I need a basic guide to poetry analysis for a poetry comprehension test. What might be on it?

Poetry analysis can be perceived as a difficult task
perhaps because poetry often uses figurative language—words that
"paints" a mental picture in our mind is "imagery." All examples below are forms of
imagery, and all imagery is a form of figurative language—not literal
language.

A poem about the joys of spring and the fears of
winter may be referring to the joy of youth and the fear of death,
where a metaphor is used to compare
the stages of life to nature's seasons: the
theme is "aging." Note, for instance,
Henry King's lines from "A Contemplation upon
Flowers:"

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...but I

Would have
it ever Spring:

My fate would know no Winter, never
die...

The author is saying
that he would wish to always live in the "Spring" of his life and never know "Winter."
(*Authors often give hints about important elements in their poems by capitalizing
common nouns.)

Another thing that you should prepare for is
the use of several kinds of literary devices. There are two lists
shown in the source links below: they have devices such as
similes,
metaphors,
personification,
imagery and
repetition. These are not the only
devices, but they are very popular.

In the following, Emily
Dickinson personifies a train with human traits like: "lap," "lick," "stop to feed," and
"then…step…"

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"The Train"

I like
to see it lap the miles,

And
lick the valleys up,

And
stop to feed itself at tanks;

And
then, prodigious,
step...

The
third line of Sonnet 29 (below) personifies heaven as
"deaf."

Metaphors and similes are important. Stevie
Wonder's lyric, "You are the sunshine of my life" is a
metaphor. The woman has the same
characteristics of the sun. Patrick Swayze’s “She's Like the Wind” provides a
simile: she has
the same attributes as the wind, but the comparison uses
like or as. Review your literary
terms!

Another important piece of information
for understanding a poem is to
follow the punctuation rather than stopping at the end of a line. A
period, semicolon, question mark or exclamation point indicate that a complete thought
has been presented. A comma or a dash indicates that more information is to follow that
may be necessary to comprehend the author's message. Note the lines
from Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" where the complete thought ends with the second
line:

And the
stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes

Of the
beautiful Annabel
Lee;

Sentence structure and
word order offer deeper understanding. Refer to Shakespeare's Sonnet
29:

When, in
disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast
state 
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless
cries…

First of all, if you
pull up the entire poem, you will see that the sentence that begins on line one does not
end until the eighth line—with a semicolon.
This is not a run-on sentence, for you will note the use of commas. It sometimes helps
to be able to put the words in another order for easier understanding. Shakespeare is
trying to order the words to create a specific rhyming pattern.
(E.g., eyes rhymes with cries;
state rhymes with fate.) It is true that
knowing the definition of words used, as with anything, also helps.
The first line means when I am disgraced by luck ("fortune") and
men ("men's eyes"); the second line says that I cry because I am an
outcast. "Trouble deaf heaven" means he calls to heaven, but it seems deaf.
Switch the word order and see if it
helps.

Additional
Sources:

http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/29.html

http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/poe/annabel.html

http://ai.stanford.edu/~csewell/culture/litterms.html