrase.

Considering the Influence of Cultural References

Identify and understand cultural references and allusions within the poem. Such insights are vital for grasping the full scope of the poem’s meaning. Awareness of these elements ensures that your paraphrase respects and reflects the poet’s intended messages, enhancing accuracy and depth.

Interpreting Symbolism and Metaphors with Context

Engage with the symbolism and metaphors in the poem, considering their historical and cultural relevance. This method allows you to reconstruct the layered meanings the poet intended accurately. A context-aware paraphrase stays faithful to the original text and resonates with the richness designed by its creator.

Mistakes to Avoid When Paraphrasing Poetry

Effective paraphrasing of poetry requires careful attention to detail to avoid common pitfalls. Recognizing these mistakes can significantly enhance your ability to create faithful and impactful paraphrases.

Oversimplification

Avoid reducing the poem’s depth when simplifying its language. Stripping too much detail can result in losing the nuanced meanings and emotional undertones that define the poem. Aim to balance simplicity with richness to preserve the poem’s original flavor and complexity.

Misinterpreting Figurative Language

Figurative language is a cornerstone of poetic expression, often conveying more than the literal meaning of the words. 

Misreading metaphors, similes, or symbolism can lead to a paraphrase that deviates significantly from the original intent. Ensure you fully understand these elements before attempting to rephrase them.

Introducing Unintended Meaning

In your effort to paraphrase, be cautious not to insert meanings that are not present in the original text. 

This can happen through the choice of words that carry different connotations or implications. Always cross-reference your paraphrase with the original to confirm that it reflects the intended themes and messages without adding extraneous elements.

Why Paraphrasing Poetry Matters

Mastery of poetry paraphrasing is crucial for students and educators as it fosters deeper literary comprehension and enhances analytical skills. By paraphrasing poetry, learners develop their ability to interpret complex texts and express subtle insights clearly and creatively. 

Encouraging ongoing exploration and practice in paraphrasing builds proficiency in language arts and enriches students’ appreciation of diverse poetic forms and themes. These skills are invaluable, offering a solid foundation for academic success and personal growth through a deeper connection with the art of poetry. 

This practice not only hones communication skills but also encourages a lifelong engagement with literature, allowing for continuous discovery and enjoyment.

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When it comes to studying literature, especially poetry, the ability to paraphrase a poem is often the only thing that can help you understand and, as a result, appreciate the text more. However, paraphrasing, or rephrasing a poem in your own words, is not just a mechanical exercise, as one might think. In reality, it requires a balance of keeping the original meaning, being able to decipher even the oldest, least recognizable words, and still do it in your own way.

Why Would You Need to Paraphrase a Poem?

Picture this : you’re sitting in your literature class, and the teacher announces a group discussion on Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” You’ve read the poem, but the words seem to dance around, not quite sticking in your mind. This is where paraphrasing comes to the rescue! Even though paraphrasing will not help you memorize the lines, it will give you that deeper understanding of the poem’s meaning, making it your own. This may sound a bit dramatic, but you do, in fact, internalize the ideas better, when you repeat them to yourself in your own way.

Now, imagine you’re preparing for an exam. You’ve got a list of poems to analyze, and time is ticking. Instead of cramming lines, you paraphrase. It’s like creating a cheat sheet, but for understanding, not for cheating (yes, we know it sounds cheesy). You’re distilling the essence of each poem, making it easier to recall and write about under the pressure of the ticking clock.

But it’s not all about exams and grades. Sometimes, you just want to feel the poetry, to connect with it on a personal level. Paraphrasing can be your bridge to that connection. It’s like having a heart-to-heart with the poet, where you say, “I see what you’re saying, and here’s my take on it.” It’s a conversation across time and space, facilitated by your own words.

Key Points to Keep in Mind When Paraphrasing

You may think that paraphrasing a poem should be somewhat similar to rephrasing a novel. You are right, for the major part. Yet, this process has its intricacies, mostly dictated by the specifics of the structure and tone of poetry. Thus, when you decide to start paraphrasing, several key considerations should be at the forefront of your mind. Here’s how to paraphrase a poem :

• Quoting vs. Paraphrasing While it’s tempting to rely on direct quotes, paraphrasing encourages a deeper engagement with the text. It’s about finding the balance between preserving the original meaning and infusing it with your unique voice. Still, if the task requires you to incorporate direct quotes, be sure to do that, as it can help save the poem’s initial message.
• Understanding the Poem Familiarity with the poem’s overall meaning is crucial. If you can’t grasp the gist of the poem, your paraphrase might miss the mark. So, before trying to paraphrase, read the text a few times. Maybe look online for some literary reviews of the poem you are reading. This will ensure you aren’t messing with the original author’s intentions.
• Oral Rephrasing Try reciting the poem in your own words aloud first. This can help you internalize the message and find a natural way to express it.
• Imagining the Meaning Visualize the poem’s imagery and themes. Can you rewrite the ideas you evoked in your mind? This exercise can enhance your understanding and creativity in paraphrasing.

How Do You Paraphrase a Poem?

Academic paraphrase of a poem is a step-by-step process that requires patience and attention to detail. Below we include a guide to help you structure your work effectively.

Read and Understand

First things first, you’ve got to get cozy with the poem. Read it once, twice, thrice, or as many times as it takes for the words to start playing in your head like a catchy tune. Pay attention to the message, the mood, and the little nuances that make the poem tick.

Now, grab your highlighter or pencil and start marking up the poem like it’s a treasure map. Look for keywords, phrases, or images that stand out. These are the gems you’ll use to reconstruct the poem in your own words. Think of it as picking out the ingredients for a recipe: you need to know what you’re working with.

Break It Down

Here’s where you put on your detective hat and start dissecting the poem into manageable chunks. Whether it’s line by line or stanza by stanza, breaking it down makes the task less daunting.

Use Your Own Words

Now, the fun part! Take each piece of the poem and rewrite it in your own words. Keep the essence, but add your flavor. It’s like singing a cover of a song; you’re keeping the tune but adding your own style. Don’t worry if it’s not perfect on the first try – it’s all part of the process.

Maintain the Tone

As you paraphrase, don’t forget to keep the mood of the poem intact. If it’s a somber poem, your paraphrase shouldn’t sound like a party invitation. Here, you want to keep the vibe consistent.

Review and Revise

Finally, it’s time to polish your paraphrase. Compare it with the original poem and make sure you’ve captured the essence without losing the meaning. Just make sure everything looks right.

How Do You Paraphrase a Stanza?

A stanza is a grouped set of lines within a poem, often separated by a space from other stanzas, much like a paragraph in prose. To paraphrase a stanza effectively:

• Identify the Core Idea: Determine the main theme or message of the stanza. For example, in the first stanza of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (which we paraphrase below), the core idea is about facing a choice between two paths in a wood .
• Reword Line by Line: Rewrite each line in your own words, ensuring you maintain the original meaning. In this case, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” could be rephrased as “In an autumn forest, two paths split apart.”
• Check for Cohesion: Ensure that your paraphrased lines flow smoothly and cohesively, mirroring the original stanza’s structure. If the original stanza has a certain rhythm or rhyme scheme, try to keep that vibe in your paraphrase.

What is paraphrasing in poetry?

Paraphrasing in poetry is the process of rewording a poem or a stanza in your own words while maintaining the original meaning and essence. Basically, you translate the poet’s thoughts and emotions into words that are easier to grasp. This process requires a deep understanding of the poem, as well as creativity and sensitivity to the nuances of language and imagery.

Why is it important to paraphrase a poem?

Paraphrasing a poem is important since it helps you engage more deeply with the text. It’s a way of peeling back the layers of a poem to uncover its core meaning and themes. While paraphrasing, you’re not just passively reading the words, but rather actively interpreting and reimagining them. This process can enhance your appreciation of the poetry, improve your analytical skills, and make the poem more accessible and relatable to you and others.

What are the benefits of using a paraphrasing tool for poems?

Using a reword generator for poems can offer several benefits. First, it can save time by quickly generating alternative wordings. Second, it can provide a fresh perspective, suggesting new ways to express the same ideas. Third, it can help you overcome writer’s block by offering different linguistic options. However, it’s important to use these tools consciously and not rely solely on them, as they may not capture the subtleties and emotional depth of the original poem.

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How Does Paraphrasing Help Readers Understand Poetry?

Anika Mehta

• April 30, 2024

Paraphrasing is a tool used to restate poems in simpler words. This helps make the poem’s meaning clearer, especially if the original text is complex or has old language.

In this article, we will discuss how paraphrasing breaks down complicated poetry into simpler forms. We’ll explore how it aids in understanding the deeper meanings and feelings behind a poet’s words, making poetry more accessible and enjoyable for everyone.

Why is it important to paraphrase the poem?

Paraphrasing a poem helps us understand it better. It’s like rewording the poem in our own simple language. This makes the deep or complex ideas in the poem clear and easier to enjoy and discuss.

When we paraphrase, we also get to appreciate the poem’s beauty in a new way. We can see how the poet plays with words and expresses feelings. It’s a bit like translating a song into a new version that still keeps the original tune and emotion.

Doing this is important for students and anyone who loves poetry. It builds our skills in language and lets us dive deeper into the art of poetry. This way, poems become more than just words, they become stories and emotions we can all relate to and learn from.

How does paraphrasing a poem make it easier to understand?

Paraphrasing a poem means rewriting it in simpler words. This helps to make the poem’s message clearer. When we paraphrase, we focus on the main ideas and feelings in the poem.

We use everyday language that’s easy to understand. This makes the poem’s meaning more accessible, especially if the original language is complex or old-fashioned.

Turning a poem into simpler language also lets us explore its themes in a new way. It’s like translating the poem’s emotions and ideas into words that are more familiar to us.

By doing this, we can connect more deeply with the poem. It becomes something we can relate to and understand better.

How paraphrasing and Summarising can help readers to better understand and appreciate a poem?

Paraphrasing 

Paraphrasing and summarizing are powerful tools for understanding and appreciating poetry. When you paraphrase a poem, you restate it in your own words, which can clarify complex language or imagery.

This process makes the poem’s ideas more accessible, especially if the original text uses archaic language or dense metaphors. It’s like unwrapping a layered gift, revealing the core message in simpler terms.

Summarizing

Summarizing, on the other hand, involves condensing the poem to its essential points or themes. This helps in grasping the overall message or emotional essence of the poem without getting lost in the details. It’s like viewing a map of a journey, providing a clear overview of the terrain the poem covers.

Together, paraphrasing and summarizing allow readers to digest and internalize the poem’s content more easily.

This deeper understanding can lead to greater appreciation, as readers are better equipped to recognize the nuances, emotions, and artistry in the poet’s work.

By simplifying and focusing on the key elements, these techniques make poetry more approachable and enjoyable.

Does paraphrasing help with understanding?

Paraphrasing can indeed aid in understanding. It involves rewording information in your own style while keeping the original meaning. This process requires you to think deeply about what you’ve read or heard, leading to better comprehension.

When you put ideas into your own words, it confirms if you’ve truly grasped the concept. Moreover, paraphrasing is a tool for simplifying complex ideas. By rephrasing something in simpler terms, you make it more accessible to a wider audience.

It’s especially helpful in teaching or explaining things to others. When they hear an idea in plain language, it becomes easier for them to understand and remember.

What is paraphrasing and how does it apply to poetry?

Paraphrasing in poetry involves rewording the lines or stanzas in simpler, more straightforward language while retaining the original meaning. This process helps readers break down complex poetic structures, unfamiliar language, or dense imagery, making the poem more accessible and easier to understand.

Can paraphrasing affect the emotional impact of a poem?

Yes, paraphrasing can sometimes alter the emotional impact of a poem. While it simplifies the language, it may strip away some of the nuances, rhythm, and lyrical qualities that contribute to the poem’s emotional depth.

