Tone in Poetry

A lecture by Jonathan McClure

Defining the Terms — 0:00:01

Voice, tone, and mood are often used interchangeably, but it helps to treat them as distinct—related and overlapping, but not the same.

Voice here means the voice of the speaker: who they are, what their mannerisms are, how they think, what their quirks are. These are qualities the speaker can’t really change—they’re just who this character is.

Tone is the emotional and ethical stance the speaker takes toward the material in this particular poem: sincere or ironic, comedic because something is funny, or comedic because the speaker is trying not to cry. Self-aware or not. Warm or cold. Tone is more situational—more dependent on the specific circumstances of the poem—than voice.

Mood is the effect the poem creates in the reader. It may match the tone—or it may not. A speaker who is going for comedy might create pathos in us. A speaker who is performing tragedy might tip into bathos and make us laugh. The gap between tone and mood is often where the most interesting things happen.

What influences tone? Word choice, syntax (clipped and punchy versus meandering and run-on), imagery, figures of speech, the form of the poem, the speaker’s stance toward their listener and their subject, what they’re willing and unwilling to say, how they set up and fulfill or violate expectations, how much emotional distance they maintain, and pacing.

A Chilling Dramatic Monologue: Browning’s “My Last Duchess” — 0:07:00

The speaker is the Duke of Ferrara, showing an envoy—sent to negotiate his next marriage—a portrait of his previous Duchess, whom he had executed. The speaker’s voice is aristocratic, self-satisfied, precise, cultivated, condescending. His tone is polite and controlled throughout, ostensibly boastful about the painting (really about himself), and carefully coded in its threats.

The Duke’s whole monologue performs refinement and reasonableness. He insists, implicitly, that anyone would understand what he did. But as the poem unfolds, a monstrous blind spot opens up: he genuinely cannot see himself as others see him. The speaker is proud of his nine-hundred-years-old name, irritated that the Duchess seemed to value his gift no more than anyone else’s, and completely untroubled by having had her killed. He thinks he’s projecting sophistication and control—and he is projecting control, because the menace is real. But he’s also revealing, to us if not to himself, that he’s a monster.

The entire thing is written in iambic pentameter rhyming couplets—formal control at every level, even in the meter. The cold evenness makes him more frightening, not less.

Tone and mood diverge sharply here. The Duke’s tone is genial, self-satisfied, politely threatening. The mood his monologue creates for the reader starts curious, becomes eerie, and ends in something like horror. One participant drew a useful contrast with the next poem: in Browning, we don’t take on the emotional stance of the speaker at all. In Hardy, we do. Both are available to a poet.

Wistful Restraint: Hardy’s “The Oxen” — 0:20:00

A shorter, plainer poem. An elder tells children, gathered by the fire on Christmas Eve, the old folk belief that oxen kneel in their pens at midnight to honor the birth of Jesus. The adult speaker looks back on this memory: he knows the belief is silly, but he also knows that if someone invited him tonight to come see the oxen kneeling, he’d go—hoping it might be so.

The voice is modest and plain-spoken. The tone is wistful, nostalgic, quietly pained—but the speaker never overplays any of it. He doesn’t dramatize the loss of faith or reach for large abstractions. The smallness of the belief (a charming old superstition) makes the poem feel at first like a minor thing, until you realize it’s standing in for something much larger: the disenchantment that comes with age, the world becoming less magical, the particular ache of knowing you can’t really believe what you want to believe but wishing you could.

The restraint is the point. By not reaching for more than the poem strictly needs, Hardy amplifies the effect—the understatement creates more feeling than overstatement would.

Humor as a Mask for Pain: Tony Hoagland’s “Coming and Going” — 0:31:00

A much more contemporary voice. A brief note from the poet frames the reading: he was interested in what he called “the vast possibilities of voice” and in the axis that runs between vulnerability and detachment—”between it hurts to be alive and I can see a million miles from here. Good poetic voice can do both at once.”

The poem describes a marriage ending at an airport. The speaker walks through a parking garage trying to find a car he never had—he came by cab and forgot. The situation is objectively funny, and the speaker notes that it’s a source of amusement to him now. But the language underneath tells a different story: heavy-bellied planes carrying frightened dogs and kidneys in dry ice, long streaks of rubber molecules scraped off the runway that “might have been my wife and I screaming in our fear.” The joke is played straight; the pain comes through anyway.

