This document discusses tone in poetry through several examples. It explores how poets use tone and devices like irony and satire to shape the reader's response. It analyzes the tones of several poems, including an e.e. cummings poem that uses verbal irony and double entendre to convey a comic and possibly sexist or bawdy tone. It also analyzes the tones of poems called "The Planned Child" and "My Papa's Waltz," exploring how the tones reveal attitudes and perspectives of the speakers.

1. Tone: The Creation of Attitude in
Poetry

2. • A poet’s choice of words governs the reader’s
response
• The poet shapes response through
denotation, connotation, seriousness or
humor, irony, metaphors . . .
• Of major importance is the poem’ speaker
Tone

3. Tone and Irony
• Irony
– Verbal
– Situational
– Dramatic

4. Tone and Satire
• Epigram
Sir, I admit your general rule
That every poet is a fool;
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

5. • She being Brand/-new
– e.e. cummings
• she being Brand
• -new;and you
know consequently a
little stiff I was
careful of her and (having
• thoroughly oiled the universal
joint tested my gas felt of
her radiator made sure her springs were O.
• K.)i went right to it flooded-the-carburetor cranked her
• up,slipped the
clutch (and then somehow got into reverse she
kicked what
the hell) next
minute i was back in neutral tried and
• again slo-wly;bare,ly nudg. ing(my
• lev-er Right-
oh and her gears being in
A 1 shape passed
from low through
second-in-to-high like
greasedlightning) just as we turned the corner of Divinity
• avenue i touched the accelerator and give
• her the juice,good
• (it
was the first ride and believe I we was
happy to see how nice and acted right up to
the last minute coming back down by the Public
Gardens I slammed on
the
• internalexpanding
&
externalcontracting
breaks Bothatonce and
• brought allofher tremB
-ling
to a:dead.
• stand-
;Still)
• 1. How extensive is the verbal irony, the double entendre in
this poem?
• 2. Is the tone comic? Sexist? Bawdy?

6. • "The Planned Child"
Sharon Olds
I hated the fact that they had planned me,
she had taken
a cardboard out of his shirt from the laundry
as if sliding the backbone up out of his body,
and made a chart of the month and put
her temperature on it, rising and falling,
to know the day to make me - I would have
liked to have been conceived in heat,
in haste, by mistake, in love, in sex,
not on cardboard, the little x on the
rising line that did not fall again.
But when a friend was pouring wine
and said that I seem to have been a child
who had been wanted,
I took the wine against my lips
as if my mouth were moving along
that valved wall in my mother's body, she
was
bearing down, and then breathing from the
mask, and then
bearing down, pressing me out into
the world that was not enough for her
without me in it,
not the moon, the sun, Orion
cartwheeling across the dark, not
the earth, the sea - none of it
was enough, for her, without me.
• 1. Who is the speaker? What is she like?
What is she talking about? Why does she
begin the poem talking about something she
hated?
• 2. What change of attitudes is described by
the poem?
• 3. What attitude is expressed in the
concluding global, planetary, solar, and
stellar references?

7. • My Papa’s Waltz
• BY THEODORE ROETHKEThe whiskey on
your breath
• Could make a small boy dizzy;
• But I hung on like death:
• Such waltzing was not easy.
•
We romped until the pans
• Slid from the kitchen shelf;
• My mother’s countenance
• Could not unfrown itself.
•
The hand that held my wrist
• Was battered on one knuckle;
• At every step you missed
• My right ear scraped a buckle.
•
You beat time on my head
• With a palm caked hard by dirt,
• Then waltzed me off to bed
• Still clinging to your shirt.
1. What is the tone of the speaker’s opening
description of his father? What is the tone
on the phrases “like death” and such
waltzing?”
2. What is the waltz the speaker describes?
What is the tone of his words describing it
in lines 5-15?
3. What does the reference to this mother’s
countenance contribute to the tone?
4. What does the tone of the physical
description of the father contribute t your
understanding of the speaker’s attitude
toward his childhood experiences as his
father’s dancing partner?