Paying attention to the way the sentences in a poem are constructed can be a useful key to understanding poetic effects and explaining how they work. Some types of poem rely mostly on simple sentences — that is, sentences with only one clause. However, many others make effective use of complex sentences which are made up of one or more main clauses and one or more subordinate clauses. Consider this example from Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘A Birthday’, in which the subordinate clause is in blue: ‘My heart is like an appletree / Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit.’ If Rossetti had written only ‘My heart is like an apple-tree’ it would have been a simple sentence. The addition of the subordinate clause produces a complex sentence which expands the sweet, homely image of the apple tree to include the idea of abundant, almost overwhelming fruitfulness.
A quick way to identify complex sentences is to look for the subordinators that introduce subordinate clauses. The words and phrases that can function as subordinators are too numerous to list, but here are some common ones with the type of clause they introduce. We can begin with clauses that have the same grammatical function in a sentence as nouns and adjectives:
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