breaks that most poets use in their works. Dorfman's sentences, specifically, extend across multiple lines and sometimes entire stanzas. The last stanza, for example, is the end of the sentence that started in the previous stanza. If you analyze this way, you can create entire meanings from each sentence and understand what Dorfman was trying to communicate in full thoughts.

Or, try stanza by stanza. Because the stanzas often aren't full thoughts in Dorfman's piece, it could be interesting to see how your analysis turns out if you interpret each stanza individually instead of looking for complete thoughts. You may find you get an entirely different result than if you tried to piece together full sentences.

These three techniques work fine on their own (and there are, of course, other ways to analyze a poem), but poetry analysis often consists of a combination. Many people will look at how the line breaks affect the stanza's overall meaning and go more in depth on the poem. Take, for example, the following stanzas, lines, and sentence:

After the car left,
the car with no license plate,
we couldn't
find out
anything else
about him.

This single sentence spans across three stanzas, and Dorfman's choice to leave the words "find out" on not only their own line, but their own stanza, can create a churning effect in your stomach. It makes the phrase stand out, makes it punchy. An answer to why he may have done this could be that he wanted the narrator to seem like they're speaking in exasperated breaths. Maybe they're crying or panicking.

Try using a combination of the techniques and the example above to analyze the entire poem. It's okay if the meanings you come up with are different from others, because everyone interprets poetry in different ways.

In reading Ariel Dorfman's poem "Hope," from his collection of poetry In Case of Fire in a Foreign Land, the elements that seem most important to me are first that a son is missing. We learn that this state of affairs has been happening since the previous year when the son was taken on May 8. Next we are told that he was "taken"—he did not leave on his own. Against his will, the son was placed in an unmarked car, without license plates, with promises by those who took him that he would only be gone for a "few hours" for "routine questioning."

As the poem continues, we find that the parents have been unable to find out anything about him: whether he was dead or alive, since May 8. The speaker is horrified by these events as well. He asks in what country, in what world, could such a thing take place.

However, on this day, the day the speaker is presently observing, things have changed dramatically. A friend or neighbor (a compañero) has come to visit. He also had been held prisoner in the "red house" at Villa Grimaldi, the house once owned by the Grimaldi family. (We can assume they no longer live there—perhaps it has been seized by the "police.") While there (and this man has only just been released that day), the compañero heard their son's voice, which he recognized—and their son's screams.

Ironically (and at first, surprisingly), the parents do not lament the torture of their son, but are filled with hope (hence the poem's title). Eventually we understand that this is because they know that as of that day, he has been alive the entire time he has been missing, and is alive still. We also know that their hope extends to "next year," when after eight months they hope they may again hear news of his torture and know—then as well—that he is still alive. We grasp the fact that for them, death is the worst piece of news they could receive. Their son's suffering helps them through their own suffering by giving them something to pray for, to hope for—his continued life.