Does paraphrasing poetry help in analyzing its themes and symbols?

Absolutely. Paraphrasing can uncover the layers of meaning in a poem, making themes and symbols more apparent. By translating the poem into simpler language, readers can more easily identify and understand the recurring motifs.

Paraphrasing a poem helps grasp its essence and conveys its message more clearly. It simplifies complex language, making the poem accessible to a wider audience.

Toolv.io ‘s paraphrasing tool offers a user-friendly way to achieve this. By rewording poems without losing their original intent, it opens up the beauty of poetry to everyone, encouraging appreciation and understanding.

For more information about how to convert text to speech, click our  how to convert text to speech  post. For free text to speech tools click on our f ree text to speech tool  post.

About Author

Dr. Anika Mehta is a renowned expert in computational linguistics. After completing her PhD at Cambridge, she worked with leading tech companies to develop advanced NLP tools. Her work in speech recognition and AI-driven text analysis has been published in several high-impact journals. Anika is passionate about making language technology accessible and frequently speaks at international conferences about the ethical use of AI in language processing.

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How to Paraphrase a Poem: A 5 Step-by-Step Guide

There are times when you may need to paraphrase a poem. If you want to know how to paraphrase a poem, read on.

Paraphrasing involves rewriting the words of another author in your own words. Getting it right is a skill. While you want to be careful not to use words that are too similar to the source to avoid being accused of plagiarism, you also need to ensure that the original text’s meaning remains intact. In academic writing, paraphrasing is a useful tool that allows you to reference the work of others without having to quote their work directly.

Why you would paraphrase sections of an article, essay, or novel is clear. But why would one paraphrase a poem? Read on to see our step-by-step guide outlining how to paraphrase a poem correctly.

Why Would You Paraphrase a Poem?

1. carefully read through the poem a few times, 2. analyze the poem, 3. recite the poem in your own words, 4. start writing, 5. proofread your work.

If you’ve ever had to write an essay at college or university, you’ll be well-versed in the art of paraphrasing. Paraphrasing the words of another scholar or academic allows one to incorporate their research into your work skillfully. Apart from demonstrating that you’ve adequately understood your source material, paraphrasing also makes for writing that flows well. Your work reads more smoothly if you paraphrase than constantly insert direct quotes.

As you will undoubtedly know, paraphrasing other people’s words is OK as long as you reference their work. In the academic world, plagiarism is not allowed in any case. 

Here are a few reasons for paraphrasing a poem:

• For your understanding: Many regard poetry as the most difficult literary form. This is because poems often contain figurative language, which is dense and challenging to unpack. By paraphrasing a poem in your own words, you can ensure that you clearly understand the figurative phrases and have grasped the meaning the poet is trying to convey.
• To save space: you may need to reference a piece of poetry in an essay; paraphrasing allows you to do this without including the whole poem
• When writing about a poem: As is the case with any other literary forms, such as novels or short stories, you need to refer to the content of a poem when you’re writing about it. Since you don’t always want to quote directly from a poem, you may choose to paraphrase lines from time to time.
• When trying to explain a poem: Paraphrasing a poem effectively conveys its meaning. If you’ve grasped a poem and try to help somebody else understand it, paraphrasing the poem’s lines in easy-to-understand, everyday language is a useful method.

You might also want to learn about a refrain in poems .

How To Paraphrase a Poem

The first step you need to take when paraphrasing somebody else’s words are to read their work carefully. This is especially important when paraphrasing a poem since this literary form is notoriously difficult to interpret. Ensure you grasp the meaning and feel a deep understanding of the themes and meanings of the poem before you begin paraphrasing.

Next, you need to go thoroughly analyze the poetry. This means that you should go through the poem line by line. Look up words in the dictionary that you don’t understand and carefully unpack similes, metaphors, symbolic sections, and other figurative phrases. Also, consider the poem’s structure since poetry often is just as important for meaning as the content. In addition, think about the period in which the poem was written and how this may have influenced how the poet has chosen to construct their work.

Once you’re quite certain that you understand all aspects of the poem, it’s time to start using your own words. Depending on how you plan to refer to the poem in your written work, you may choose to paraphrase line by line or in larger chunks, such as stanzas or sections. Before writing down your words, it makes sense first to recite them. Try to use common everyday language and keep things as simple as possible. The aim is not to create beautiful or ornate phrases but to reveal the essential meaning of a dense literary work in plain language.

After reciting your paraphrased version of the entire poem or sections of the poem, it’s time to put pen to paper. Since you’ve probably recited different versions of your own words by this point, you should have a clear idea of how you’d like to paraphrase various lines or sections of the poem.

If you get stuck, remember that one of the first steps you want to take is to write down the literal meaning of the poet’s words. For instance, Shakespeare’s line “If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head,” can be paraphrased as “Her hair is coarse and dry instead of silky and soft.”

Also, while poets often condense their content to fit within the rhythm and meter of the poem, you are not limited by such constraints. It’s not that tricky to paraphrase poetic lines in your own words when you can fill in the spaces and missing words that a poet has consciously omitted. Since you’re rewriting a poem in prose form, remember that your paraphrased version should consist of full sentences.

Once you’ve completed your paraphrased version of the poem, you should proofread your work. First, read through your paraphrased version line by line or section by section, and double-check that you’ve captured the original work’s meaning. This is very important. Whether you’re using your paraphrased words in an essay or to explain the poem to students, it’s essential that you accurately portray the meaning the poet worked so hard to bring across.

Here are a few other things to look out for:

• Avoid overuse of synonyms: While it’s OK to replace the occasional word with its synonym, you should guard against using synonyms as your sole method of paraphrasing. When paraphrasing someone else’s words, you need to demonstrate that you understand the work by completely rewriting lines or sections in your own words. Rewriting original lines and just replacing some words with their synonyms constitutes plagiarism.
• Changing word order is not paraphrasing: Although this is a trick often employed by lazy students, simply shuffling the word order of a line does not equate to paraphrasing. Again, you need to rewrite the other author’s words in your own words. Otherwise, you are plagiarizing. In addition, simply rearranging the words of another author serves no purpose.
• Use the same point-of-view: Remember to retain the point-of-view of the original work when you’re paraphrasing. For instance, if a poem utilizes the first-person point-of-view, your paraphrased version should also be in the first person. For instance, the line “While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping” can be paraphrased as “While I was falling asleep I suddenly heard a tapping sound.”
• Avoid adding your ideas: You should stay true to the original work when paraphrasing. While you should use your own words, avoid changing the original content or adding any of your ideas or opinions.
• Make sure to reference the original source : You must reference the origins of the poetry and credit the author, even when paraphrasing.

For more, check out our roundup of the best grammar checkers .

• Paraphrasing Tools
• How to Avoid Plagiarism
• How to Paraphrase Poetry: A Step-by-Step Guide with Examples

Paraphrasing poetry involves restating the poem’s content in your own words while maintaining the original meaning and tone. To paraphrase a poem means to rephrase the text, simplifying complex language and clarifying intricate ideas without altering the poem’s essence. This skill is particularly useful for gaining a deeper understanding of poetic works and for conveying interpretations in a more accessible manner.

The importance of paraphrasing poetry in literary analysis and academic writing cannot be overstated. It helps students and scholars to grasp the nuances of a poem, facilitating a better appreciation of its themes, structure, and stylistic devices. Paraphrasing also aids in avoiding plagiarism, as it requires you to process and express the poem’s ideas independently. Additionally, tools like Grammarly paraphrasing can support this process by suggesting alternative phrasings and ensuring clarity.

The objectives of this guide are to provide a clear and systematic approach to paraphrasing poetry, offer practical steps and examples to illustrate the process, and highlight common mistakes to avoid. By following this guide, you will learn how to paraphrase a poem effectively, enhancing your ability to analyze and write about poetry with greater confidence and precision.

Understanding Paraphrasing in Poetry

Definition of paraphrasing in the context of poetry.

Paraphrasing in poetry involves restating the poem’s content in your own words while preserving the original meaning, tone, and nuances. To paraphrase a poem means to rephrase its lines to make the underlying messages clearer and more accessible. This process often involves breaking down complex language, figurative expressions, and dense imagery into simpler, more straightforward terms.

Differences Between Paraphrasing Poetry and Prose

• Poetry:  Often uses figurative language, metaphor, and symbolic imagery that requires careful interpretation.
• Prose:  Typically employs more straightforward and literal language.
• Paraphrasing Poetry:  Involves deciphering and rephrasing metaphorical language and maintaining the emotional and thematic essence.
• Paraphrasing Prose:  Focuses on simplifying and clarifying the content without the need to interpret symbolic meanings.
• Poetry:  Has a distinct form, rhythm, and sometimes rhyme, which contribute to its meaning and impact.
• Prose:  Generally follows a standard grammatical structure without a specific rhythmic pattern.
• Paraphrasing Poetry:  Requires attention to maintaining the flow and musicality where possible, even in a simplified form.
• Paraphrasing Prose:  Concentrates on conveying information clearly and concisely without the need for rhythmic consistency.
• Poetry:  Condenses deep emotions and complex themes into a compact form, often using fewer words.
• Prose:  Typically elaborates on themes and emotions with detailed explanations.
• Paraphrasing Poetry:  Involves extracting and restating these condensed emotions and themes in a more expansive and accessible manner.
• Paraphrasing Prose:  Focuses on summarizing detailed explanations without losing essential information.

Benefits of Paraphrasing Poetry

• Paraphrasing helps break down complex poetic language, making it easier to grasp the poet’s intended meaning.
• Encourages deeper engagement with the text, fostering a more profound appreciation of its themes and nuances.
• The process of paraphrasing requires close reading and careful interpretation, enhancing analytical and critical thinking skills.
• Helps in identifying key literary devices and understanding their significance within the poem.
• Paraphrasing allows you to express the ideas and themes of a poem in your own words, making it easier to discuss and write about poetry in academic settings.
• Aids in explaining complex poems to others, facilitating better communication and discussion.
• By rephrasing the poem’s content, you ensure that you are not merely copying the original text, thus maintaining academic integrity.
• Tools like Grammarly paraphrasing can assist in this process, suggesting alternative phrasings and ensuring that the paraphrased content is original.

By understanding the nuances of paraphrasing in the context of poetry, you can develop a valuable skill that enhances both your comprehension and communication of poetic works. This foundational knowledge is essential as you learn how to paraphrase a poem effectively, ensuring that you maintain the integrity and richness of the original text.

Steps for Paraphrasing Poetry

Step 1: read and understand the poem.

Techniques for Reading Poetry Effectively:

• Read Aloud:  Reading the poem aloud helps you grasp its rhythm, tone, and emotional impact.
• Multiple Readings:  Read the poem several times to fully understand its meaning and nuances.
• Annotate:  Make notes on the poem, underlining or highlighting key phrases, unfamiliar words, and significant imagery.
• Context:  Research the poet and the context in which the poem was written to gain additional insights.

Identifying Key Themes and Messages:

• Theme:  Determine the central ideas or themes of the poem. What is the poet trying to convey?
• Imagery:  Identify the main images and symbols used in the poem. How do they contribute to the overall meaning?
• Tone and Mood:  Pay attention to the tone (the poet’s attitude) and the mood (the feeling evoked in the reader).
• Structure:  Look at the poem’s structure. How do the stanzas, line breaks, and rhyme scheme affect its meaning?

Step 2: Break Down the Poem

Analyzing Stanza by Stanza or Line by Line:

• Stanza Analysis:  Break the poem into stanzas and analyze each one separately. What is the main idea of each stanza?
• Line Analysis:  For more detailed analysis, examine each line. What does each line contribute to the poem’s overall meaning?

Highlighting Difficult Words and Phrases:

• Vocabulary:  Identify and look up any difficult or unfamiliar words.
• Phrases:  Highlight any complex phrases or metaphors. Consider their literal and figurative meanings.
• Interpretation:  Write down your interpretations of these words and phrases. How do they fit into the context of the poem?

