A Poetry Lesson

by Steve Shann , Mary Macken-Horarik & CeCe Edwards

Steve Shann

Jan 04, 2024

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Changing English, Studies in Culture and Education 2021, Vol 28, No 1 14-28

ABSTRACT

What do we see when we observe an excellent English lesson? What’s going on in the room? Perhaps what stands out is a collaborative making of meanings inspired by stimulating texts. Perhaps what’s most important is an ever-deepening knowledge about, and facility with, the many ways that language works. Maybe what we’re seeing is a carefully sequenced preparation for future hurdles to be negotiated. Or a blend of all three. And perhaps, as this story suggests, there is more. Perhaps every English lesson is affected in all kinds of subtle and sometimes invisible ways by unconscious fears and desires and by half-remembered histories, the territory towards which a story – more easily than a piece of non-fiction – can gesture.

I. The poem

Hello there.
As I appear to be the main character in this story (a claim that, no doubt, will be disputed by some of the others you’ll soon meet), let me introduce myself.
On the surface, I’m a poem made up of a finite number of words, a finite number of lines, with an embedded number of what is rather blandly called ‘poetic techniques’. Rhyme, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, allusion, onomatopoeia, personification, simile, metaphor ... I’ve got them all. This, of course, is a crude over-simplification and misrepresentation of who and what I am. But, as a place to start, here are my three stanzas.

Look, stranger, on this island now,
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.
Here at a small field’s ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the sucking surf,
And a gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.
Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,
And this full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.

I was born in 1936. Or at least that was when I was first published. My creator, W.H. Auden, was an English poet who moved to America just before the Second World War. What else do you need to know about him? Nothing really. Not if it’s me – the poem – you want to engage with, rather than with the poet.

No, perhaps there’s one more fact about the poet that is relevant. The poet is dead. Not me. I’m alive. And like every living thing, I go on developing and changing. I create affects, but the affects (the impressions on readers’ or listeners’ bodies) that I create are not fixed. My words and their order might be the same, but meanings, associations, contexts all make for fluid and unpredictable readings. As with any living body.

You’ll see what I mean when you visit a Canberra classroom. That story is below. I was let loose in Jess’s class of Year 11 students, and the energetic ripples created by that encounter were unique.

There’s a limit, of course. My subject matter is the possible impacts of the view out to sea from the edge of a cliff. It’s not about green eggs and ham.

But neither the poet’s purpose nor my meaning are fixed, or can be known with any certainty. Why did Auden write me? Maybe he had no conscious motive, but a stray phrase came to him one day and he decided to construct a poem around it. Maybe he was wanting to capture a moment in a way that was somehow faithful to reality. Or maybe he hoped some finely-worded phrases and lines would create their own unpredictable magic. Was he interested in truth, or in beauty? Who knows?

II. The teacher and her classroom

She’s introverted, green-eyed teacher Jess,
the one (this month) with close-cropped orange hair
and jingling metal earrings, a pre-loved pair,
A brightly coloured skirt, and clashing vest.
She’s quiet in the staffroom at her desk.
Shuts banter out that swirls around that lair.
Would rather read than chat, avoids the glare,
And, bunkered down, makes walls around her nest.
It’s different in her classroom. There she blooms
It’s where she, as a student years ago,
Saw pricked the Darcy pride, felt Juliet’s woe,
First heard the throb of Hiawatha’s drum.
So in this room suffused with pleasures past
Her quiet spirit finds its voice at last.
And Jess now needs some time before the bell,
the morning classroom empty, voices mute.
She sits, eyes shut, and seeks a calming thought.
Her lesson’s finely-tuned, yet she can’t tell
if what, last night, she’d planned alone in bed
when myriad thoughts began to calibrate,
- if what seemed then quite sure to pollinate -
would play out as it played out in her head.
She stirs, then stands, moves desks across the floor.
This is this teacher’s pre-class ritual move.
Puts music on, with lyrics that she loves,
As outside students gather by the door.
They’ll enter soon this part-found part-forged space
Where ghosts with present bodies interlace.

brown wooden table and chairs — Photo by Ivan Aleksic on Unsplash

III. The students

Jess opens the door, but there are only five students outside.

