Monday
Monday: A Poem's Shape
Raven sits by the porch window with an old poetry book open on her knees. Outside, the maple drops yellow leaves onto the Signal Desk.
"You have been on one page for ten minutes," Rocket says.
"It is a poem," Raven says. "Two roads in a yellow wood. The speaker has to pick one."
Rocket leans over. "It is short. Why are the lines broken like that?"
"What do you notice when you read it aloud?" Raven asks. She reads the first five lines.
Rocket listens. "Some lines rhyme. And it stops after five, then starts again."
Nova hovers at the window, her light catching a falling leaf. "A poem's shape is part of what it says," she says. "Count the stops."
"Four," Rocket says. "Four groups of five."
Learn it: lines, stanzas, rhyme and speaker
A poem is built from lines, and the poet decides where each line ends. Lines are grouped into stanzas, set off by a blank space, the way paragraphs group sentences.
Rhyme is two line endings that share a sound. Many poems repeat a rhyme pattern in every stanza, and the pattern is part of the poem's form.
The speaker is the voice saying the poem. The speaker says "I", but the speaker is a voice the poet made, not a report about the poet's life.
Raven thinks aloud: "The first stanza ends with a semicolon, not a period. So the thought is not finished. The stanza break makes me wait, the way the speaker waits at the fork."
- Read the poem aloud once without stopping. Then read it again, pausing at each stanza break.
- Mark the rhyming words at the ends of lines. Look for a pattern that repeats.
- Ask who the speaker is and what the speaker is doing.
- Ask what each stanza adds. A new stanza often means a new step in the thought.
Read it: a public-domain poem, quoted exactly as printed
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;
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,
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.
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.
Look closer: what the shape does
Each stanza has five lines. In every stanza, lines one, three and four rhyme with each other, and lines two and five rhyme with each other. Check it: wood, stood, could, and then both, undergrowth.
The same pattern repeats four times. That steadiness feels like walking, one step after another, while the speaker thinks.
Stanzas one to three happen on one morning. Stanza four jumps far ahead to "ages and ages hence". The form moves from a single moment to a whole life.
- Read the question.
- Tap your answer.
| About the poem | True or false? |
|---|---|
| The speaker travels both roads. | ? |
| In stanza two, the two roads had really been worn about the same. | ? |
| The first stanza ends with a period. | ? |
| The speaker expects to tell this story with a sigh. | ? |
- What does the speaker do first in the poem?
- Tap the cards in order.
A poem's shape is part of what it says. Tomorrow a Signal story takes up the same big idea, choices, in a very different shape.