Step 3: Rewrite in Your Own Words

Simplifying Language and Maintaining Meaning:

• Restate:  Rewrite each stanza or line in simpler language, ensuring you retain the original meaning and tone.
• Clarify:  Clarify any metaphors or symbols, translating them into straightforward language while preserving their essence.
• Consistency:  Maintain the overall theme and message of the poem in your paraphrase.

Avoiding Plagiarism While Paraphrasing:

• Originality:  Ensure that your paraphrase is genuinely in your own words and not just a rearrangement of the original text.
• Credit:  Always credit the original poem and poet when using paraphrased content in your work.
• Tools:  Use tools like Grammarly paraphrasing to check for unintentional plagiarism and to refine your rephrased content.

Example of Paraphrasing

Original Line:  “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,”

Paraphrased Line:  “The forest is beautiful, with a dark and profound quality,”

By following these steps, you can effectively paraphrase a poem, transforming complex poetic language into clear, accessible prose while preserving the original meaning and emotional impact. This process not only aids in understanding and analyzing poetry but also enhances your ability to communicate your interpretations in academic writing.

Examples of Paraphrased Poems

Example 1: classic poem.

Original Poem:  “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Paraphrased Version with Explanation:  In a forest filled with yellow leaves, two paths split. Regrettably, I couldn’t travel both, so as one traveler, I stood there for a long time, examining one path as far as I could see until it curved into the bushes.

Then I chose the other path, which seemed just as good, perhaps even better, since it was grassy and less worn. However, both paths had been traveled similarly.

That morning, both paths were covered in untrodden leaves. I saved the first path for another day, but knowing how one path leads to another, I doubted I would ever return.

In the future, with a sigh, I will say that two roads diverged in a forest, and I chose the one less traveled, and that has made all the difference.

Explanation:  This paraphrase simplifies Frost’s complex language while maintaining the poem’s message about choices and their impacts on life. The original poem’s metaphors and imagery are translated into straightforward language, making the themes of decision-making and individuality clear.

Example 2: Modern Poem

Original Poem:  “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

Paraphrased Version with Explanation:  Some people believe the world will end in fire, while others think it will end in ice. Based on my experiences with desire, I agree with those who think it will be fire. But if the world were to end twice, I understand enough about hate to know that ice would also be a powerful force of destruction and would be enough.

Explanation:  This paraphrase simplifies Frost’s poetic language while retaining the poem’s exploration of human emotions like desire and hate. The paraphrased version makes the poem’s contemplation of the world’s end more accessible by translating metaphorical expressions into clear, straightforward language.

By examining these examples, you can see how paraphrasing poetry involves breaking down complex poetic language and imagery into simpler terms while preserving the original meaning and emotional impact. This practice not only enhances comprehension but also improves the ability to communicate nuanced interpretations in a clear and concise manner.

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Paraphrasing poetry requires careful attention to detail and a deep understanding of the original text. Here are some common mistakes people make when paraphrasing poetry and tips on how to avoid them.

Misinterpreting the Original Meaning

Common Mistake:

• Misunderstanding the poet’s intended message, themes, or emotions can lead to a paraphrase that distorts the original poem.
• Example: Interpreting a metaphor literally instead of figuratively, resulting in an incorrect interpretation.

How to Avoid:

• Close Reading:  Carefully read the poem multiple times to grasp its full meaning.
• Contextual Research:  Research the historical, cultural, and biographical context of the poem to better understand its themes and references.
• Consult Literary Resources:  Use annotations, literary critiques, and discussions to clarify difficult passages and gain insights into the poem’s deeper meanings.

Losing the Essence of the Poem

• Failing to capture the tone, mood, or emotional impact of the original poem, resulting in a paraphrase that lacks the original’s emotional depth.
• Example: Paraphrasing a sorrowful poem in a way that makes it sound neutral or unemotional.
• Emotional Awareness:  Pay close attention to the emotions conveyed by the poem and ensure your paraphrase reflects these feelings.
• Tone Matching:  Try to maintain the tone of the original poem in your paraphrase. If the poem is somber, your paraphrase should reflect that somberness.
• Practice and Compare:  Regularly practice paraphrasing and compare your versions with the original to see if you have maintained the emotional and tonal essence.

Over-simplifying Complex Ideas

• Reducing complex themes, metaphors, and imagery to overly simplistic interpretations, losing the richness of the original poem.
• Example: Turning a vivid, symbolic description into a plain, uninteresting statement.
• Balance Simplicity and Depth:  While paraphrasing should simplify the language, it should not strip away the poem’s complexity.
• Detail Retention:  Retain key details and nuances that convey the poem’s deeper meanings.
• Synonym Caution:  Choose synonyms carefully to ensure they do not alter the poem’s meaning or diminish its impact.

Tips for Avoiding These Mistakes

• Analyze the poem in depth before paraphrasing. Understand both the literal and figurative meanings of each line.
• Research the background of the poem, including the poet’s life, the historical period, and the cultural context.
• When substituting words, select synonyms that preserve the original meaning and tone. Avoid words that drastically change the context or feeling.
• Try to keep the structure and flow of ideas similar to the original poem. This helps maintain the poem’s rhythm and coherence.
• Compare your paraphrase with the original poem to ensure it accurately represents the poem’s meaning, tone, and complexity. Revise as necessary.
• Share your paraphrase with peers, teachers, or literary forums to get feedback. Others might catch nuances or meanings you missed.
• The more you practice paraphrasing poetry, the better you will become at capturing the essence and complexity of the original works.

By understanding and avoiding these common mistakes, you can improve your ability to paraphrase poetry effectively. This will enhance your understanding of poetic works and enable you to communicate your interpretations with greater clarity and precision.

Table of Contents

• Mastering Paraphrasing: Your Comprehensive Step-by-Step Guide
• How to Write a Blog Post
• Summarizing vs. Paraphrasing: Mastering the Art of Effective Writing

Poetry & Poets

Explore the beauty of poetry – discover the poet within

How To Paraphrase Poetry

Understand the Poem

When paraphrasing a poem, the first step to take is to become familiar with the poem and its structure. Understanding its content is essential, as it allows you to rephrase the poem in your own words. Focus on key elements of the poem and make a list of these. This can be words, phrases, concepts and images.

Read and reread the poem. Take notes on how the poem is structured. Is the poem written in a particular kind of meter? Is its language structured in a specific way? Be aware of its nuances; look for puns and wordplay, metaphors and figurative language, symbolism and irony.

Think about the poem’s theme and its tone. What message is the poet trying to convey? What emotions is the poem trying to evoke? To properly paraphrase a poem, it’s crucial to know these things on an intimate level.

Brainstorm Ideas

Once you have a good understanding of the poem, the next step of paraphrasing is to come up with ideas. Often the best way to do this is to brainstorm. By taking some time to brainstorm, you can begin to think of different ways to express what the poem is saying.

On a piece of paper, jot down some of the key words and concepts from the poem. Deconstruct the poem’s structure and put it back together in your own words. Resist the urge to copy the meaning directly; think about what could be written that conveys the same general meaning.

Brainstorm possible word choices that could effectively rephrase the poem in other ways. Then, group these words and ideas together. As your brainstorming session progresses, you should get closer to coming up with a rephrased version of the poem.

Write Your Paraphrase

Now that you have some ideas down on paper, it’s time to get to work on actually writing your paraphrase. Like any piece of writing, break it up into manageable chunks. Take the poem, one line at a time, and begin to draft the paraphrased version.

Keep the poem’s structure and meaning in mind as you go. As you write, try to explain the content more in-depth. The poem isn’t likely to be long in length, so you’ll want to provide as much detail as possible. Additionally, stay as close to the author’s original meaning as possible.

As your draft nears completion, work to ensure it reads smoothly and is easy to understand. You may want to undertake a few drafts before you find what works for you. By doing so, the rephrased poem will read similarly to the original, and still accurately capture the essence of what it was conveying.

Check & Edit Your Paraphrase

Once you’re satisfied with your draft, it’s time to check and edit. Being a poet’s work, the poem is probably quite concise. This can make it very difficult to re-phrase without using some of the same words. Thus, a plagiarism check is the best way to ensure that your work is unique and different.

Also, it’s a good idea to have someone else read over your paraphrase. Doing so will help to ensure it mirrors the original meaning while still being completely original and different. Furthermore, if a new reader isn’t familiar with the original poem, having them read over the paraphrase can gauge how well it stands on its own.

Compare and Contrast the Paraphrase to the Original

It’s also helpful to compare the poem and its paraphrase side by side. This enables you to identify key phrases and strive to keep the original emotion and message. You can also take this opportunity to make any necessary edits or changes that may still need to be done.

Seeing the two versions of the poem written out together can help ensure that the paraphrase remains true to the original. Take note of the similarities and differences. If something seems off, make the appropriate changes so that the essence of the poem is not lost.

Understand How Paraphrasing Differs from Quoting

When paraphrasing, it is important to recognize the difference between paraphrasing and quoting. Quoting is simply recalling the original words, while paraphrasing is the act of restating the essential ideas using your own words. While quoting can be helpful in certain instances, it is not the same as paraphrasing.

Quoting does not add to the conversation and does not show understanding of the poem. Quoting phrases from the poem within your own words can come off as trying to pass off the poet’s original words as your own. Thus, it is best to avoid quoting in a paraphrased poem.

Understand the Legalities of Paraphrasing

It is also essential to understand the legal implications of paraphrasing a poem. Paraphrasing can present legal issues if it’s too close to the original. In some cases, proper citation may be needed due to cases of plagiarism.

To maintain legality, make sure the new version of the poem is clearly credited to the poet and has clear distinctions from the original. Additionally, try to make sure you’re not infringing on the poet’s copyright. With plagiarism out of the way, you can rest assured knowing the paraphrase is both legal and respectful.

Know When to Stop

Once you’ve gone through all of these steps, you’re almost done. The last step is knowing when to stop. If you overthink your paraphrase and try to change too much, the meaning can begin to drift away from the original. If this happens, it will no longer accurately represent the original poem.

If you find yourself doing too much, it’s best to take a step back and assess the changes. It might be best to return to previous drafts and make slight changes. Remember, you’re trying to capture the essence of the poem without changing its core message.

Set Apart Your Paraphrase from Original

Of course, your final paraphrase needs to be distinct from the original. Through creativity, you want to try to express the same meaning differently. This can be done through word choice or through revising the structure of the poem. Both elements should be changed so that it’s clear that the poem is being paraphrased.

Above all, the poem should evoke the same feelings in the reader as the original. By understanding the poem and making sure it reads differently, you can succeed in effectively paraphrasing a poem.

Minnie Walters

Minnie Walters is a passionate writer and lover of poetry. She has a deep knowledge and appreciation for the work of famous poets such as William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and many more. She hopes you will also fall in love with poetry!

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Article Contents

I. what is a paraphrase, ii. the limits of paraphrase, iii. pragmatics, metaphor and the limits of meaning, iv. conclusion.

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Poetry and the Possibility of Paraphrase

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Gregory Currie, Jacopo Frascaroli, Poetry and the Possibility of Paraphrase, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Volume 79, Issue 4, Fall 2021, Pages 428–439, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpab040

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Why is there a long-standing debate about paraphrase in poetry? Everyone agrees that paraphrase can be useful; everyone agrees that paraphrase is no substitute for the poem itself. What is there to disagree about? Perhaps this: whether paraphrase can specify everything that counts as a contribution to the meaning of a poem. There are, we say, two ways to take the question; on one way of taking it, the answer is that paraphrase cannot. Does this entail that there is meaning mysteriously locked in a poem, meaning that cannot be represented in any way other than via the poem itself? If that were so it would have profound implications for poetry’s capacity to convey insight. We suggest reasons for thinking that the entailment does not hold. Throughout, we connect the traditional debate over paraphrase, which has largely been conducted within the fields of philosophy and literary theory, with recent empirically oriented thinking about the communicability of meaning, represented by work in pragmatics. We end with a suggestion about what is to count as belonging to meaning, and what as merely among the things that determine meaning.

