Teaching Tone in Literature: 7 Poems & 8 Practical Strategies

“Okay”

That single word, no punctuation, in a text reply is enough to trigger an anxiety attack in any millennial. Wait, what does that mean? Are they mad at me? How do I respond? Should I apologize?

In a world of text messages and DMs, teaching tone is, perhaps, the most relevant it’s ever been to students. When we first started teaching, it wasn’t always easy to make clear why tone matters so much in literature. But now? Students get it. Everyone has been on the receiving end of an ambiguous message that they aren’t sure how to interpret.

But this doesn’t mean teaching tone is easy. Students may quickly grasp why tone matters, but identifying the tone of a piece of literature without clues—like emojis, facial expressions, and tone of voice—is challenging.

Teaching tone is essential in any literature class, but it’s a particularly high priority in AP Literature. It’s arguably one of the most important literary terms our students learn, and it’s a literary device they’ll definitely need to interpret multiple times on the AP exam.

Students need to start discussing tone early in the year, and it’s relevant no matter what you’re reading. But your poetry unit is a particularly effective place to focus on tone. 

In this post, we’re sharing practical strategies that have helped us teach tone more effectively to our students, along with seven poems that provide a good challenge to students.

Why Teaching Tone Is Essential

We all know tone matters. Whether it’s spoken or written language, tone makes all the difference between kind encouragement and biting sarcasm.

Tone, which we define for students as “the writer’s or narrator’s attitude toward the subject, the reader, a character, or himself/herself,” is essential to the interpretation of any text. When we misread the tone, we take away an entirely wrong interpretation—often the opposite of the one the author intended.

Take, for example, Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll,” one of our favorite poems to teach.

Piercy describes a typical young girl constantly reminded of her gender identity—dolls, makeup, play kitchen equipment. When she emerges from puberty with “a great big nose and fat legs,” it doesn’t matter that she has many other valuable qualities. Her supposed physical deficiencies are all people see, so she spends her lifetime trying to “make up” for them—flirting, exercising, and eventually cutting off her offensive nose and legs as an allegorical sacrifice. As she lies in her casket, the onlookers celebrate that she finally looks pretty.

In the last two lines of the poem, Piercy’s speaker declares, “Consummation at last. / To every woman a happy ending.”

If we misread the tone of these last two lines, we miss Piercy’s scathing commentary on the dangerous gender norms and beauty standards that kill a woman’s spirit, if not her actual body. Even worse, we think Piercy is upholding society’s pressure and the girl’s desperate actions.

Tone, then, is an essential part of the work our students must do for any text. Beyond that, most reading comprehension tests—and definitely the AP Literature exam—specifically ask students to identify the tone of a poem or piece of prose, and tone can be a valuable literary device for students to analyze when writing essays.

Despite its clear importance, however, tone may be one of the most challenging literary devices for our students to master. Why?

Why Teaching Tone Is So Challenging

Like most things in the classroom, teaching tone is challenging because identifying tone is challenging.

Even experienced readers sometimes struggle to interpret tone. Steph, for example, loathed Pride and Prejudice the first time she read it. It wasn’t until she saw a stage adaptation of the novel and realized that it was supposed to be funny that she fell in love with it. The characters were supposed to be annoying and ridiculous—it was all part of Austen’s larger purpose.

Tone is far more challenging to identify in written text than in spoken text. Without facial expressions and tone of voice to help us, we’re left with the words themselves. And while we may have adapted our phone language—emojis or a well-placed “this isn’t hostile” LOL—literature tends not to incorporate these.

Correctly identifying tone requires closely examining individual words to identify patterns that point toward the emotion behind the text. Close reading, however, is not something our students enjoy or gravitate toward on their own.

This is why our students need plenty of practice—and poetry is a great place for it.

Why Teaching Tone with Poetry Is Particularly Effective

Of course, one of poetry’s biggest assets is that it’s short. Reading the text often requires a minute or less rather than the days or weeks it takes to get through a novel. This helps with student endurance and buy-in, and it allows us to squeeze in multiple practice opportunities.

Analyzing tone with short prose passages does work well (and is important), but the nice thing about poetry is that you’re not looking at an excerpt: you have the full text to work with.

Another reason that teaching tone with poetry works particularly well is that students are already uncomfortable. If we’re reading a short story or novel that students think they understand, they can be reluctant to consider that they might need help analyzing more deeply. But with poetry, students know they don’t know. Everything is a struggle, so they’re more willing to look to us for help.

