TONE IN POETRY
- Tone expresses the poet’s or speaker’s attitude toward the subject, the reader, or herself or himself.
- Tone can shift through a poem.
ADJECTIVES USED TO DESCRIBE TONE
- The following are the common tone/attitude words:
| Word | Meaning | |
| 1. 2. 3. 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 | Accommodating Accusatory Humorous Optimistic Pessimistic Sadistic Bitter Malicious Respectful Resigned Loving Understanding Spiteful Inferior Nostalgic Critical Cynical Ironical Patronizing condescending Satirical Slanderous Supportive Contemptuous Judgmental obsequious callous derisive . ribald | Willing to help. Also oblidging. charging of wrong doing. Making one laugh. Having hope. Having no hope. Being cruel to others. exhibiting strong animosity as a result of pain or grief. Intending to harm. Showing respect. Reluctantly accepting something unpleasant. Feeling or showing love. Sympathetic to Wanting to hurt /annoy/offend. Feeling smaller before. Have a look at the happy/good past. Pointing out mistakes in. Having little faith in. Meaning the opposite of. Belittle/consider inferior. a feeling of superiority Mocking/ ridiculing. Making false statement about. Giving help/encouragement Despising/ looking down upon. authoritative and often having critical opinions polite and obedient in order to gain something . unfeeling, insensitive to feelings of others. ridiculing, mocking offensive in speech or gesture |
Tone Poems
A FREEDOM SONG
BY Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye (Kenya)
Atieno washes dishes,
Atieno plucks the chicken,
Atieno gets up early,
Beds her sucks down in the kitchen,
Atieno eight years old
Atieno yo.
Since she’s my sister’s child
Atieno needs no pay
While she works my wife can sit
Sewing each sunny day,
With her earning I support
Atieno yo.
Atieno’s sly and jealous
Bad example to the kids
Since she minds them, like a school girl
Wants their dresses, shoes and beads.
Atieno ten years old,
Atieno yo.
Now my wife has gone to study
Atieno’s less free,
Don’t I feed her, school my own ones,
Pay the party, union fee
All for progress? Aren’t you grateful,
Atieno yo?
Visitors need much attention,
Specially when I work nights.
That girl stays too long at market
Who will teach her what is right?
Atieno rising fourteen,
Atieno yo.
Atieno’s had a baby
So we know that she is bad
Fifty-fifty it may live
To repeat the life she had,
Ending in post partum bleeding
Atieno yo.
Atieno’s soon replaced
Meat and sugar more than all
She ate in such a narrow life
Were lavished in her funeral
Atieno’s gone to glory
Atieno yo.
The tone is sympathetic to the child.
Ironic Tone
Read the poem “Building the Nation”
The poet uses an ironic tone, and his choice of words clearly reflects his bitterness and anger about the pretence by leaders like the PS, who attempt to hide their greed and selfishness behind empty official meetings.
Nostalgia Poems
The two poems below have nostalgic tone.
- Nostalgia by Billy Collins
Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.
The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.
2. PATRIOT INTO TRAITOR BY ROBERT BROWNING
It was roses, roses, all the way,
With myrtle mixed in my path like mad:
The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway,
The church-spires flames, such flags they had,
A year ago on this very day.
The air broke into a mist with bells,
The old walls rocked with the crowd and cries.
Had I said, “Good fold, mere noise repels–
But give me your sun from yonder skies!”
They had answered, “And afterward, what else?”
Alack, it was I who leaped at the sun
To give it my loving friends to keep!
Nought man could do, have I left undone:
And you see my harvest, what I reap
This very day, now a year is run.
There’s nobody on the house-tops now–
Just a palsied few at the windows set;
For the best of the sight is, all allow,
At the Shambles’ Gate– or, better yet,
By the very scaffold’s foot. I trow.
I go in the rain, and more than needs,
A rope cuts both my writs behind;
And think, by the feel, my forehead bleeds,
For they fling, whoever has a mind,
Stones at me for my year’s misdeeds.
Thus I entered, and thus I go!
In triumphs, people have dropped down dead.
“Paid by the world, what dost thou owe
Me?”– God might question; now instead,
‘Tis God shall repay: I am safer so.