What is at stake when people debate the heresy of paraphrase? That paraphrase is sometimes useful? No one denies that. That a paraphrase may substitute for the poem itself? It certainly can, given the right preferences. If I am indifferent between a raven and a writing desk the one will substitute for the other. In that sense, anything can substitute for anything. But for someone who wants to experience the poem—and that is the relevant preference in this context—the paraphrase will not do. Surely no one has claimed otherwise. 1

We think there is a debate to be had. It concerns whether there are elements of meaning which can be expressed only through the poem; poetic contents, that is, which are unparaphrasable. In philosophy and literary criticism, this idea has traditionally been presented as a thesis of the “unity of form and content”: the idea that in poetry form and content, what is said and how it is said, are one, and that, consequently, there is no way to convey the content of a poem or passage in any form other than its own. 2 As Peter Lamarque puts it, “relative to an interest in poetry as poetry, there can essentially only be one way in which a work’s content can be expressed: content-identity is lost under any different form” (2009, 410–11). Those who hold views of this kind may not think that all the meaning of a poem resists paraphrase; Cleanth Brooks, the inventor of the phrase “the heresy of paraphrase,” thought that paraphrase has its uses, but that “the paraphrase is not the real core of meaning which constitutes the essence of the poem” (1970 [1947], 197), suggesting that there is always some bit of meaning which resists paraphrase. We call this idea the incompletability of paraphrase , or IP ; we shall see that it comes in two versions: a true but innocuous version and a threatening version that is, according to us, false. 3 We say this hesitantly, aware that a number of unclarities stand in the way of resolving the issue in a satisfactory way. One of the things we will do is illustrate these difficulties.

This is a debate with some significance for our thinking about what poetry can teach us. If there are things that can be meaningfully conveyed only in the way the poet said them, the poet and the poem gain an epistemic status denied to other kinds of discourse, notably science and philosophy. Conversely, as Peter Kivy points out, “If the content of the poem could be paraphrased, then that paraphrase would inevitably fall into one of the categories of human knowledge populated by resident authorities who perforce would outrank the poet in expertise” (1997, 91). 4 It is also a debate that, we will argue, needs to move beyond traditional claims from literary theorists and philosophers about the inseparability of form and meaning to encompass recent work in the theory of communication. We consider some of that work in Sections II and III of this article.

We take a paraphrase to be any attempt to convey the meaning or part of the meaning of a poem. This way of understanding paraphrase has two important implications. First, a paraphrase need not be successful, wholly or even in part; a paraphrase may fail completely to elucidate a poem’s meaning. Not all paraphrases are good; some are terrible. Secondly, a paraphrase is not a set of propositions or sentences but is the intentional production or utterance of certain sentences which may (or may not) encode certain propositions. Like any utterance, a paraphrase has the capacity to communicate meaning which is not encoded; what is uttered may need pragmatic enrichment before it expresses anything truth conditional, and it may carry implicatures. This will be important later.

Paraphrase aims to specify meaning. One problem, then, is the difficulty of saying what, in general, counts as meaning in poetry and what as something else; this problem will dog our inquiry throughout. Poems generally have meaning in the minimal sense of being composed of meaningful words. But paraphrase is not usually thought of as the project of explaining the meanings of the poem’s words, though it might occasionally explain an unusual or invented word. Here we give some examples which indicate the variety of ways one may contribute to the project of paraphrasing a poem (we do not endorse or reject any of the examples; they are merely illustrative):

The narrative of Elizabeth Barrett’s Aurora Leigh ends with Aurora and Romney united.

“Great Tom” in Anthony Thwaite’s poem At High Table refers to the bell of Tom Tower, Christchurch.

The words of At High Table are spoken by a fictional Oxford don in the middle of the nineteenth century.

In “Hope” is the Thing with Feathers Dickinson tells us that hope is ever present in the human heart.

In Corinna’s going a-Maying Herrick stresses “the clash between the Christian and pagan world views; or, rather, while celebrating the pagan view, he refuses to suppress references to the Christian” ( Brooks 1970 [1947 ], 69).

The order of these remarks corresponds roughly to what we may think of as their obviousness; by the time we get to (5) the paraphraser is doing real work, and not everyone will agree with the result. We count them all as contributions to paraphrase: they are attempts to identify some part of what the poem means, even in cases where the rest of us feel we know it already. 5 We can also see from this small set of examples that there is no one logical form or speech act register for the utterances in a paraphrase. Some of the examples given may be understood as straightforward assertions: the paraphraser asserts that, in Aurora Leigh, Aurora and Romney are united at last, that “Great Tom” in At High Table refers to the bell, that Herrick’s poem stresses a clash between the Christian and pagan world views. But the last of these might be better framed as a suggestion rather than a confident assertion—see below on “the meaning of the poem.” This way we get complex relations between nested operators: the paraphraser may assert that the poet asserts that such and such, or suggest the same, or suggest that the poet suggests…, and so on. Further variants of (5) would attribute the thought, asserted or not, to a dramatic speaker, or to an implied author and not to the poet. Utterances in many registers, some of them embedding contents attributed to many kinds of agents, are all capable of taking their places in paraphrase. Paraphrastic utterances are of many kinds, and we do not presume to set general limits on what counts as a contribution to paraphrase.

Does all this unclarity mean there is no point in having the debate we are embarked on? No. One function of debate is to encourage moves towards clarity. Hilbert claimed that we could replace the idea of mathematical truth with the idea of proof in a formal system, without having a clear conception of what would count as such a proof. The debate that followed showed that Hilbert was wrong, a result that depended on Church, Gödel, and Turing defining proof in terms of computable functions. No doubt the debate over paraphrase will never achieve this level of precision. But progress is not impossible.

We said that a paraphrase is an attempt to convey the meaning of a poem. In that case it seems a successful paraphrase can be relied on as a source of knowledge about meaning. But in fact, so the objection goes, few paraphrases—if any—can be relied on in the way we often do rely on testimony. It would rarely be appropriate to treat a paraphrase as having settled the question what, if anything, the poem means; poetic meaning is too contested and value-laden a notion for that. This is a limitation on testimony familiar from other areas where dispute is rife but hard to resolve. 6 If you wonder whether there are moral truths or whether eating meat is wrong, you should not settle on a view simply because you heard a philosopher say “yes to both questions”—though their saying it might be relevant to your inquiry. In like manner you should not treat a paraphrase in the way you would treat directions to the nearest garage. Still, you might reasonably treat a poetic paraphrase as a basis for further inquiries, going back to the poem to see how far it accords with your own efforts at interpretation—efforts which are aided by having the paraphrase in front of you, but which might also result in your thinking the paraphrase in some way deficient. Ideally, all this would go on until you arrived at a to-some-extent adequate understanding of the poem, informed but certainly not dictated by the paraphrase. Treating the paraphrase in this provisional, distanced way is sensible even (perhaps especially) if the paraphrase is your own attempt at saying what the poem means. The fact, if it is one, that paraphrase does not rise to the status of acceptable testimony does not show paraphrase to be useless for elucidating the poem’s meaning.

One more general issue needs to be confronted before we get to the central question of whether the limits on poetic paraphrase imply that poetic meanings is ever available only from within the poem itself. We need to ask whether it is even legitimate to speak of “the meaning of the poem.” After all, poems are multiply interpretable—so the history of criticism teaches us—and it is surely a realist fantasy to suppose that the problem here is merely epistemic, that there is always a uniquely correct interpretation, and the difficulty is that we do not easily come to know what that is. We do not, on the other hand, have to adopt a critical nihilism which refuses to recognize gradations of quality in interpretation. Borrowing an idea from set theory, let us say that a reading of a poem is maximal when no reading is better than it. 7 There may then be many maximal readings of a poem, none of which is better than the others; some of these maximal readings may be better than other (nonmaximal) readings and some may be incommensurable with other readings (maximal or not). A maximal paraphrase is one that goes with a maximal reading, so there is space for many maximal paraphrases. Things might be more complicated than this. In a spirit of critical pluralism, it may be said that there are not merely many maximal readings but many maximal criteria for deciding what a maximal reading is. In that case we have many classes of maximal readings of poems: one class consists of all the readings that are maximal by criterion C 1 , and so on. That does not invalidate the idea of a maximal paraphrase; it just means there will be plenty of them. 8

It is consistent with this pluralism about paraphrase to suppose that often there are attributions of meaning which will belong to any maximal reading, by any maximal criterion. Could it ever be right to adopt a reading of Aurora Leigh according to which Aurora and Romney are not united at the end? We acknowledge a strong inclination to say no. If you do not like this example, we leave you to find other cases where something that may be said about a poem’s meaning is nonnegotiable. If you think everything is up for grabs and there is no claim about a poem’s meaning that cannot be reasonably controverted, that will not conflict with anything else we say here.

This relatively uncontroversial form of pluralism about meaning is consistent with the denial of a blanket projectivism about meaning according to which meaning is conferred on the work by the act of interpretation. As Peter Lamarque says, there is a distinction, vague no doubt and hard to draw in particular cases, between paraphrase and “finding new ways of reflecting on [the poem’s] imagery or themes, … [and] encouraging other readers to expand their own imaginative response” (2020, 86). 9 An analogy may be helpful. There may be no one best way to climb a mountain. What the mountain offers is a set of affordances for climbing—handholds and the like. Given the overall structure of affordances there may be some good ways to climb with some equally good, some bad ways, and some combinations of affordances that do not enable any climb at all. The affordances are there, independent of agents who may or may not take advantage of them. Think of the meanings made available by the poem as interpretive affordances. They are there independent of the interpreter, in the way that objects have their colors whether anyone sees them or not. But, as with colors on a dispositional view, the concept of poetic meaning is the concept of something available to a suitably placed interpreter.

It is time to confront the idea of the incompletability of paraphrase ( IP ). It is an idea subject to one of those scope ambiguities loved by philosophers:

IP weak : No paraphrase can express everything that belongs to the meaning of the poem;

IP strong : Something that belongs to the meaning of a poem cannot be expressed in any paraphrase.

It is consistent with IP weak to say that whatever is left out of one paraphrase may be included in another; that nothing is absolutely unparaphrasable. IP strong denies that; it says there are aspects of a poem’s meaning that no paraphrase can capture. 10 We favor IP weak and are inclined to disbelieve IP strong . Accepting IP weak means that we agree with some of what is claimed by those who follow Bradley and Brooks in thinking there is a heresy of paraphrase. We agree that no paraphrase will ever express all the meaning of the poem.

