4th grade poetry analysis worksheets

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Fourth grade poetry worksheets print one classic poem exactly as the poet wrote it, then ask five questions. Children say who is speaking and what is happening, listen for rhyme and rhythm, look at how the stanzas are built, explain a comparison, and choose the mood and the big idea. Every poem is in the public domain.

Free printable PDF worksheet, aligned to Common Core RL.4.5.

Each click picks one of the 15 passages written for this grade. Every sheet comes with its answer key. You don't need to sign up.

The kind of passages you'll get

Read the poem twice, once for what happens and once for how it sounds. Then circle the letter of the best answer for each question.

The Swing, by Robert Louis Stevenson

How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do! Up in the air and over the wall, Till I can see so wide, Rivers and…

  1. What can the speaker see when the swing goes up? rivers, trees and cows far below · ships sailing far out at sea · the moon and stars in the sky · a busy town full of tall towers

    Answer: rivers, trees and cows far below

  2. The words 'Up in the air' come back again and again. What does this repeating do? it sounds like the swing going up over and over · it shows the speaker is afraid of falling · it shows the speaker is tired of swinging · it tells the reader the swing is stuck at the top

Each print picks one of the 15 passages written for this grade, and its questions come with it. With 15 to pick from, a second print can land on one you've used, so check the title before you hand it out.

What's on a 4th grade sheet

4th grade sheets draw from 15 passages, 42 to 187 words long. All 15 are on 5th grade sheets too, along with 15 more.

Some of the titles: My Shadow, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Where Go the Boats? by Robert Louis Stevenson, Windy Nights, by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Wind, by Robert Louis Stevenson, Ducks' Ditty, by Kenneth Grahame, My Bed Is a Boat, by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Every version prints on US Letter or A4, with its answer key on the last page.

How to teach this

Read the poem aloud, then read it again and clap the beat. Fourth graders hear rhythm far more easily than they see it on the page. Point to the blank lines between stanzas and ask what each stanza is about, then what changes from one to the next. For rhyme questions, have your child say both words out loud. Spelling fools the eye (brown and grown look like a rhyme), but the ear decides.

Watch for: The speaker is not automatically the poet. A poem can speak as a child, a soldier or a tree, so the questions say 'the speaker' on purpose. Students read each line as a sentence and stop at the line break. The sentence runs until the punctuation does, and a line that spills into the next one is often the point. Naming a device is not the answer to a question about its effect. Rhyme, repetition or a stanza break is right only when the option says what it does to the poem.

Common questions about 4th grade poetry analysis

What poems are on the 4th grade poetry worksheets?
Classic children's poems by writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti and Vachel Lindsay. All of them are in the public domain, and they're printed exactly as written, with the original line breaks, punctuation and old spellings. Every sheet comes with an answer key.
What does 4th grade poetry cover?
The 4th grade standard, RL.4.5, asks children to talk about verse, rhythm, meter and stanzas, and how a poem is built differently from a story. These questions ask about rhyme, a repeated line, the beat of the words and the stanzas, along with the speaker, the mood and the big idea.

Related worksheets

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Want a different passage? Print again. Each print picks one of the 15.

Aligned to Common Core RL.4.5. Reviewed by the One more sheet team. Content version 241, updated October 2026.

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