The speaker and structure of a poem: line breaks, stanzas, and turns
The speaker of a poem is the voice talking in it, which is not necessarily the poet; in a dramatic monologue like Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess," the speaker is a character, a duke, who reveals more about himself than he intends. Structure shapes how that voice is heard. Line breaks control pace and emphasis: an end-stopped line finishes with a pause, while enjambment carries a sentence over into the next line, creating momentum or surprise, and a caesura is a pause within a line. Stanzas group lines like paragraphs, from couplets (two lines) and tercets (three) to quatrains (four). Many poems also contain a volta, or turn, a shift in thought or feeling, as at line 9 of a Petrarchan sonnet or before the final couplet of a Shakespearean sonnet. Sound devices, such as alliteration, assonance, and consonance, work with structure to shape meaning. Analyzing a poem means asking who is speaking, to whom, and how its form reinforces what is being said.
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