To see this, return to an earlier point: a paraphrase is not an abstract set of propositions but the upshot of a communicative act. Acts of communication, we know, carry with them implicatures: meanings not encoded in or entailed by what is said but created by the very act of communicating. We also assume that there are “explicatures,” or pragmatically motivated additions that make explicit what is said, as with “I’ve had breakfast [today]” and “The wound will take [a significant amount of] time to heal.” 11 It is natural to think that the function of a paraphrase is to make the meaning of a poem explicit. Elisabeth Camp says,

an adequate paraphrase must state that content in a literal and explicit fashion. This means, I think, that the paraphrase should consist of a sentence whose semantic content is the same as the content of the speaker’s intended speech act; it should enable an otherwise linguistically competent speaker to understand the original utterance’s content simply in virtue of understanding the meanings of the paraphrasing sentence’s constituent terms and their mode of combination. (2006, 2) 12

In that case a complete paraphrase would make explicit all the meaning of the poem. In our view such an ambition cannot be achieved and anyway would not be desirable given a reasonable account of the aims of paraphrase. Consider this line from T. S. Eliot: “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree in the cool of the day.” How would one provide a fully explicit statement of what is meant here? To achieve strict completeness, many things would need to be said: that the leopards are under the tree in the sense of “within the shade offered by the tree” rather than in the sense of “within the ground below the tree”; that the leopards and the tree are not suspended in mid-air, with the leopards at a lower elevation than the tree; that the whiteness of the leopards is a property of their externally visible fur rather than their internal organs; that there are exactly three leopards under the tree and not eighty-seven (a situation in which it certainly would be true that there were three). We claim that a competent reader will implicitly assume these things to be part of what is meant and would, if the question came up, agree that the leopards are above ground, that there are just three of them under the tree and that it is their fur that is white. The poem is not seen as ambiguous on these points—to our knowledge no commentator has raised the question whether the leopards are under ground and, given the importance of ambiguity in poetic interpretation, they surely would have if they though that the poem was ambiguous on this question. 13 However we do not expect or want a paraphrase to state these things explicitly. It is not merely that stating them explicitly would be unnecessary; doing so would distort the meaning of the poem because it would create further implicatures that would be misleading and undermine the effectiveness of the paraphrase. Saying that there were exactly three leopards makes salient the possibility that there might have been four, five, or eighty-seven, when the poem itself does nothing to make that salient—imagine asking someone how many children they have and hearing the answer “I have exactly two children.” Saying that the leopards were not under the ground would suggest that in the world of the poem leopards are sometimes found in this position—again a distracting thought. The lesson is that complete explicitness is not only tedious and impractical but destructive of the enterprise of paraphrase.

It does not follow, however, that there is meaning in the poem that cannot be represented in words other than those of the poem. We have no difficulty in saying explicitly (as we are saying now) that there were exactly three leopards under the tree and that they were in the shade of the tree rather than under the ground next to the tree. We cannot say all of this without going on at such length that the paraphrase would become unsurveyable to a human consciousness or without, as indicated, creating unwanted meanings. But that is a problem for IP strong and not for IP weak . Our view has the advantage of acknowledging the real limits of paraphrase when it comes to the elucidation of meaning, without falling into the mysterious sounding doctrine that some meanings are locked in a single, poetic form of words.

The difference between IP weak and IP strong parallels a familiar distinction in the philosophy of mathematics. It is sometimes said that Gödel showed that there are unprovable truths of arithmetic. He did not. He showed that any axiom system meeting certain formal conditions would always leave some truth of arithmetic unprovable. And what is unprovable in one system may be provable in another (add the statement in question to the axioms). 14 Beyond this, the similarities between poetry and mathematical proof are, unsurprisingly, rather sparse. Gödel’s result, as we have seen, depended on a precise specification of “mechanical provability” for which there is no parallel in the literature on paraphrase. Here is an illustration of how that lack of precision limits our inquiry.

Someone might argue that our position is incoherent. We admit that there is nothing in a poem’s meaning which cannot be paraphrased, that is, expressed in words other than those of the poem. So, anything, M i , that belongs to the meaning of a poem can be expressed in some paraphrase, P i . Now conjoin all these P i s and you have one big paraphrase which captures all the poem’s meaning. So IP weak , with which we agree, is false. But this argument depends on treating meanings and paraphrases of them as mathematically well-defined entities subject to closure under Boolean operations. In fact, no one has anything intelligent to say about the conditions under which the union of two paraphrases constitutes a paraphrase. Is infinite summation allowed? 15 The idea of an infinitely long paraphrase is completely unhelpful from the point of view of anyone wanting to understand how poetic interpretation actually works. To avoid disappearing into some realm beyond that of practical criticism we have to think of paraphrase as constrained by ordinary but hard to regiment expectations of surveyability, intelligibility, and plain, downright helpfulness. Developing an algebra of paraphrase will not contribute to this. Better, we think, to simply grant the truth of IP weak and then to show that granting it need not lead to mysterianism about poetic meaning.

Before moving on we note that the argument of this section depends on the assumption that the kind of pragmatic inference we apply in the case of ordinary communicative utterances applies also in the case of poetry. 16 While philosophically inclined literary scholars such as new critics and deconstructionists have sought to insist on the independence of poetic meaning from the context of utterance (sometimes urging this as a truth about all meaning) it is in fact common in interpretive circles to speak of what is communicated in a poem. Tom Paulin, examining Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings , says “Larkin communicates both disappointment—the ‘sense of falling’—and a swelling sense of fertility and alert purpose, with more than a hint of tears.” 17 And according to Brooks,

It is not that the poem communicates nothing. Precisely the contrary. The poem communicates so much and communicates it so richly and with such delicate qualifications that the thing communicated is mauled and distorted if we attempt to convey it by any vehicle less subtle than that of the poem itself. (1970 [1947], 72–3)

We do not, however, assume that there is no difference between poetry and ordinary informative utterance when it comes to the operation of pragmatic inference. For one thing, much poetry falls into the fictional, or at least the “non-assertive” category, and cannot be interpreted in any straightforward way against Grice’s maxim of quality (“say only what you believe to be true”). For present purposes all we are committed to is the following: (1) there is meaning in poetry which is not explicitly stated; (2) some of that meaning is arrived at by making a judgement about what an utterance of the words of the poem, in the context in which they were uttered, would reasonably be intended to convey. The need for assumptions such as these is evident even when we consider cases of relatively “plain speaking” in poetry. Our parentheses represent unproblematic silent explications and interpolations within these lines from Stevie Smith’s I Remember :

It was wartime, and [some thousands of feet] overhead The Germans [their bombers] were making a particularly heavy [in weight of bombs dropped] [bombing] raid on Hampstead. Harry, do they [the German bombers] ever collide [while in the sky]?”

These are boring and pointless interpolations certainly (to which we could add more), but someone who did not understand the poem’s meaning as conforming to them would be interpreting it in a very eccentric way.

The previous section brought pragmatics into the picture with its talk of “implicatures” and “pragmatic enrichment.” We will now see how arguments from pragmatics might be used to make a case for our inability to capture certain meaningful contents in words other than those of the poem itself. But before considering the arguments here it is as well to make a clarification. It may happen (we will suppose) that the words of a poem, or some of them, literally express, or better represent, some part of the poem’s meaning. It is harder than one might think to find examples that strictly meet this condition, given the way the words of a poem (like the words of any other utterance) usually rely on the reader silently adding content, as with the toy explication for “ I Remember ” above. Still, many will say that “The Germans were making a particularly heavy raid on Hampstead” has a thoroughly paraphrasable meaning that merely requires some trivial explication, and it would not in our view be a good tactical move for the opponent of paraphrase to make their case by disputing this. 18 A more productive debate is likely to ensue when we consider aspects of poetic meaning that cannot plausibly be thought of as being literally represented in the words and sentences of the poem. And there are plenty of such meanings, it being common ground that poems express much more than their words encode, even on a liberal interpretation of encode that allows for the kind of reader-driven enrichment we find in those lines from Stevie Smith’s poem. A poem may be fairly said to express the thought that life is meaningless even though one would not find anything in the words of the poem that encodes this thought. It is that sort of “reading beyond the code” that we consider here.

The first pragmatics-inspired claim we need to consider is that, most of the time, what is communicated by a word uttered in context is not its lexicalized meaning, but something more fine-grained and nuanced, an ad hoc concept, which the hearer constructs by means of a quick on line adjustment. 19 If at the restaurant customers complain that “The steak is raw,” their interlocutor fluently and appropriately understands them as saying that the steak is RAW*, where RAW* is not the lexicalized concept associated with the word “raw” but a newly-formed ad hoc concept whose content is, roughly, “So grossly undercooked as to be virtually inedible.” “Roughly” is important here, because ad hoc concepts, being fine-tuned to their unique context of utterance, are said to be unparaphrasable. As Robyn Carston puts it:

On the basis of the paraphrases often provided in the R[elevance]-T[heoretic] literature for ad hoc concepts, it might look as if they are being construed as decompositional; for example, dance* has been glossed as ‘dance in an intense, focussed, lively way,’ tired* as ‘tired to the extent that one does not want to go out,’ raw* as ‘so grossly undercooked as to be virtually inedible,’ and so on. But the idea behind this is that ad hoc concepts are, generally, ineffable , in the sense that, as well as not being lexicalised, there isn’t a linguistic phrase that fully encodes them either , and the paraphrases are intended as just a rough indication to aid readers in understanding what we have in mind in particular cases. ( 2010a , 165; final emphasis added)

It is evident from this that the uses examined by relevance theorists are usually ordinary, unpoetic uses of language. Things are likely to be more resistant to articulation with more creative and idiosyncratic expressions of the kind that we find in poetry. Here is what Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber conclude with regards to a “creative” metaphor in Sandburg’s Fog : (“The fog comes / on little cat feet”):

It is not part of the explicit content of the poem that the fog comes silently, or smoothly, or stealthy. Rather, what is part of the explicit content is that the fog comes on-little-cat-feet*. And what is this concept? It is the concept of a property that is difficult or impossible to define … How is this ad hoc concept on-little-cat-feet* arrived at? By taking the poet to be attributing to the coming of the fog that property which contextually implies the very ideas suggested by the phrase ‘little cat feet.’ (2012, 122; emphasis added)

The idea that a poem may express meanings which are beyond the reach of verbal expression is therefore not foreign to serious linguistics. Is it correct? The issue is complex, and it is wise, once again, not to be dogmatic in this area. But it is worth considering other options before we accept this view. As Wilson and Sperber’s example directly above suggests, the standout evidence for this is metaphor, and metaphors with any life in them are frequently said to have a meaning which goes “beyond expression.” We think that two different—albeit related—features of linguistic communication are at stake here. Meaning might be beyond verbal expression because it is inexhaustible or because it is elusive . 20 We consider these ideas in turn.

Before turning to them we note that, for relevance theorists, the construction of ad hoc concepts happens with “almost every word” ( Wilson and Carston 2007 , 231). If this is true, the incompletability of paraphrase would not be limited to poetry, but would be a quite general feature of linguistic communication, possessed, to a certain degree, by even the most mundane utterances. It may be that poetry, by frequently displaying novel combinations of words, makes the phenomenon more obvious. But anyone who relies on this argument for their claim that poetic paraphrase is incompletable will have to agree that this is true, perhaps less obviously, for every other form of utterance. This point is important because believers in the heresy of paraphrase have generally written as if they are pointing to something distinctive about poetry and its language. The argument we are considering here would not, even if they were sound, support that view. We return at the end to the question what, if anything, sets poetry apart.

III.A. Inexhaustibility

The inexhaustibility of metaphor is expressed by Stanley Cavell:

[In uttering “Juliet is the sun”] Romeo means that Juliet is the warmth of his world; that his day begins with her; that only in her nourishment can he grow. And his declaration suggests that the moon, which other lovers use as emblems of their love, is merely her reflected light, and dead in comparison; and so on. … The ‘and so on’ which ends my example of paraphrase is significant. It registers what William Empson calls the ‘pregnancy’ of metaphors, the burgeoning of meaning in them. ( 1976 , 78–9) 21

We need to ask what exactly is implied by the “and so on” in Cavell’s statement. Is the idea that there are infinitely many things that might legitimately be mentioned in this excavation or elaboration of meaning? We doubt that this is plausible or even intended; it seems more likely that what is forcing the interpreter to say at some point “and so on” are such factors as:

(a) One can never be confident that a further meaning will not be found;

(b) There is indeterminacy in what can plausibly be attributed to the metaphor and so there may be unresolvable disputes about what is meant.

