Tone/Mood

1. Tone/Mood • o     Identifying tone and mood is important to understanding what the author is trying to convey to the reader as well as the theme of the poem.

2. Tone • Is the author’s attitude toward his or her work or a character in the poem.   • Tone can usually be summed up in one word: solemn, tense, sarcastic, serious, enthusiastic, fearful, hostile, formal, objective, personal, ironic, humorous, or impersonal. • One way to think about tone is to think of a poem like a song.  Ask yourself: if this poem was set to music, what sort of music would it have?  • For instance, a poem about losing a lover would probably have sad, emotional music, because this would fit its tone.  On the other hand, a poem about a beautiful morning would have a more energetic, positive tone.

3. Mood • Is the emotional atmosphere produced by an author’s use of language.   • In the movies, it is achieved by special lighting, music, or sound effects as well as the actor’s tone.   • In poetry, it is conveyed with words and phrases, imagery, figurative language, rhyme and rhythm. • No one word describes the mood- it can be a feeling of doom, fear, pride, chaos, peace, or love, gloomy, imaginary, optimistic, pessimistic, silly, thought-provoking, sadness, courage…

5. Activity • You will be divided into small groups and each group will be given a card with one of the following words on it: sadness, courage, tension, sympathy, love, sarcasm, excitement, fear.    • You will write a description of a person walking a dog in the park according to the tone word you’ve have been given. • You may use a thesaurus as needed.  • When you have finished with your descriptions, you will read them to the class and the class will try to guess what tone word you had.   • We will also discuss how you decided to write your descriptions and the tools you used to convey the attitude of the description.