How should I approach an unseen poetry question in my exam?

First, take a moment to read through the poem and work out what it is quite literally about. It may take a couple of read-throughs to wrap your head around this, but this is nothing worry about, poetry can often be quite dense and hard to get to grips with. The next step is more tricky; try and think about what the poem is metaphorically about. Frequently poems will have a second level of meaning for you to access. It’s working out this level of meaning, and how it is created, which will enable you to obtain the higher marks in your exam. Take La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats as an example. Quite literally, a lonely knight is wandering through the countryside when he meets a beautiful woman who seduces him and then leaves him dilapidated. On a deeper level the poem seems to be about the pain of love, the cruelty of women and potentially about his own personal frustrations about his poetic output. Once you’ve established what that secondary meaning is the next stage is to understand how that meaning is being created. For the purposes of your exam it may be useful to memorise a list of common techniques to look for, as in the stress of the moment it can sometimes feel like everything you know about poetry has evaporated, and you’re left staring at a blank piece of verse that you have no way of cracking. A good place to start is form and style. You might not know off the top of your head that Keats is using a typical medieval ballad form, but you should be able to identify the use of quatrains. Check the syllable count of every line to see if you can establish any kind of metre, Keats alters iambic tetrameter and trimeter, but even an acknowledgement that the rhythm is regular and that the last line is always a little shorter will enable you to comment on the deliberately slow pace of the poem – an easy technique to a painful love story. Next think about aspects like rhyme, imagery, enjambment, caesura, tone, dialogue, symbolism, extended metaphors and remember to keep reflect on how these techniques are coming together to give you the impression of meaning that you got on your third or fourth read-through. Once you have a list of ideas try and group them thematically – for example, I might write a paragraph about how Keats uses the environment in the poem, a paragraph on the depiction of the faery and a paragraph on the medieval style (considering ideas of form and rhythm). Remember to keep your introduction and conclusion brief, using that space to simply tie your answer together by explaining what Keats is telling readers so you can focus in your paragraphs on how he does it.