Both these things could be true without supporting a doctrine of incompletability. We may be unsure that a further meaning cannot be found, but if one is found there is no reason to think it cannot be expressed in words (indeed, how else would it be found?). There may be no answer to the question whether certain candidate meanings really are meanings of the metaphor in question, but there is no reason to think that any candidate meaning is unstatable. 22 Indeed, even the (implausible) view that metaphors have literally infinite meanings does not imply that any of them are inexpressible in language, since finite languages have infinite representational resources. There are infinitely many natural numbers but each one has a finite numerical expression.

A similar point can be made in response to the worry, registered earlier, that a paraphrase cannot convert everything that would otherwise count as implicated material into explicit utterance, for the attempt to do so creates new, unwanted implicatures. We can grant that paraphrase will always depend on implicated content without supposing that this content is inexpressible outside the poem itself. The problem is not that it could not be made explicit, but that making it explicit would generate other implicated and unwanted meanings. We also grant that too much meaning is associated with what is said for it to be included in a single paraphrase, and certainly too much to be included in a paraphrase of manageable length. As John Searle (1978) pointed out, “Bring me a burger” is understood implicitly to rule out endless ways that would constitute bringing it to me: encased in concrete, delivered to my home next year, dropped on me from the ceiling. But no one of these illegitimate ways lacks an adequate expression in language.

III.B. Elusiveness

The idea here is that there are contributions to meaning that cannot be expressed in words, not because of the vastness or the vagueness of their extent but because they are simply things that defy verbal expression. Wilson and Carston (2019) , speaking against the background of the relevance theoretic approach to meaning and communication, discuss what they label “non-propositional effects” which they characterize as follows, contrasting them with the Gricean idea of speaker’s or utterer’s meaning, considered as something determinately propositional:

Different audiences paraphrase them in rather different ways;

No finite paraphrase captures all their nuances;

They are often described as “open-ended”;

They typically involve the activation of perceptual, emotional or sensorimotor mechanisms. 23

The first three on the list we have already considered: the fact that different audiences paraphrase remarks in different ways (very typical in the case of poetry) does not prevent any proposed understanding of what is communicated from being paraphrased—as indeed their way of putting it indicates; the fact that all the nuances of meaning cannot be captured in a finite (or surveyable?) paraphrase does not, as we have argued, show that any one nuance is unparaphrasable; open-endedness is consistent with any further candidate being paraphrasable.

Their fourth item—the activation of perceptual, emotional or sensorimotor mechanisms—requires a different response. The idea here is that, as well as serving to bring to the attention of an audience (to “make manifest”) a certain propositional content, an utterance may be designed to generate emotional and imagistic responses, with the latter encompassing visual, auditory, motoric, and perhaps other modalities. 24 If we regard these “non-propositional effects” as aspects of a more inclusive account of poetic meaning it will follow immediately that paraphrase cannot capture all that a poem means. Should we do that?

It must be granted, of course, that it is vitally important to an understanding of poetry that we give some account of the ways in which engagement with a poem achieves these nonpropositional outcomes. 25 Wilfred Owen’s line “Move him into the sun” would not be so powerful if it did not provoke an imagined experience of bearing the dead weight of a human body. That poetry does these things is one reason why the paraphrase is no substitute for the poem. But if everything that we experience in a poem is to be counted as meaning it follows trivially that paraphrase will never capture it all and there is no debate to be had. If we are to retain recognizable contours of the traditional debate over paraphrase, we shall have somewhere to distinguish between aspects of an utterance which are constitutive of its meaning, and aspects that, though they may suggest or even determine meaning, are not themselves elements of meaning. We suggest that these emotional and imagistic “poetic effects” be counted among the determinants of meaning. One of Brooks’s concerns about paraphrase was that to paraphrase is to ignore the overall effect of the poem:

whatever statement we may seize upon as incorporating the “meaning” of the poem, immediately the imagery and the rhythm seem to set up tensions with it, warping and twisting it, qualifying and revising it. (1970 [1947], 197)

In a similar vein, Peter Lamarque says that paraphrase encourages us to ignore “the salience of verbal texture—sound, rhythm, rhyme” (2020, 88). It would be wrong, certainly, in coming to a view about a poem’s meaning, to ignore imagery and rhythm. But the solution is simple: do not ignore them. Meaning on the one hand and “imagery and rhythm” on the other are not to be the subjects of parallel but independent investigation. In order to correctly grasp the meaning of the poem the reader will need to engage imagistically, emotionally, and in other corporeal ways with the poem. 26 The images, emotions, and feelings of bodily tension and release, rhythm and resonance, rhyme and sound texture, will all make a difference to our judgement of the poem’s overall tone, and hence to the provision of a good account of its meaning; they may, for example, suggest a new sense of purpose in a poem’s final lines (recall Paulin on The Whitsun Weddings ). The things on Wilson and Carston’s list, overlapping with Brooks’s own, contribute to meaning in the sense that a sensitive reader’s understanding of meaning will be modulated by their experience of them; they are determinants of meaning. 27 But our inclination is to say this: they do not contribute to meaning in the way that the concepts represented in a sentence do. They are not constituents of the meaning of the sentence. 28

One might take the view that we have done no more than rearrange the labels on things. You want to insist that there are no ineffable meanings? It is simple: rule out things which look dangerously ineffable by declaring them not to belong to meaning. We are aware that our proposal needs further support and that other plausible pathways might lead to a different conclusion. But there is nothing ad hoc about insisting on a distinction between what an utterance means and those aspects of the utterance that help us determine what it means. Indeed, the meaning conveyed by an utterance is often entirely distinct from the meaning of the sentence used to convey it, as with Cavell’s reading of “Juliet is the sun.” That reading depends on the words uttered; if the words had been different Cavell’s paraphrase would be different also. The boundary between what determines meaning and what constitutes it has to go somewhere. Our placing of that distinction puts imagistic, emotional and sensorimotor effects on the meaning-determining side of the line. Is that the wrong place to put it?

Once again, we have no killer argument to offer. But it is worth noting that things Carston has said seem to support our placement. She has elsewhere made out a strong case for the role of imagery in the reception of poetry, and what she says would apply equally to emotional feeling and to sensorimotor experience. 29 Imagery, she says, “plays the role of prompting thoughts, including hypotheses about intended contextual implications.” ( Carston 2010b , 314). Thought is prompted by many things—sights, sounds, smells—that hardly count as meaning. She goes: on “mental images are not available via language in the same way as mental concepts are, and perhaps they are … not carriers of utterance content. Rather, they are components of the mental context within which communicated contents are recovered” (316). She suggests that the activation of imagery may count as “perlocutionary” in the same way that our being moved or repelled by an utterance does; that if “the speaker/writer does not (perhaps cannot) communicatively intend images or their objects, she may, nevertheless, have images in her own mind [and] … intend, albeit noncommunicatively, that among the effects of her utterance on her audience will be the entertaining of images similar to her own” (316). This seems to recognize a meaning-constituting/meaning-determining distinction and to place imagery on the same side as the one we put it on.

In thinking about the value of paraphrase in helping us understand and appreciate poetry there is much we should avoid arguing about. Certainly, paraphrase has a use, though a limited one. Certainly, the paraphrase will not substitute for the poem if a poem is what you want. The question we have focused on is this: are the limitations of paraphrase such that they require us to recognize a kind of meaning possessed by a poem which is incapable of expression in other ways? This paper has been an attempt to see what is required in order to make out a case for answering “No” to this question. As we have emphasized, we are not committed to this answer and believe that there is too much unresolved for anyone to be confident that it is right. But it is the answer to which we are naturally drawn, as others may be. What we have proposed is a pathway to the negative answer which shows some promise; it depends on distinguishing between strong and weak versions of the idea that poetic meaning is not capturable in paraphrase and recognizing that the weaker version is all we need. It then depends—more controversially we think—on setting a boundary between that which is constitutive of meaning and that which merely contributes to the determination of meaning. Further work may show that the boundary we suggest is well motivated, or that some other placement of it is correct, where that other placement may well be inconsistent with the negative answer we favor. It may also turn out that there are rival ways to explicate the idea of poetic meaning between which no principled choice is possible, where one supports the negative answer and one does not. In that case the best we can say is that “taking the question one way the answer is No, taking it the other, the answer is Yes.” It may even turn out that there is no principled way to distinguish what is determinative of meaning from what is constitutive of it, and the question lapses.

Finally, all we have said seems to leave us with no answer to a pressing question: what is distinctive about poetry? Not, it seems, the impossibility of paraphrase; meaning in poetry is just like meaning in any other use of language. What marks out poetry (to the extent that it is marked out) is not the meanings it traffics in but the kind of achievement it represents. To express a meaning is part of what the poet does, but poetic achievement is the expression of meaning via a certain choice of words , a choice that also determines those nonpropositional effects that Wilson, Carston, and others speak of. It is like the achievement of the archer, whose efforts we admire not merely because the arrow hits the target—that could be done up close and by hand—but because the arrow hits it as the result of a performance that exhibits characteristically archer-ish skill. To judge the poem is to judge the performance that is the poet’s construction of just those words. No change of words, and hence no paraphrase, preserves what was achieved. Ernie Lepore has argued that we can understand what is wrong with paraphrase only when we realize that “To grasp the poem requires a recognition that it’s partly about its own articulation” ( 2009 , 196). We disagree: poems are not about their own ordering of words—not always or even usually. 30 But to judge, to appreciate, to enjoy a poem is to enjoy the achievement that this articulation represents. Paraphrase may give us the meaning, but it will not give us the achievement.

This does not give us a sharp boundary between poetry and everything else—a good thing, since poetry is not sharply divided from everything else. We may enjoy, admire and judge any utterance for the achievement its ordering of words represents. But poetry is at the top end of the spectrum; to think of something as poetry is immediately to focus on how meaning is achieved through word choice. Reading a paraphrase, however meticulously meaning-preserving, does not allow us to do that. 31

Beardsley , M.C . 1981 ( 1958 ). Aesthetics. Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism . Indianapolis : Hackett Publishing .

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Green , Mitchell . 2017 . “Imagery, Expression, and Metaphor.” Philosophical Studies 174 : 33 – 46 .

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Hills , Alison . 2009 . “Moral Testimony and Moral Epistemology.” Ethics 120 : 94 – 127 .

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———. 2011 . “Paraphrasing Poetry (for Profit and Pleasure).” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 : 367 – 77 .

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———. 2015 . “Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value.” In The Philosophy of Poetry , edited by John Gibson , 18 – 36 . Oxford University Press .

———. 2020 . The Uselessness of Art . Eastbourne : Sussex Academic Press .

Leighton , Angela . 2009 . “About About: On Poetry and Paraphrase.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33 : 167 – 76 .

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Searle , John . 1978 . “Literal Meaning.” Erkenntnis 13 : 207 – 24 .

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Wassiliwizky , Eugen , Stefan Koelsch , Valentin Wagner , Thomas Jacobsen , and Winfried Menninghaus . 2017 . “The Emotional Power of Poetry: Neural Circuitry, Psychophysiology and Compositional Principles.” Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 12 : 1229 – 40 .

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———. 2019 . “Pragmatics and the Challenge of ‘Non-Propositional’ Effects.” Journal of Pragmatics 145 : 31 – 8 .

Wilson , Deirdre , and Dan Sperber . 2012 . Meaning and Relevance . Cambridge University Press .

As Peter Kivy says, “No one who sets out to say in prose the content of what a poem says in poetic form intends as the goal of the task to provide an alternative way of experiencing the poem. And to fault the interpreter for failing to do what is not the point of interpretation in the first place is plain nonsense” ( Kivy 1997 , 105).

Bradley ([1909] 1959 , especially 3–34), is the locus classicus here. More recently, the thesis has been championed by Lamarque (2009 and 2015 ). See also McGregor (2014) , and Hulatt (2016) .

In an earlier version we used the term “ineffability,” following the usage of Moran (for whom the ineffability of poetic metaphor is “the essential inability to capture this dimension in words other than those of the specific metaphor itself” (1999, 257). But the word certainly has stronger connotations of inexpressibility and is best avoided (thanks here to a referee).

