Questions about a poem need to be answered from someone who is good in poetry.
BIOGRAPHICAL QUESTIONS
1. Are facts about the writer's life relevant to your understanding of the work?
2. Are characters and incidents in the work versions of the writer's own experiences? Are they treated factually or imaginatively?
3. How do you think the writer's values are reflected in the work?
PSYCHOLOGICAL QUESTIONS
1. How does the work reflect the author's personal psychology?
2. What do the characters' or speaker's emotions and behavior reveal about their psychological states? What types of personalities are they?
3. Are psychological matters such as repression, dreams, and desire presented consciously or unconsciously by the author?
FORMALIST QUESTIONS
1. How do various elements of the work - plot, character, point of view, setting, tone, diction, images, symbol, and so on - reinforce its meanings?
2. How are the elements related to the whole?
3. What is the work's major organizing principle? How is its structure unified?
4. What issues does the work raise? How does the work's structure resolve those issues?
POEM -
DAVID R. SLAVITT (B. 1935)
Titanic 1983
Who does not love the Titanic?
If they sold passage tomorrow for that same crossing, who would not buy?
To go down . . . We all go down, mostly alone. But with crowds of people, friends, servants, well fed, with music, with lights! Ah!
And the world, shocked, mourns, as it ought to do and almost never does. There will be the books and movies to remind our grandchildren who we were and how we died, and give them a good cry.
Not so bad, after all. The cold water is anesthetic and very quick.
The cries on all sides must be a comfort.
We all go: only a few, first-class.