(a) Verbal irony — saying the opposite of what is meant; e.g., "Beautiful weather!" during a storm. (b) Dramatic irony — the audience knows something a character doesn't; e.g., the audience knows Hamlet hides behind the curtain when Polonius is killed. (c) Situational irony — outcome is the opposite of what is expected; e.g., "The Lottery" presents a wholesome village ritual that ends in killing.
A. Three quatrains in alternating rhyme, then a closing couplet. The couplet typically delivers a turn or punchline.
Tone = the author's or speaker's attitude toward the subject (e.g., bitter, reverent, sardonic). Mood = the emotional atmosphere created in the reader (e.g., eerie, joyful). Tone is produced by the writer; mood is felt by the audience.
First-person ("I"): narrator is a character inside the story (Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye). Third-person limited: narrator is outside but tied to one character's mind (most modern realist fiction). Third-person omniscient: narrator knows every character's interior (Tolstoy, Dickens). Also acceptable: second-person ("you"), third-person objective (no inner thoughts at all).
B. Iamb = unstressed/stressed (da-DUM). "of MICE" and "and MEN" are both iambs. Trochee is DUM-da; dactyl is DUM-da-da; anapest is da-da-DUM.
Denotation = the dictionary meaning. "Home" = a place where one lives. Connotation = the emotional/cultural associations. "Home" connotes warmth, safety, family, belonging — connotations a synonym like "residence" lacks. Diction = an author's or speaker's deliberate word choices, ranging from formal to colloquial, abstract to concrete.
Shakespeare lists conventional Petrarchan tropes (eyes like the sun, coral lips, snow-white skin, golden hair) and negates each one ("nothing like," "far more red than," "dun," "black wires"). The negation strategy mocks the formulaic blazon while paradoxically still describing the mistress in detail. The subverted tradition prepares readers for the volta in which the speaker insists his love is "as rare / As any she belied with false compare" — i.e., realer for being un-idealised. Marks: 1 for identifying Petrarchan tropes; 2 for the negation/subversion mechanism; 1 for specific quotations; 1 for connecting to overall thematic effect.
Possible devices: (1) extended metaphor (the fog as a cat — sustained across all six lines), creates the sense of a sentient, almost prowling presence. (2) personification ("sits looking," "moves on") — the fog perceives the city, mirroring the speaker's contemplative attention. (3) free verse / brevity — the lack of metrical scaffolding mimics the silent, weightless quality of fog itself; the short lines and white space enact the transience. Also acceptable: alliteration ("silent" / "sits"), enjambment, imagery. Marks: 3 for naming devices, 2 for connecting each to the poem's effect.
Sample: "Plath's opening establishes Esther's dislocation by yoking a personal disorientation to a historical violence. The phrase 'queer, sultry summer' uses two adjectives that suggest both strangeness and oppressive heat, while the abrupt second clause — 'the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs' — anchors the personal mood in 1953's most public act of state killing, suggesting that the narrator's interior breakdown is continuous with a societal one. The shift from third-person observation to first-person admission ('I didn't know what I was doing') with no transition mimics Esther's untethering. The sentence's parataxis (clauses linked by 'and' rather than subordinated) refuses to assign cause, so historical event and personal confusion sit beside each other as equally inscrutable." Mark for thesis identification (1), evidence (2), interpretation of devices (2).
Look for: (P) clear topic sentence asserting wistfulness over triumph; (E) one quotation embedded with signal phrase and line citation, e.g., '"And sorry I could not travel both" (line 2)'; (E) interpretation of how diction ("sorry," "sigh") and the future-tense framing ("I shall be telling this with a sigh") signal regret rather than victory; (L) closing sentence linking back to thesis or transitioning. Marks: 1 Point, 1 Evidence, 2 Explanation, 1 Link/conventions (grammar, citation format).
Sample strong thesis: "Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' uses the narrator's worsening obsession with the room's pattern to critique the 'rest cure' of late-Victorian medicine, showing how the prescription of inactivity ironically produces the breakdown it claims to cure." Look for: a debatable claim (1), specific reference to text/device (1), an interpretive verb ("uses … to critique") (1), specific evidence implied (1), conventions (1).
Both connect a concrete image to an abstract idea. A metaphor is local — a single comparison ("Juliet is the sun"). A symbol is sustained — the same concrete object recurs and accumulates meaning across a whole work (the green light in The Great Gatsby; the road in Frost). All sustained metaphors can become symbols; not every metaphor does. Marks: 1 each definition, 1 the overlap, 1 examples and conventions.
(1) Metaphor: the soldier's body becomes English soil ("for ever England"), turning death into national continuity rather than loss. (2) Conditional ("If I should die") softens the violence, treating death as a hypothetical bequest rather than a brute event. (3) Capitalised "England" personifies and elevates the nation, equating dying-for with being-for. (4) A modern critical reading might note the imperial framing ("foreign field") that erases the host country, or the way the poem aestheticizes a war (WWI) that killed 17 million. Marks: 3 for the device analyses, 2 for the resistant reading.
The sentence states the opposite of Austen's actual view — wealthy single men are not, factually, "in want of a wife"; rather, the matchmaking mothers of the neighbourhood are in want of wealthy sons-in-law. The "universally acknowledged truth" is a parody of how village gossip elevates self-interest into universal law. The irony immediately positions the narrator's wit above the surrounding social world, training the reader to read everything else with measured distance. Marks: 1 for identifying verbal irony, 1 for naming whose belief is mocked, 2 for the social-satire reading, 1 for the structural function (orienting reader stance).
Strong responses identify how close-reading transfers: tone-detection helps spot sarcasm in a tweet; diction analysis flags loaded language ("crackdown" vs "policy"); irony spotting can reveal genuine vs performed apologies; connotation reveals subtle bias ("rebels" vs "freedom fighters"). Marks: 1 selection of a clear context, 2 transfer of two skills, 1 specific example, 1 communication/conventions.