What Is Close Reading | Definition & Examples
- Melchior Antoine
- 20 hours ago
- 6 min read
Close reading is essential for students of literature or anyone who is interested in gaining deep meaning and understanding from a literary text. It requires that a reader relies on the actual text to justify any analysis or conclusions that they glean from the text.
Let’s look at a formal definition of the term before we proceed:
Close reading is a form of literature review that develops arguments about a text based on evidence that can be found through careful analysis of the text itself.
Close reading can apply to any form of literature, including poetry, plays, novels, and short stories. However, it works most effectively when it focuses on brief passages, such as a short poem and passages from plays, short stories, and novels. In this article, I discuss how to go about doing close reading and provide a few examples, including passages from Shakespeare’s Macbeth and a poem by Walt Whitman.
How to do close reading
Close reading can be the basis for writing a literary analysis essay. To carry out close reading, you should first do a preliminary reading of the text, and then read again and again until you fully understand its deeper meaning or subtext.
To do so, you should pay attention to how the text maintains coherence or lacks coherence. You should also pay attention to things like imagery, metaphor, and symbolism and how they relate to the wider meaning of the text. Let's get straight into an example.
Our first example is the famous soliloquy by Macbeth in the dinner scene, where he decides against killing King Duncan in Act 1, Scene 7. It’s a long text, so we will break it into various sections for easier analysis:
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly. If th’ assassination
Could trammel up the consequence and catch
With his surcease success, that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgment here, that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return
To plague th’ inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends th’ ingredience of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips. He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself.
In this passage, Macbeth reasons that killing the king would bring short-term political and military success (coded in blue). In short, if the assasination of the king is to be successful, it should be done quickly and efficiently. He also acknowledges that he would suffer the consequences in the afterlife (i.e., “jump the life to come”). He seems to come to terms with that fact and accepts it as a price for his ambition.
However, the blue text considers the earthly justice and karma of committing such a crime. Duncan is both his king and kin, which means far from murdering Duncan, he is charged with protecting him against any harm. He uses vivid imagery and metaphor in doing so. For example, he talks about “even-handed justice” commending “th’ ingredients of our poisoned chalice / To our own lips.”
Then, Macbeth proceeds to contemplate how righteous a king Duncan is and how the natural order of both heaven and earth would be upset if the king is killed (colored in red):
Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked newborn babe
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on th’ other.
Duncan is portrayed as being “clear in his great office.” His righteous conduct as a king is portrayed as qualifying him as being God or heaven-ordained, so much so that the agents of heaven would weep at the tragedy of his death. This is suggested in language such as describing his virtues as pleading “like angels.” He also mentions cherubims riding “sightless couriers of the air” to announce the wrong committed if Duncan is killed, causing the world to feel pity.
In this part of the speech, Macbeth also links earthly justice to righteous or heavenly retribution. For example, pity for Duncan is portrayed as a “naked newborn babe.” However, there is a paradox in the imagery that is used. For example, pity is described as “striding the blast,” which is rather powerful imagery for a baby.
Before that, the “virtues” of Duncan are compared to angels who are “trumpet-tongued.” The imagery of trumpets and angels brings to mind the judgement day when men will be held accountable for their sins. So, the strange image of a naked baby striding the blast is a paradoxical image suggesting that innocence is not simply meek, vulnerable, or weak, but instead comes with strident justice and righteous retribution in its tail.
This ties in with the theme of the play that evil begets its own destruction, which Macbeth himself references in the first part of the quote where he mentions “even-handed justice.” In short, earthly justice is closely linked to heavenly justice as King Duncan because of his innocence and proper conduct in his “great office” is upholding God’s order on earth.
Macbeth, in the last part of his famous soliloquy (colored in blue), decides against killing Duncan because there is no moral justification for it, only his “vaulting ambition.” The speech ends with a metaphor that can be linked to the imagery of action, riding, and jumping from the beginning of the soliloquy.
The metaphor in question is Macbeth comparing his lack of moral motivation or justification as lacking spurs “To prick the sides of my intent.” This is reflected earlier in the passage where Macbeth talks about jumping the life to come and later in the images of a babe striding the blast and “cherubims horsed / Upon the sightless couriers.” Macbeth’s clear train of moral logic is closely tied to well-thought-out and coherent metaphors and imagery linked to concepts of heavenly and earthly moral justice.
The soliloquy is crucial for the wider point of the tragic play. It shows that Macbeth has a clear moral logic to recognize evil and its consequences, and that he is a deeply moral man. This means that he is fully responsible for his decision to choose evil and murder King Duncan. Later in the scene, he changes his mind after talking to Lady Macbeth, but that has less to do with Lady Macbeth being a femme fatale seducing him into evil than it has to do with Lady Macbeth symbolizing his own attraction to evil ambition against the better angels of his nature.
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A close reading of Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”
Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” (published in 1867) makes for an excellent case of close reading. The poem is written in free verse; however, its form and function is as well-thought out as a traditional Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. Let’s take a look at the short poem in full:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
The poem is about a man who attended a lecture about outer space and who fell sick because he wasn’t happy about what he heard. The poem is mysterious in that it is never explicit about what made the man feel “unaccountable . . . tired and sick.” Instead, the poet uses juxtaposition and incorporates it deftly into the form of the poem.
The poem is a free verse poem, which means it is not written in regular meter and rhyme. However, its form is reminiscent of the traditional poetic form known as the sonnet, a fourteen-line poem that has a change in thought or feeling between the octave (first eight lines) and the sestet (last six lines). The first five lines explain the poet’s sense of discomfort.
He uses repetition at the beginning or anaphora in the first five lines with the phrase “When I.” This tends to give an impression of how stuffy, boring, and tedious the room and lecture were. Such an impression is in contrast to the last four lines of the poem, where the night air is described as moist and mystical.
Moreover, the words “rising and gliding” also serve to emphasize this feeling of freedom of movement associated with stepping out of the room. The poet seeks to say that he values the mystical and poetic associations of the sky and stars over the modern urge to measure and understand them in scientific terms. In doing so, he links this scientific attempt to a feeling of unnaturalness and juxtaposes his mystical association as satisfying and liberating.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2024, October 24). What Is Close Reading | Definition & Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/close-reading |