Teaching tone with poetry also works because we’re already looking closely at individual words. Because poetry is the most concise form of language, each word tends to be carefully selected to carry as much meaning as possible. The clues we take away from this close reading are the same clues we’ll need to correctly identify tone.

Finally, teaching tone with poetry allows us to explore complexities more efficiently than prose does. Many poems—particularly sonnets, where there is often a clear break between octave and sestet or between quatrains and concluding couplet—include a shift in tone. Analyzing these texts gives our students practice with tone that isn’t straightforward, practice they’ll need when they take the AP exam.

When we take time to focus specifically on tone—whenever that is—there are a few practical strategies we’ve developed that make the skill easier for students.

8 Practical Strategies for Teaching Tone in Literature

Two of the most commonly confused literary terms are tone and mood. It’s worth taking time to remind students that the tone of a piece of writing is how the author feels about a particular topic, while the mood of a piece of writing is how the text makes the reader feel.

If you’re looking for a technical definition to give your students, we teach that mood is “the feelings evoked in readers through a poem’s diction and imagery; sometimes referred to as atmosphere.” For example, the lonely, rugged moors and foggy weather in Sherlock Holmes’s The Hound of the Baskervilles create an eerie mood, as the reader wonders if there is truly a supernatural hound attacking the Baskerville family.

If your students are like ours, they’ll need to be reminded of the difference more than once.

It can be helpful to play professional audio recordings of the poems, especially when students are just starting to practice identifying tone. The reader’s tone of voice points students in the right direction, and then you can work together to find the words that created that particular tone.

This can be particularly impactful when you find multiple interpretations of a poem, as it creates the opportunity to discuss how the meaning of a text changes when the tone changes. We’ve used Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 for this, incorporating readings by Sir John Gielgud, Michael York, David Tennant, Andrew Cullimore, Lorna Laidlaw, and Harriet Walter.

Tone, like its cousin diction, is one of those literary terms that is nearly meaningless without an adjective in front of it. To be worth discussing, we must identify what the tone of a text is, not merely that there is one. We taught our students that these terms are never to be used without an adjective.

While the “you must use an adjective” rule is helpful, it can go awry when students don’t know where to start. They select the wrong adjective, an odd adjective, or an adjective like “interesting” or “effective” that doesn’t actually provide an interpretation.

To help our students get off the metaphorical fence and into a space where they were actually making an interpretive claim, we often had them start by determining whether the tone was positive or negative. This is usually an easier decision for students to make, and then they can work to narrow their choice down to something more specific. Even if they don’t narrow down to a more specific adjective, they’ve made a claim they can support, even if it’s not an amazing one. For students writing a timed essay, this can be a game-changer.

Because students often struggle to select an appropriate adjective to describe tone, it can be helpful to provide students with a list of adjectives they can use, perhaps even grouped into categories. Versions of a list like this abound on the Internet, and it’s a great tool for novice literary scholars—just make sure they use a dictionary to confirm their understanding of their selected adjective!

One of the earliest lessons in our poetry unit focuses on denotation and connotation. It’s helpful to connect your tone lesson back to this because, essentially, denotation and connotation are our focus when we look at individual words—or patterns of words—to determine the tone of a text.

As you move toward more complex texts, encourage students to look for lines that don’t seem to match the rest of the poem, as those can be signals of an ironic or unexpected tone. As we saw with the “Barbie Doll” example earlier in the post, the final lines can lead readers astray if they misinterpret the tone. When students pay attention to these mismatches, they’re more likely to pick up on more complex tones.

We’re big fans of helping our students build their cultural toolkits—-providing them with the background knowledge that college literature students are “expected” to know in Western culture. When you’re teaching tone, it can be helpful to share some of the most obvious “shortcuts” with them—authors who make a regular habit of using a particular tone or addressing a particular topic. We taught our students that if they saw the names Austen or Dickens attached to a close reading excerpt, they should automatically consider that the tone might be ironic.

When we give our students some of the shortcuts that we’ve gained in our time studying literature, we increase their chances of success within that same world.

7 Effective Poems for Teaching Tone in AP Literature

Of course, any poem can make for an effective discussion of tone. But the seven poems listed here are poems we’ve actually used in our tone lessons over the years. Many of them would be challenging for standard-level students, but they make for excellent discussions in AP Literature.

