ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the form and shape of poems, how they all are defined partly by the white space that surrounds them and what such framing means for the way in which they could be read. It explores both the highly framed poem and the types that question and/or break the frame. The chapter addresses the relationship between framing and multimodality—what is inside/outside the chosen 'frame'? Why? What kinds of meanings are suggested by what is 'inside'? It includes three different poems: George Herbert's Easter Wings, John Donne's Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, and Robert Lowell's The Heavenly Rain. The poems considered so far in this chapter are both highly framed. Concentration of the analysis has so far focused on the 'shape' of the poem themselves and their internal dynamics. The multimodal imagination enables the manoeuvring of a response to a poem until sense can be made of it.