It ends on a deliberate cliché made literally true: going back inside to collect the luggage he’ll be carrying for the rest of his life. One participant observed that the speaker’s insistence on finding everything amusing is a performance of detachment that nobody believes, including the speaker—the pain is coming through in the negation of what’s being claimed. The word matter-of-fact appears, and it’s clearly not.

Weird Sincerity: Thomas Lux’s “Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy” — 0:42:00

Tarantulas fall into a pool in some unnamed semi-tropical location. The speaker argues that we should save them. This is set up as a wacky scenario, and the speaker never entirely stops being wacky—he hedges, self-interrupts, undercuts his own claims. But the moral argument becomes gradually more serious: the spiders have their own sign language, their own fears, their own worth. The poem builds toward an ending in which the speaker imagines the tarantulas telling each other that we who saved them are good and loving and would do it again. We are briefly cast as benevolent gods in a spider universe.

The question the poem leaves hanging is whether we’ve actually absorbed the moral—or whether we’ve just found another way to center ourselves, now as divine figures rather than as people who find spiders gross. Probably both. Lux loves to set up a moral argument and then make us wonder whether even our best responses are slightly self-serving.

The voice is folksy, plain, fond of starting a sentence and then doubting itself. The tonal range moves between discomfort (they might end up in your hat and bite you) and something close to real compassion. One participant who knew Lux personally felt a sweetness in the final stanza that seemed true to the person; another found the moral argument genuinely persuasive. The poem doesn’t force a conclusion—it lets you end up where you end up.

Unstable Tone, Unstable Speaker: Meg Freitag’s “I’ve Come to Demand the Light I’m Used To” — 0:51:00

From Edith, a collection of poems addressed to a dead parakeet—eaten by the speaker’s dog, the speaker’s negligence implied. All the poems are delivered to Edith as a kind of prayer or apostrophe. In this one, the speaker declares war on the moon: “The moon can go fuck itself, for instance. The moon with its eyes full of unkind marbles, its hands like two slabs of flank meat on an iridescent tray.” Then comes a meditation on grief studied like art history, then a confession of constant fear, then a sequence of fantasies about how the significant other might die or leave—a pack of wolves through the doggy door, a beam falling on his head—ending with the speaker standing in a gas station line with a pocket full of quarters, waiting to buy two Diet Dr. Peppers.

The tone shifts rapidly throughout—bravado, humor, self-awareness, genuine fear, and then deflation. The speaker is self-mythologizing and knows it, continues to do so anyway. The awful event at the center of the book (the death of the parakeet, only a teaspoon of strawberry jam under the radiator) arrives briefly and is then departed from. The fear of losing the significant other is expressed through grandiose fantasies that keep collapsing into the banal—because the banal is what the speaker actually dreads. Being left while standing in line buying sodas.

One participant identified the strawberry jam image as the emotional anchor of the poem; another noted that the tonal instability itself mirrors the emotional instability of a speaker who can’t quite hold herself together.

Wonder Overtaking Self-Absorption: Ross Gay’s “Opera Singer” — 1:00:00

A long poem in maybe three or four sentences. The speaker announces that his heart is so full of grief that he’s been hauling it in a wheelbarrow—no, an anvil—no, he’s swimming through the corpses of hippos, which means there’s probably a crocodile—”which only means to say I’m sad.” He catches himself and restarts, in a more plainspoken mode. He walks to a café not seeing the trees, slogging through the obscure country of his sadness, and then he hears opera coming from an open window. He begins jogging toward it. Fifty children materialize and run behind him. He finds an elderly woman in slippers, painting her doorway and singing, and the poem describes her singing as heaven. And then it stops, aware that language will make a miracle into an anecdote if you say too much.

The poem is very self-conscious about itself—calling its own hyperbole a “run-on simile,” making jokes in the middle of a poem about not knowing when to shut up. But it also seems genuinely moved by what it describes. One participant noted that the distinction isn’t quite between sadness and joy, but between self-absorption and wonder—two states with their own gravitational pull, and the poem dramatizes the sudden shift from one to the other. The shift in syntax enacts this: the sad sections have short, choppy sentences; the moment of wonder becomes a single long run-on, carrying everything with it.

Closing Thoughts — 1:10:00

Tone is one of the most difficult elements to talk about because it’s so diffuse—it emerges from everything at once. But it’s also one of the most important because it determines the reader’s emotional relationship to the poem before they’ve consciously analyzed anything. Reading with close attention to what the speaker is actually doing tonally, and how that sits against what the poem is making us feel, is a practice that transfers directly back to your own writing. The gap between the two—between the tone the speaker projects and the mood the poem creates—is often where the poem’s real work is happening.