Poem Paraphrasing Tool for Students

Table of Contents

️📜 Why Using the Tool?
️👌 How to Paraphrase Poetry
️🔗 References

📜 Poem Paraphrasing Tool: Why Using It?

The language of poetry is figurative and often vague.

Poetry paraphrase means a verse is interpreted and rendered in a more “spoken” language.

But why may someone need to rewrite a poem?

While preparing for in-class discussion, you can use the tool to help orient yourself within the text.
The paraphraser clarifies the literary devices, notably allusions, metaphors, symbols, similes, and synecdoche.
In the process, you’ll define the complicated and rarely used words.
Poetry may have confusing syntax and logically unrelated sentences. Rewriting poetry, you simplify these patterns.
Poets disregard many grammar rules. To create rhythm and rhyme, they may omit auxiliary verbs and other words with low meaning coefficient. The poetry paraphrasing tool eliminates these “drawbacks.”
Paraphrasing any text helps to understand the plot. It is especially valid in terms of poetry.
Translators of English poems use it to convey the meaning. Because at first, they need to understand the idea and purpose of every line and then only transmit it in the target language.
A poem rewriter is especially helpful when the piece is too long to reword by hand. It will save you much time that you’ll be able to dedicate to the plot analysis.

What Does It Mean to Paraphrase a Poem?

You should transmit the author’s ideas line-by-line in your own words without evaluation, analysis or explanations. Neither should you address the underlying messages or principal themes. In other words, you provide a translation of the verse in regular prose and common language.

👌 How to Paraphrase Poetry: 4 Tips

Below we describe the 4 tips that will help you effectively paraphrase poetry.

The picture contains a definition of a phrase in academic writing.

Walk in the Author’s Shoes

Try to follow the author’s steps and look at the things from their position.

Your rewording should parallel the author’s mood, tone, and voice.

If the poem is written in the first person, do the same. For example, the first lines of Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise can be paraphrased in the following way.

Original version	Paraphrased version
“You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”	You can make people remember me according to your bitter, twisted lies. You can walk over me, pushing me deeper into the dirt, But even if you do so, I will inevitably rise as dust rises from the earth.

Don’t Overuse Synonyms

Unlike paraphrasing the prose, keeping as many original words as possible is better.

You will soon notice that preserving even 20% is a challenging task. This advice does not apply to archaic or narrowly specialized terms.

Meanwhile, it is highly advisable to rearrange the sentence structure (toward simplification). The only criterion is to keep the original message. An illustrative example can be made based on Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art.

Original version	Paraphrased version
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.”	It is easy to master the art of losing. Most things in the world can be easily lost, so there is no point getting upset.

Add the Necessary Details

The meter and rhythm are critical in poetry. Because of that, authors often have no choice but to leave out some details that may be evident to the reader.

When you rephrase, it is correct to put all the words in their places, especially when the poet gave nothing but a hint.

For example, compare the original and paraphrased versions of Gwendolyn Brook’s We Real Cool.

Original version	Paraphrased version
“…We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.”	We celebrate misbehavior. We drink cheap alcohol. We listen to Jazz in June. But while doing that all, we may die soon.

Translate It into the Language You Speak

Poem paraphrasing is the most similar activity to translation.

The difference is that you use the same language but change its style.

Compare the last lines of Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley and our rewording:

Original version	Paraphrased version
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”	Those who think you are powerful look at what I have built and despair seeing my accomplishments. Nothing else has been left here. Around the remains of the large ruined statue, there is a boundless and bare desert, where empty and level sands stretch as far as the eye can see.

🖋️ Poem Paraphrasing: 3 Examples

To better understand how to do this task, we have prepared 3 paraphrases of the best samples of English poetry. You can also compare them with the originals available through the links.

Sonnet 18 Paraphrased

It is a sonnet by William Shakespeare written somewhere in the 1590s. In this poem, the speaker admires the beauty of his beloved one and promises that it will always live in his sonnet. The language is archaic and complicated, so you shall read the original several times to understand its meaning.

Read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 paraphrased below.

Example:

Can I compare you to a summer day?
You are lovelier and softer.
In May, rough winds shake the fragile flower buds,
And summer is always too short.
Sometimes the Sun shines too hot,
And its golden face gets dimmed;
And the beauty of beautiful people decays
By chance or natural causes.
But your eternal summer will never fade,
You will not lose your beauty,
And death will not be able to boast of having taken you
Because you live in my eternal lines.
As long as people breathe and have eyes to see,
As long as this sonnet exists, it will make you alive.

The New Colossus Paraphrased

Emma Lazarus created the poem in 1883 to raise funds for the Statue of Liberty. Now, it is engraved on the monument’s base. Lazarus’ sonnet recognized the statue’s primary role of welcoming those who seek refuge. You can check The New Colossus paraphrased below.

Example:

Different from the giant bronze statue of Helios in the Ancient Greek Rhodes,
Whose limbs joined two sides of a harbor, commemorating a military victory,
Here, at an American shoreline
There is a statue of a powerful woman with a torch, the flame of which
Is electric and lights up the sky. Her name
Is the Mother of Exiles. Her hand with a beacon
Welcomes people from around the globe. Her gentle gaze
Commands the harbor in the cities of New York and Brooklyn.
“Ancient European countries, you can keep your history,” she says
With her silent lips. “But give me your tired and poor
People who strive for freedom.
These people have been abandoned and forgotten by your overpopulated lands.
Send the homeless and miserable to me,
As I raise my lamp over the gateway to America.”

Fire and Ice Paraphrased

Robert Frost created the poem Fire and Ice in 1920, soon after WWI. The title symbolizes the two apocalyptic scenarios. Fire represents desire, and ice stands for hatred. You can read Fire and Ice paraphrased below.

Example:

Some people say the fire will bring the end to the world,
Others say that it will be the ice.
But as far as I have experienced desire,
I believe that fire will be the case.
But if the world had to be destroyed twice,
I think I have also experienced hatred enough
To say that ice
Would also fit this purpose
Perfectly well.

Thank you for reading this article! If you are not completely satisfied with the result of paraphrasing, try one of our highly specialized tools for various types of content:

Updated: Sep 29th, 2024

🔗 References