What is Tone?

Tone is the attitude of an author or speaker toward a literary work’s subject or audience. The other basic elements of literature, figures, diction, syntax, and point of view, all contribute to the tone of a piece. 

In his poem “The World is Too Much with Us,” Wordsworth addresses an English, Christian society he feels has become too materialistic, too obsessed with “getting and spending.” Notice how his use of an interjection helps convey an outraged tone toward his subject:

Tone Words: Sensory or Personifying?

Intriguingly, tone words can be sensory, and so closely related to literary imagery. If the work is humorous, is it sweet, like a bon-bon, bitter, like dark coffee, or acidic, like a lemon? Is it soft, or light, or perhaps heavy?

Is the dreamy tone of a drama dark yet sparkling, like a starry night? 

Consider how to describe Dorothy Parker’s attitude toward her subject in the poem “Love Song:”

My own dear love, he is strong and bold
      And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
      And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurled—
      Oh, a girl, she’d not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world,—
      And I wish I’d never met him.

My love, he’s mad, and my love, he’s fleet,
      And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
      And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
      As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams,—
      And I wish he were in Asia.

My love runs by like a day in June,
      And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He’ll tread his galloping rigadoon
      In the pathway of the morrows.
He’ll live his days where the sunbeams start,
      Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart,—
      And I wish somebody’d shoot him.

Is the poem bitter or even acidic? Or might a close reader describe Parker’s tone another way?

Tone words may also be words generally reserved for describing a personality. In other words, we can use personification. Is Parker’s poem childish? playful? Is it lighthearted?

Consider the following list of twenty personifying words, which may be useful in describing a narrator’s tone:

Use the list above as a starting point, but develop your own sensory and personifying language for building a comprehensive set of words for describing the speaker’s attitude while close reading.

How carefully one chooses to describe the tone of a work of literature will affect whether he or she is thinking like a reader.

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Now, click here to learn about the final literary element, Prosody.