“Church Going,” by Philip Larkin

This one is definitely a good “challenge” poem for your students—ours were not happy with us when we assigned it! In large part, this is because the poem appears simple but requires considerable time with a dictionary, not only to understand some of the church terminology but also to grasp some of the connotations. Larkin’s speaker considers an empty church, displaying a blend of emotions that allows for a complex, rather than straightforward, discussion of tone.

“Crossing the Bar,” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Tennyson’s tone toward death in the poem is, perhaps, surprising until students unpack the central metaphor and identify the “Pilot” in the final lines. While students will need some background information about the nautical context, the poem is rich in figurative language, allowing them to practice identifying a precise adjective to describe the tone, one more complex than simply “positive” or “negative.”

“Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold

Armold’s lament over the decline of religious faith in his time clearly presents students with an example of a negative tone. As they unpack the poem, however—which will definitely take some work—they’ll uncover a shift from beginning to end. The poem is an excellent option for emphasizing the role connotation plays in developing a poem’s tone.

Our textbook paired “Church Going” and “Dover Beach” together, as the two poems address a similar topic with different tones. Assigning both would likely have been too much for our students, but if you have more advanced readers, the pairing might make for an interesting discussion.

“The Flea,” by John Donne

We’re big fans of Donne, so any time we get the chance to teach him, we’ll take it! “The Flea” is an excellent example of metaphysical poetry, characterized by its use of conceits. In a dramatic scene, the speaker, presumably male, tries to convince his sweetheart to lose her virginity to him by the logic that, after all, their blood has already mingled together in the body of the flea that bit them both. (Don’t think too hard about the 16th-century understanding of biology).

Donne’s language always challenges students, and this particular poem requires students to infer the actions the woman takes between the stanzas. But the poem works well in a tone lesson because of its lighthearted nature—if the speaker actually thinks he’s making a good argument, the poem is quite ridiculous, but said in fun, it’s an amusing (and quite creative) game between sweethearts.

“In Memory of Danny L.,” by Maxine Kumin

Kumin’s poem eulogizes a child with Down syndrome who died from heart failure but maintains a bittersweet, even, at times, joyful tone that adds nuance to the eulogy. With its contemporary language, students will find the poem accessible, and it allows them to consider the role imagery plays in developing tone.

“Since there’s no help,” by Michael Drayton

In Drayton’s sonnet, a presumably male speaker breaks up with his sweetheart, proclaiming there is nothing that can be done to save their relationship. But then, right at the transition between octave and sestet, the tone shifts, indicating that the speaker is far less okay with this breakup than he implied (and telling us that the speaker’s complaints are more lustful than romantic).

We like assigning poems with some drama to help dissuade students from the belief that poetry is stuffy and boring, so the “same old pickup line” vibe makes for a fun payoff once students work through the meaning. The allegorical scene in the sestet, however, makes students work for that payoff.

Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare

Sonnet 130, “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” is a great piece for teaching tone. It’s relatively easy for students to understand the basic content of the poem (though you’ll need to help them understand that “reeks” simply means “exhales”), but if the tone is misinterpreted, the poem sounds quite insulting. When students recognize the tongue-in-cheek tone, however, the poem starts to seem a bit more “real-world romantic,” and Shakespeare starts to seem a lot more fun.

If students are having trouble grasping the parody element of the poem (Shakespeare is poking fun at the traditional hyperbolic love poetry of his time), we’ve found it helpful to suggest it would be like a modern poet or songwriter writing a parody of Bruno Mars’s “Just the Way You Are” or One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful.”

Teaching tone is, in many ways, as challenging as interpreting tone. Not only must we put our close reading skills to work, analyzing language closely to consider connotation, but our students must learn to do the same. Poetry, with its emphasis on close reading, makes the perfect content to explore as you help your students develop this important skill. Tone is a literary device that will pay dividends when your students fully master it, and it’s worth your time—and your students’ time—to slow down and pay it some focused attention.

While we don’t yet have resources specifically relating to tone, we do have resources that can be easily adapted and incorporated into a tone lesson: our literary terms list, our 5C paragraph structure mini-lesson (which comes with a character analysis prompt that could easily be modified to help students practice discussing tone), and our mini-unit on how to write a literary analysis essay (which includes scaffolding to help students describe diction with an appropriate adjective, a skill they need when discussing tone as well).