Angela Leighton celebrates what she takes to be the epistemic gains of unparaphrasable poetry when considering George Herbert’s “Prayer”: “I still don’t know what ‘Reversed thunder’ is, but the constantly renewed attention of not knowing may be a better form of knowledge than any number of finished explanations” ( 2009 , 174).

It may be that “paraphrase” has other, narrower meanings for some and there may indeed be purposes for which a narrower conception is appropriate. Our purpose is to understand the extent to which a poem’s meaning can be expressed in ways other than through the poem itself and our broad understanding suites that purpose.

On the possibility of testimony in moral matters see for example Hills (2009) . Hills argues that moral testimony cannot convey understanding .

We are grateful to an anonymous referee here.

Note that there are two kinds of incommensurability at work here: (1) two maximal paraphrases of a given poem may be such that neither is better than or equal to the other by a given criterion of goodness; (2) two paraphrases of a given poem may be such that one is maximal by criterion A and not maximal by criterion B, with the reverse holding for the other. Neither kind of incommensurability entails the other.

Lamarque calls this second activity “interpretation” and says that “interpretation is quite different from paraphrase as normally understood” (2020, 81). But it seems to us that in its ordinary signification, “interpretation” includes the act of paraphrase. We cannot interpret what we do not understand.

This is not a new idea; Beardsley expressed it sixty years ago when he said, “even if we can seldom, in practice, paraphrase all of a given poem, we can nevertheless paraphrase any of it that we wish to paraphrase” ( [1958] 1981 , 436).

See Sperber and Wilson (1995 , 182). The distinction between implicatures and explicatures is disputed. The points we make here will not depend on settling this debate.

Camp’s argument against the paraphrasability of metaphors with “demonstrative” content depends on this assumption. We do not have space here to respond to Camp’s subtle and complex argument for that; see especially pp.12–20 of her paper.

Might someone examine the poem very closely and argue in some coherent way that there are things said elsewhere in it that do support the idea that, for example, there is a forth leopard present? While this seems unlikely, we cannot rule out any such move a priori. We accept that any one of the examples we gave of this kind of implicit content—and any examples that anyone could give—might, in certain circumstances, be contested in ways that actually shed light on the poem’s meaning. The point of the examples we gave was not to hold them up as irrefutable instances of poetic meaning but to illustrate that there always will be implicit content of some kind in a poem where the effect of making that content explicit would be to distort the poem’s meaning.

Or consider the fallacy: Everything has a cause, so there is a cause of everything.

We do return to the issue of the potential or actual infinitude of meaning in poetry below: see Section III.A.

An anonymous referee raised this question.

London Review of Books , 21 October 2010.

We are granting quite a lot here. For example it would have to be assumed that “heavy raid” is here a case of polysemy (compare “heavy bomb”) which has been conventionalised rather than a case of metaphor. For opposing views on the role of convention in polysemy see Carston (2021) and Devitt (2021) .

Lamarque argues that attention to poetry requires that meanings be discriminated in a maximally fine-grained way and that “no theory of meaning seems able to accommodate this kind of fine-grainedness” (2009, 416). But Lamarque does not give an argument to show that the language of poetry and the language of paraphrase differ in their capacity for fine-grained expression. Nor do we think that one can be given, for the language of the one is the language of the other. And why can we not attend to paraphrase with the same discriminatory power that we attend to poetry?

As Camp (2006 , 6, quoting Hills 1997 , 121) notices, most metaphorical paraphrases “‘live on intimate terms with qualifiers like ‘roughly’ and ‘and so on.’” “Roughly” and “and so on” seem closely allied to these two features of (metaphorical) meaning: elusiveness and inexhaustibility respectively.

See also Davidson: “when we try to say what a metaphor ‘means’, we soon realize there is no end to what we want to mention” ( 1984 , 263).

See the discussion in Camp (2006 , 8), reflecting on some remarks by Max Black.

Wilson and Carston (2019 , 32). As Moran (1999) points out, there are accounts of propositions according to which images and other non-linguistic entities carry propositional content. ‘Non-verbal’ might be a better term than ‘non-propositional.’ Thanks here to a referee.

In a similar vein, Peter Lamarque notes that “the experience sought in poetry—and inevitably the focus turns to lyric poetry—is multifaceted: affective, cognitive, imaginative, and also visceral” (2020, 85). Mitchell Green (2017) emphasises the essential role of images for some metaphors.

Empirical work on the bodily effects of poetry are at an early stage. See for example Wassiliwizky et al. (2017) .

Our claim here parallels one made by Camp against Black concerning the role of perspective in metaphor: “‘Perspectives’ are indeed cognitive, in the sense of being tools for thinking, but they are not themselves thoughts. Thus, while Black is correct both that a literal paraphrase lacks the same insight as the original, and that this is a significant cognitive loss, this does not impugn the paraphrase’s own adequacy” (2006, 9).

There is an ambiguity in the idea of a determinant of meaning. One might think that what determines the meaning of an utterance is simply the speaker’s communicative intention, and that the things we are calling “determinants of meaning” are of merely evidential significance. Alternatively one may opt for a concept of “achieved meaning” which corresponds to “the most reasonable conclusion concerning the speaker’s intention the hearer can draw in the circumstances.” One might seek victory for one or other side in this debate, or instead regard them as two useful but non-equivalent concepts of meaning. For our purposes you may choose either of those options.

Friends of paraphrase, we suggest, should say that form and content are disunited—they are separate things—but should not say that the one has no effect on the other. As Kivy says, “There is nothing inconsistent in thinking both that there is an interrelation between the thought and diction in a poem and that a poem can be paraphrased” ( 2011 , 369).

Indeed, in the context of a discussion of poetry we can think of sensory motor experience as a modality of imagery (“motor imagery”). Emotions are often said to have a cognitive component being partly constituted by certain thoughts. What is at issue here is the role of a non-cognitive component, hence our reference to “emotional feelings.”

Here we agree with Lamarque (2015 , 26).

We are grateful to Peter Lamarque and two anonymous referees for detailed and careful comments, to Deirdre Wilson for discussion, and also to the editors for their suggestions. Work on this paper was supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust for work on the project “Learning from Fiction” (RPG-2017-365).

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Preparing for Poetry: A Reader's First Steps

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), one of the world's most prolific writers of poems and sonnets.

Library of Congress

Students are often gleeful to discover that their reading homework involves only a few short poems. Yet the attentive student realizes that carefully reading a poem involves as much work as reading a short story, article, or passage from a novel. Reading through a poem once might count for the letter of the assignment, but certainly not the spirit. A careful review of a poem involves diligent attention to form, language, and technique—all items students are often unprepared to examine on their own. This EDSITEment lesson teaches students how to read a poem so that they are prepared, rather than simply present, for class discussion.

This lesson will begin with a discussion on differentiating literal and figurative language, showing how students will determine denotation and connotation in language. With an emphasis on creating arguments using evidence from the poem, they will next learn how to annotate and paraphrase a poem. They will decipher who the speaker is and how tone and setting establish tension and dramatic context. Finally, students will explore the poem's structure, with attention to rhyme, use of line, and form. Through these exercises, which center on William Shakespeare's Sonnet 130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ," students will learn how to create a thesis about the poem rooted in textual evidence.

Guiding Questions

What basic strategies are involved when first reading a poetic work?

How do you create a thesis about a poem?

Learning Objectives

Distinguish between literal and figurative language.

Establish methods for paraphrasing and annotating poems.

Decipher the speaker of the poem, and his or her role.

Recognize the context of a poem.

Understand basic poetic structure and its relationship to a poem's content.

Comprehend the poem's theme.

Begin to create a thesis about a poem based on textual evidence.

Lesson Plan Details

• Review the lesson plan. Locate and bookmark suggested materials and other useful websites. Download and print out documents you will use and duplicate copies as necessary for student viewing, such as the Reading a Poem PDF worksheet. 
• Read William Shakespeare's " My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130) ," via EDSITEment-reviewed Academy of American Poets, which will serve as the sample text for this lesson plan's activities.

Activity 1. First Step to Comprehension: The Value of Paraphrasing

Upon first encountering a poem, students often read through once, perhaps note a few oddities, maybe read a footnote or two, and then put their book aside until the following day, when they expect their teacher will enlighten them on the poem's meaning. Unfortunately, this process does not do justice to the teacher, the student, or the various nuances of the poetic work at hand. The following strategies can be adapted in a variety of ways to help a student adequately prepare for the following day's discussion of a poem or series of poems.

Discuss with students their normal strategies for reading a poem for homework (you might consider assigning a poem the day before so that everyone has a common reference point). Ask students how many times they read the poem, if they read the footnotes, if they have a dictionary nearby, if they read the poem aloud, or if they take notes. Finally, ask students what problems they often encounter when reading a poem.

Tell students that they are going to learn some basic strategies to help them approach poetry in a manner that will allow them to begin discussions in an informed and confident way. Discuss briefly with them that while literature allows for more than one "answer"—or, more appropriately, thesis—about a text, there are also wrong readings that are not supported by the poet's words. Just as with any kind of investigation, students must use the clues that are available to them, and must not make faulty assumptions based on vague evidence. While some clues exist outside a work of literature—in the historical and cultural landscape of its writing—the first step of any literary investigation must be with the text itself.

An effective way to begin to understand poetry is to try to paraphrase the poem. For the purposes of this lesson, students can examine William Shakespeare's " My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130) ," available online and in many textbooks. If students do not have access to computers, make sure each student has a copy of the poem.

Share with students that while understanding line breaks and other formal features of poetry is very important, the first stage of interpretation should focus on comprehension. An easy exercise towards this goal involves paraphrasing the poem, following these strategies:

• Focus on sentences, not line breaks. Read normally, using punctuation rather than line breaks as the guide to sentence construction. Note where each "sentence" begins and ends, and mark the end either mentally or by annotating the copy of the poem.
• Write out what the poem is saying by paraphrasing in prose form.
• Define any terms that are not understood (e.g., "belied" in the last line). Note to students that they should have a dictionary at hand at all times. If online, students can access dictionary.com .
• Change all metaphors to similes. Similes are generally easier to understand than metaphors; altering the phrase to a direct comparison helps students see what is being compared to what since the "like" or "as" of the simile separates the two. As a generic example: the phrase "starbright eyes" would paraphrase to "eyes like stars."

Students may benefit from reconsidering the difference between literal and figurative language. Consider, for example, the first line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." Clearly, this line is not meant to be read literally: "My mistresses eyes are not giant stars that provide the Earth with warmth and light." Rather, the line is a figure of speech, an inversion of a simile, one of the more common types of figurative language. Ask students to ignore the negative "not" for the time being and consider instead the positive phrase: "My mistresses eyes are like the sun." What does this remind students of? Some students might call it a "pick-up line," or a "come-on." Why then, does Shakespeare reverse this trend? Is he trying to insult his lady?

By paraphrasing the poem and investigating the use of figurative language, students can next turn to examining the attitude of the poem.

Activity 2. Attitude and Scene

Share with students that the speaker's attitude or tone tells the reader a great deal about the poem. Any shifts in attitude are also particularly revelatory. In the above example, students might be left wondering, as they paraphrase the poem, why Shakespeare would write against his mistress by using figurative language common to romantic overtures in a negative way. As these thoughts germinate, students should consider the speaker and tone of the poem.

• Speaker. Who is he or she?
• Tone. What is the speaker's voice like? How does the speaker approach his or her subject? What is the speaker's attitude towards that subject?

In considering Sonnet 130, students might point out that the speaker is a lover that seems to be praising his "dark mistress," even though those praises come across as though they might be criticisms. Ask students to consider how word choice may affect a speaker's tone. Here, his tone is not sarcastic towards his mistress, however, since the last two lines re-emphasize the speaker's admiration of his love.

