When we speak of a poem’s tone, we make a metaphor, speaking of a poem as if it were a
person and voiced its own words.
It can help, when studying tone in poetry, to try out the analogy of poems-as-people. If we
sometimes misunderstand tone in poems, it is also true that we can misunderstand personal tones of
voices, even when we have body and pitch, gesture and eyebrows to help us understand. In everyday
life, we interpret people’s tones every hour of the day, without noticing that we do it.
When we are offended by someone, or when we are touched or pleased, it is often the tone that
does the offending or the pleasing.
Perhaps, after dinner one night, someone says “I’ll do the dishes.” These four words, depending
on their tone, could mean a great many things. They could mean “I want to do the dishes because
you look so tired and I am always happy to do something for you,” or they could mean “I’m about to
ask a favor,” or “I’ll get points this way.” Or they could mean “when you wash the dishes, they
never get clean.”
We receive signals through gestures and through words, and we respond in kind; we
communicate by tones.
【題組】30. The style of the passage can best be described as _______________.
(A) instructional (B) poetic (C) dogmatic (D) inquisitive
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