A poetry explication is a writer's (your) explanation of what a poem means.  The purpose is to "walk" a reader through a poem, from top to bottom and from literal to figurative meaning, so that your audience gets more enjoyment out of a poem.

Your short essay should be one full page for a poem of several stanzas.  In your essay, explain your reactions to the poem and its meaning.  

Explaining a poem to others usually means you already have considered what is happening in the poem, understand its vocabulary and references, have identified significant images and language patterns (whether those patterns are of types of words or rhyme scheme).   Print out and take notes on the worksheet below, write your essay using supporting evidence from these notes, and attach the worksheet. 

 PRE-WRITING WORKSHEET:

General Inquiry  What is the subject of the poem?  Is it a person, place, thing, or quality?	Further Inquiry Is the subject traditional or untraditional? What is the poet's attitude toward the subject?
Who is the narrator of the poem?  Is it the poet?  Or a "character"?	Who are the other characters in the poem?  Is anything non-human acting in the poem?
What details of social and intellectual culture are used in the poem?  How is the poem part of its era?	Does the poem use dialect? Foreign languages? Conversational speech?  What is the setting?  What material items are part of the poem?
What is the tone of the poem?	Does the tone or action of the poem shift and where?  (Many poems have one or more poetic "turns.")