How do I analyze the tone of a poem, prose passage, or play?
Tone/Attitude Terms One of the more difficult subjects for students to discuss in analyzing literature is tone, the author’s attitude toward the subject and characters of a work of literature. Frequently, the problem is that the student is simply not being specific enough. Tone: Key Issues: Often a single adjective will not adequately express the tone of a work, and tone may change from chapter to chapter, or from line to line. Sometimes, as in Wordsworth’s “The Prelude”, Book I, the speaker’s tone changes midway through the poem. Clues to watch for shifts in tone: Key words, such as but, yet, nevertheless, however, and although punctuation, such as dashes, periods, and colons stanza and paragraph divisions changes in line and stanza or in sentence length sharp contrasts in diction Though generally tone will refer to the author’s or speaker’s attitude towards his subject, sometimes the author may have one attitude toward the audience and another toward his subject. Generally, tone is t
