Tone

Tone is a fairly important tool that poets and author’s utilize to convey emotion, setting, and meaning. Often times, tone emphasizes the word choice and meaning of the piece and is useful in this regard. For example, in Out Out by Robert Frost, Frost uses tone and tone shifts to shock the reader and to put the reader through a series of different emotions. Whilst Frost begins the poem with a lighthearted look at a family preparing dinner whilst a boy is out sawing wood. However, the tone of the poem radically shifts halfway through as the boy’s hand is cut off by the saw and eventually he dies. Without tone and tone shifts, the poem would be very static and the boy’s death would have no emotional weight on the reader. Consequently, tone is one of the most important characteristics for defining a work’s emotion and meaning. Tone is the trait the engages the reader in the work, and contains the emotion that play is trying to portray.

Blog #6: Imagery

Imagery is a particularly powerful tool that poets utilize to make their works more vivid and lively. Particularly, imagery can be done through a variety of means such as personification. Personification is the giving of human traits and actions to nonhuman objects. For instance, in Ozymandias, Shelly uses personification to paint a vivid image of the stone remains of a statue. Shelly describes the statue as having a "sneer of cold command", an image that gives a vivid image of the king described before his eventual death.

Blog #5: Sound

Sound in poetry is effective tool in conveying emotion and tone. Similar to how a movie uses a soundtrack to emphasized how emotion an emotion conveyed in a scene, poetry uses the sound of words and phrases in order to effectively convey emotion and imagery. For example, in Out Out Robert Frost uses sound and alliteration to convey the grim emotion of the. Using words with an "s" sound like saw and supper, Frost effectively conveys an image a saw buzzing. This sound makes the reader rightfully uneasy as the boy later meets a grim death at the blade of a buzz saw.