How to Write an Analytical Essay (A Learning Booklet)

A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis

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How to Write an Essay About Any Book in English Class: Part 1

It can be related to the historic event, literature, a piece of art or process like Water Cycle or Cycle of Sleep. One of the toughest analytical essay topics is one that relates to poems. Not even the most professional writers are aware of how to write an analytical essay on a poem. Fortunately, our experts are great and have an amazing level of experience in this field. Like in a persuasive essay , you need to analyze, research, and collect data. This topic requires from you to research the content of a certain poem. You need to explore its structure and style in an explanatory manner.

And you aim to make your reader understand how great and significant the poem you are analyzing is. You may take any popular poem and make it your own topic. So, what is an analytical essay on a poem? Yes, it is an analysis of its content on various parameters. Here are few the most significant poems ever written:.

Here is how you should start your analysis essay. The main thing to start with is to get yourself a nice and winning topic. You need to figure out what you are going to write about. It may sound obvious. This step is crucial if you want to get a better grade and succeed. The thing is that you have only two ways of how your analysis essay will get a topic. Both ways have their strong and weak sides. Your task is to open the topic no matter how did you get it. It is better if the topic is familiar to you or you are passionate about it.

Here are few interesting topics suggestions on various subjects. One of the most interesting and tough tasks is to create the structure of your future analysis essay. It is called an outline.

Writing a Theme Statement

This step is very important and will help you to deal with the entire paper properly. Analytical essay outline mainly deals with the topic and thesis statement. If one wants to learn how to write an analytical essay introduction, he needs to get some background info for his text. It should have a hook to get your reader interested.

Or you can use any other way. A white spider sitting on a white flower has killed a white moth. We can guess right away that Frost's disruption of the usual purpose of the sestet has something to do with his disruption of its rhyme scheme. Looking even more closely at the text will help us refine our observations and guesses. Looking at the word choice of a text helps us "dig in" ever more deeply. If you are reading something longer, are there certain words that come up again and again?

Are there words that stand out?

While you are going through this process, it is best for you to assume that every word is important—again, you can decide whether something is really important later. Even when you read prose, our guide for reading poetry offers good advice: Mark the words that stand out, and perhaps write the questions you have in the margins or on a separate piece of paper. If you have ideas that may possibly answer your questions, write those down, too.

The poem starts with something unpleasant: Then, as we look more closely at the adjectives describing the spider, we may see connotations of something that sounds unhealthy or unnatural. When we imagine spiders, we do not generally picture them dimpled and white; it is an uncommon and decidedly creepy image.

There is dissonance between the spider and its descriptors, i. Already we have a question: We should look for additional clues further on in the text. The next two lines develop the image of the unusual, unpleasant-sounding spider:. On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—. Now we have a white flower a heal-all, which usually has a violet-blue flower and a white moth in addition to our white spider.

Heal-alls have medicinal properties, as their name suggests, but this one seems to have a genetic mutation—perhaps like the spider? Does the mutation that changes the heal-all's color also change its beneficial properties—could it be poisonous rather than curative? A white moth doesn't seem remarkable, but it is "Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth," or like manmade fabric that is artificially "rigid" rather than smooth and flowing like we imagine satin to be.

We might think for a moment of a shroud or the lining of a coffin, but even that is awry, for neither should be stiff with death. The first three lines of the poem's octave introduce unpleasant natural images "of death and blight" as the speaker puts it in line four. The flower and moth disrupt expectations: Well before the volta , Frost makes a "turn" away from nature as a retreat and haven; instead, he unearths its inherent dangers, making nature menacing.

Literary Analysis Papers: A Short Guide to Close Reading for Literary Analysis

From three lines alone, we have a number of questions: Will whiteness play a role in the rest of the poem? How does "design"—an arrangement of these circumstances—fit with a scene of death? What other juxtapositions might we encounter? These disruptions and dissonances recollect Frost's alteration to the standard Italian sonnet form: Put simply, themes are major ideas in a text.

Many texts, especially longer forms like novels and plays, have multiple themes. That's good news when you are close reading because it means there are many different ways you can think through the questions you develop. So far in our reading of "Design," our questions revolve around disruption: Discovering a concept or idea that links multiple questions or observations you have made is the beginning of a discovery of theme. What is happening with disruption in "Design"? What point is Frost making? Observations about other elements in the text help you address the idea of disruption in more depth.

Here is where we look back at the work we have already done: What is the text about? What is notable about the form, and how does it support or undermine what the words say? Does the specific language of the text highlight, or redirect, certain ideas?

What is an Analytical Essay

In this example, we are looking to determine what kind s of disruption the poem contains or describes. Rather than "disruption," we want to see what kind of disruption, or whether indeed Frost uses disruptions in form and language to communicate something opposite: After you make notes, formulate questions, and set tentative hypotheses, you must analyze the subject of your close reading. Literary analysis is another process of reading and writing!

It is also the point at which you turn a critical eye to your earlier questions and observations to find the most compelling points and discard the ones that are a "stretch" or are fascinating but have no clear connection to the text as a whole. We recommend a separate document for recording the brilliant ideas that don't quite fit this time around.

Here follows an excerpt from a brief analysis of "Design" based on the close reading above.

This example focuses on some lines in great detail in order to unpack the meaning and significance of the poem's language. By commenting on the different elements of close reading we have discussed, it takes the results of our close reading to offer one particular way into the text. In case you were thinking about using this sample as your own, be warned: Plus it doesn't have a title.

Frost's speaker brews unlikely associations in the first stanza of the poem. These lines are almost singsong in meter and it is easy to imagine them set to a radio jingle. These juxtapositions—a healthy breakfast that is also a potion for dark magic—are borne out when our "fat and white" spider becomes "a snow-drop"—an early spring flower associated with renewal—and the moth as "dead wings carried like a paper kite" 1, 7, 8.

Like the mutant heal-all that hosts the moth's death, the spider becomes a deadly flower; the harmless moth becomes a child's toy, but as "dead wings," more like a puppet made of a skull.

The volta offers no resolution for our unsettled expectations. Having observed the scene and detailed its elements in all their unpleasantness, the speaker turns to questions rather than answers. How did "The wayside blue and innocent heal-all" end up white and bleached like a bone 10? How did its "kindred spider" find the white flower, which was its perfect hiding place 11?

Was the moth, then, also searching for camouflage, only to meet its end? Using another question as a disguise, the speaker offers a hypothesis: This question sounds rhetorical, as though the only reason for such an unlikely combination of flora and fauna is some "design of darkness. Such a design appalls, or horrifies.

We might also consider the speaker asking what other force but dark design could use something as simple as appalling in its other sense making pale or white to effect death. However, the poem does not close with a question, but with a statement. The speaker's "If design govern in a thing so small" establishes a condition for the octave's questions after the fact There is no point in considering the dark design that brought together "assorted characters of death and blight" if such an event is too minor, too physically small to be the work of some force unknown.

Ending on an "if" clause has the effect of rendering the poem still more uncertain in its conclusions: Behind the speaker and the disturbing scene, we have Frost and his defiance of our expectations for a Petrarchan sonnet.

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