A close analysis focuses narrowly on a single text (or portion of a text) in order to reveal its structure and organization. A close analysis is not a summary: it should not “translate” the text into your words, but should make use of your words to explain it. A close analysis is not an argument: it should not “take issue” with the text or attempt to support or refute it. The writer of a close analysis is more an observer than a commentator. Like a lab scientist, you are observing and describing a phenomenon.

What are the structural features you should be looking for? Not every text will have all of these, and certainly not all in equal measure, but here are features you might expect to find:

• Type of discourse: is the passage persuasive, argumentative, celebratory…or what?
• Unusual diction (words that catch your eye, that seem emphatic,
  • humorous, ironic, and so on)
  • Imagery (words and phrases that appeal to the senses—e.g. pertaining to light and dark, natural phenomena, supernatural phenomena, and so on)
  • Metaphor and other figures of speech
  • Speaker or persona (who is speaking? what are his or her motives?)
  • Syntactical devices (parallelism, antithesis, rhetorical questions, unusual sentence structure)
  • Mode of development (from earlier to later, from specific to general, from cause to effect)
  • Tone (for example: flat, detached, matter-of-fact, apologetic, anxious, excited, bombastic)
  • Point of view/attitude: is the passage abstract or concrete, immediate or remembered, vivid or generalized?
  Obviously, every work of literature will exhibit such features in different combinations.

NO SECONDARY SOURCES REQUIREDTWO VERSIONS OF THE POEM
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43654/the-chimney-sweeper-when-my-mother-died-i-was-very-young
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43653/the-chimney-sweeper-a-little-black-thing-among-the-snow