If the glib portrayal of his mistress is not directed towards his lover, then who is it directed towards? What other clues might be available in a poem? Discuss with students what possible hints might be present. Students may suggest some of the following:

• Audience. Is there an audience implied in the poem? Does the audience share similarities or differences with the reader?
• Setting. Is there a setting described in the poem? If so, what is it?

Sonnet 130 does not have an explicit setting, although some students might take into consideration Shakespeare's place in Elizabethan England. In terms of audience, students might suggest that the dark mistress is the audience. Others might wonder who or what the poem is critical of, since Sonnet 130 seems to be critical of something in its tone—indicate that this is a good question to remember when they come to developing questions and a thesis for the poem at the end of the activities.

Activity 3. Structure of the Poem

Finally, ask students to review the structure of the poem. Reading the poem aloud is a useful approach to analyzing structure, so encourage students to read the poem out loud to themselves or to a friend or relative. When students paraphrased the poem, they read it without considering the line breaks, rhyme scheme, and other such features. As they reread the poem a final time in preparation for class, encourage them to map these elements of the poem, which will likely be more obvious as they reread the poem out loud. Note: For more practice with sonnets, and experiments with how a poem sounds, consider using the EDSITEment lesson plan Listening to Poetry: Sounds of the Sonnet .

First, ask students to note any rhyme pattern of Sonnet 130, which they should note using the traditional method of annotating the rhyme with lower-case letters. Ask students what the rhyme scheme of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 is. They should be able to quickly show that the poem follows this rhyme scheme:

a b a b c d c d e f e f g g

After writing this pattern down, ask students to speculate on the arrangement of the poem's rhyme. Can we tell anything about the poem's form from this rhyme scheme? Students should note the 3 stanzas of 4 lines each, followed by a couplet. Some students might notice the turn of the argument at the couplet, which is highlighted by "And yet" to show a change or advancement of the argument.

Students are likely to point out that the common title—Sonnet 130—gives the poem's form away. Ask students how they can determine what kind of sonnet is being used. Ask students to visit the Academy of American Poets website , which details the various forms of the sonnet extensively. Have them review the descriptions of the various sonnets and ask them to determine which one Shakespeare's follows and, more importantly, why. Students should be able to detail the differences in form, rather than simply stating, "Because the English sonnet is also called the Shakespearian sonnet."

Be sure to ask students if there are any inconsistencies in rhythm/meter that they hear when reading the poem out loud. Point out to students that any "odd" sounding lines often represent moments in a poem at which form mirrors content. For example, the 12th line ("My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.") disrupts the flow of the preceding lines via the monosyllabic words. Here in the poem, Shakespeare reveals that he needs no superficial conventions of love and beauty to express how great his own love is. This line formally and contextually "grounds" the mistress via its weighted-down meter.

Next, ask students to consider the length of the lines. How many syllables does each line have? When they answer "ten," point out that they have already arrived at clues as to the rhythm and meter of the poem. Should you wish to investigate meter in more depth, ask students to read this overview of rhythm and meter at Emory University , via the Academy of American Poets, and pick out which meter Shakespeare's sonnet follows.

Finally, remind students that poetic form does not always follow expected conventions of prose. Even though they paraphrased the poem on this basic level, students should now examine the length of poetic lines, and how lines often break or end abruptly at times, while at other times they maintain a certain orderly convention. Ask students to review Sonnet 130 and comment on the role of line breaks. Students might note, for example, that the first four lines of Sonnet 130 are full statements, with semi-colons indicating a full stop. The rest of the lines, however, are coupled together, such as:

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

The first four brief lines lead into these longer end-stoped lines, creating the sense of tension and structure of a building argument. An end-stopped line's meaning or sense matches the length of the line (as above, where each phrase completes a line), whereas in an enjambed line, the sense or meaning does not match the line length. Point students to the definition of enjambment at the Norton LitWeb Glossary , which will aid them when considering future poems. By the time readers reach the final couplet of Sonnet 130, the argument has built so greatly that the final couplet is a surprise. This surprise might prompt students to question the rationale behind the poet's approach, leading to their final stage of preparation: developing a theory.

Activity 4. Developing a Theory

Reassure students that they are not expected to have all of the answers before walking in to class after a night of reading poetry. These basic strategies, however, do afford students the opportunity to begin class prepared with both insights and questions. At this point, students should have

• read through the poem a few times (silently and out loud)
• paraphrased it
• noted complex words or phrases (using a dictionary when necessary)
• identified the speaker and his or her tone
• located any setting in the poem
• determined the presence of an audience in the poem, and its relationship to the reader
• noted the use of rhyme and the presence of rhythm
• identified the form of the poem, if possible
• and explored the poet's use of line length, end-stops, and enjambment

With all of this information, ask students (individually or in groups) to come up with three questions about Sonnet 130 that they feel would foster class discussion. Questions need not be easily answered—in fact, the better questions are open-ended and may require historical research and actively investigating other poems of the time period. Questions should, therefore, be thought-provoking and even speculative. Some examples of questions are:

• Why does the use of enjambment increase after the first four lines (quatrain)?
• How does the "dark mistress" compare to other standards of beauty? [ Note to teachers: students are more likely to ask this question in terms of today's society, but this would be a fine time to introduce common standards of poetry in Elizabethan poetry, which is the subject of Shakespeare's critique.]

Keep in mind—the students should come up with questions and should be pushed to ask difficult questions that foster class discussion rather than facile questions than are quickly answered. Students would be unlikely to know, for example, exactly the kind of love poem Shakespeare is criticizing with his sonnet, but the questions that they bring to class from their homework reading should help lead to this kind of informed answer during class discussion.

After asking a few questions about the poem, students should state what they think the theme of the poem is. With their questions, the theme, and knowledge gained from the earlier exercises, students are well on their way to developing a thesis about the poem. For this exercise, ask students to use one of their questions and turn it into a thesis statement about Shakespeare's sonnet. The thesis does not have to be fully formulated, but can function more like a postulation. Students should then write down two references from the text of the poem that they would use to support their claim.

Using these basic strategies, students can enter class prepared to discuss the poem. One possible strategy involves collecting students' reading questions in a hat at the beginning of each class period and choosing two or three to start class discussion.

Ask students to use this strategy as they prepare a new poem (or more) that they are assigned to read for the next class period (the poem should be relevant to whatever time period your class is studying at the time). Students should turn in their preparation worksheets (feel free to reuse the PDF included for this lesson plan, which includes space for the poem paraphrase, student annotations, questions, and thesis) for this new poem. Also, ask students to bring in their best question about this new poem on a separate piece of paper. Collect the questions and select two or three randomly, using the student questions as a way to begin class discussion. The EDSITEment-reviewed Academy of American Poets has a wealth of poems available for classroom use.

Note: EDSITEment has several lesson plans on various poems and poets that will complement these activities well.

For more practice with sonnets, and experiments with how a poem sounds, lead students through the EDSITEment lesson plan Listening to Poetry: Sounds of the Sonnet .

The EDSITEment lesson plan Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" complements this lesson plan well, and is suitable as a continuation of a student's exploration of poetry.

Selected EDSITEment Websites

• " My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130), "
• Poetic Form: Sonnets
• overview of rhythm and meter at Emory University

Materials & Media

Preparing for poetry: reading a poem worksheet, related on edsitement, listening to poetry: sounds of the sonnet.

How to Paraphrase Poetry?

Do you need to paraphrase a poem for an assignment?

Are you struggling to come up with your own words to express the same meaning as the original poem? Don’t worry, we’re here to help.

In this blog post, we will discuss how to paraphrase poetry in a way that is both accurate and creative.

We will provide tips and tricks for understanding the poem’s meaning, and show you how to express it in your own words.

So if you’re ready, let’s get started!

Table of contents

Why do people paraphrase poetry, read through the entire poetry, understand the poem’s context, use a similar point of view, break the poem down into its parts, be creative with your paraphrasing, check your work against the original, final thoughts.

There are a few different reasons why people might paraphrase poetry.

Sometimes, they need to use the poem in their own writing for an assignment or project. In other cases, they may want to use the poem as part of a presentation or speech.

Or they may simply want to understand it better by expressing it in their own words.

Regardless of the reason, paraphrasing poetry can be a difficult task. It’s important to capture the essence of the poem while also staying true to your own voice. But with a little practice and some helpful tips, you can do it!

Tips: How to Paraphrase Poetry

Simply said, paraphrasing poetry means retelling the poem’s essential concepts in your own words. The act of paraphrasing is distinct from the act of analyzing or explicating poetry.

The primary goal of paraphrasing is to restate the important themes in your own words, rather than to evaluate the ideas of the original author. The following guidelines will assist you in learning how to paraphrase poetry.

Before you start paraphrasing, it’s important to read the poem all the way through at least once. This will help you get a sense of the poem’s overall meaning and how its ideas are connected. As you read, pay attention to any words, phrases, or images that stand out to you. These may be important clues for understanding the poem’s meaning.

In order to paraphrase poetry accurately, it’s important to understand the poem’s context. This includes understanding who the author is , what time period the poem was written in, and any relevant cultural or historical context. All of this information can help you better understand the poem’s meaning.

Some poems are more difficult to understand than others. If you’re having trouble deciphering a poem, try doing some additional research on the author and the historical context surrounding the poem. This can help you get a better understanding of what the poem is trying to say.

When paraphrasing poetry, it’s important to use a similar point of view as the author. This means trying to put yourself in the same mindset as the author and writing from that perspective.

If you’re having trouble doing this, try reading about the author’s life and work to get a better understanding of their point of view. You can also look for quotes from the author that explain their thoughts and feelings about the poem.

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Once you have a general understanding of the poem’s meaning, it’s time to start breaking it down into its individual parts. This can be done by identifying the poem’s main themes and ideas. Once you have a list of these, you can start paraphrasing them in your own words.

It can also be helpful to identify any symbols or metaphors that are used in the poem. These can be tricky to paraphrase, but with a little effort, you can usually find a way to express them in your own words.

When paraphrasing poetry, it’s important to stay true to the original poem’s meaning while also being creative with your words . This means taking some liberties with the language but making sure that the overall message is still conveyed accurately.

Here are a few tips for being creative with your paraphrasing:

• Try retelling the poem in a different form, such as a song, rap, or spoken word.
• Use analogies or comparisons to help explain the poem’s concepts.
• Add your own personal reflections or interpretations to the poem.
• If you’re having trouble expressing a certain concept, try looking up synonyms or antonyms for words in the poem.

Once you’ve finished paraphrasing the poem, it’s important to check your work against the original. This will help you ensure that your paraphrasing is accurate and that you haven’t changed the meaning of the poem.

It’s also a good idea to have someone else read your paraphrase to make sure that it makes sense. Poetry can be tricky to understand, so it’s possible that you may have missed some important aspects of the poem’s meaning.

Benefits Of Paraphrasing A Poetry

There are many benefits of paraphrasing poetry. When you paraphrase a poem, you are forced to read and understand the poem in depth. This can help improve your reading comprehension skills and allow you to better analyze and understand literary works.

Paraphrasing a poem also helps improve your writing skills. By expressing the poem’s ideas in your own words, you are forced to think critically about the poem’s meaning and how to best communicate that meaning. This can help you become a better writer overall.

Finally, paraphrasing poetry can help you develop a deeper understanding of language and literary devices. By studying the way that the author uses language to convey their ideas, you can learn to use these devices in your own writing. This can make your writing more interesting and sophisticated.

Paraphrasing poetry can be a challenging but rewarding task. It’s important to take your time and make sure that you understand the poem’s meaning before starting to paraphrase it.

With a little practice, you’ll be able to accurately express the poem’s ideas in your own words. Not only will this help improve your writing skills, but it will also give you a deeper understanding of poetry and literary devices. So what are you waiting for? Get started paraphrasing some poems today!

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