‘Where are the others?’ she asks.

‘Excursion miss.’

She remembers, vaguely, an email about possible disruptions to normal lessons. She wonders if what she’s planned will work with so few bodies.

***
Scott – sandy-haired, a tad overweight, pale-skinned – is, as usual, first into the room.

‘Morning Miss,’ he says, not quite making eye-contact. ‘What’s on the menu for today?’

‘Just you wait Scott,’ she says. ‘You’ll love it, as usual!’

‘I bet,” he says, rolling his eyes. ‘More of your touchy-feelies?’ They both smile.

Scott struggles with English. He wants to do well, needs to do better if he’s to get into nursing after Year 12. But, no matter how many hours he puts in out-of-school, there’s something about his literal mind that makes foreign territory of this subject, especially the way Jess teaches it.

It’s not that he feels nothing in English classes. On the contrary, he senses strong feelings that are more than just anxieties about marks and the future. At the same time that he relies on and celebrates his literal mind, he feels it as a handicap, a deficiency, a reason why his brothers and classmates – even, sometimes he thinks, his parents – feel uncomfortable in his presence. He senses intensities just below the surface but has no vocabulary to relax their grip.

Now he’s moving towards his seat near the window. Eyes down. Avoiding looking at the photos of ex-pupils on the wall next to the glass-doored bookcase. The students in those photos make him think of his grandfather. His grandfather died suddenly earlier this year. Scott was there, in the hospital, when it happened. The family won’t talk about that terrible day. The shock still sits, wordless, like a weight in Scott’s chest.

***
Helen – tall, thick shoulder length wavy hair, dark smiling eyes – is next in.

She’s recently come back from a trip to Greece to visit aunts in the coastal village where her father was a boy. There she was surprised to discover that old traditions – and attitudes towards the bringing up of girls – were far stricter in her Australian family than back in Greece.

Helen will one day be part-owner of the family business – a hotel in the city – and she finds that world, the world of commerce and customers, way more compelling than the worlds described in the literature they study in English.

Her assessments are always handed in on time, always carefully set out and edited, are carefully calibrated against the published outcomes, and never score higher than a solid C.

She likes her teacher Jess and has a vague sense that she’d like to understand better why Jess gets so enthusiastic about language and works of the imagination. She has no expectation that this will ever happen.

‘Hi Helen,’ says Jess at the door.

‘Hey Miss,’ says Helen. ‘Nice top. Nice colour. I like it.’

Helen makes her way to her seat in the middle of the room.

***
Jamila – diminutive Jamila with the unkempt hair, baggy jeans and deep circles under her eyes – is next. She loves her English classes, yet responds to Jess’s bright ‘Hi Jamila!’ by raising a weary hand.

Born in Australia after her parents travelled as refugees by boat from Iraq, Jamila speaks three languages fluently, taught herself to read at 4, spent last year in Japan on her own (and against her parents’ wishes, though now they’re proud of her independence), currently works as a waitress in a club four nights a week to support the family (her father has been off work recently with a serious illness), and wants to be a lawyer. She will regularly study into the early morning in order to maximise her marks.

***
Nathan is next. Nathan the renaissance boy, Jess has thought. A student who scored As in all his subjects, exceptional at a number of sports, popular with his peers. He does especially well in maths and the sciences, and wants to be a doctor or, if he can’t get into medicine, a sports physiotherapist. Jess finds him a little brittle or dogmatic at times, pleased with the world as he finds it, but with a keen eye on the marks he gets. His girlfriend, Kate, is also in the class and they invariably arrive and sit together. Today, though, Kate is on the excursion.

‘Morning Nathan,’ says Jess.

‘Morning,’ says Nathan. His tone is unusually flat.

‘You OK?’

‘Couldn’t be better,’ he says. There is a bitterness in his tone.

At his seat, Nathan takes out his phone and reads Kate’s text again.

I think we need some time apart. I’ve been struggling with the way you put me down, or put women down, like last night with your father, or when you’re with the guys. I’ve tried talking to you about this but you keep saying I’m making a big deal of nothing. That’s not how it feels to me, and it keeps happening. Maybe some time apart will give us both some perspective.

***

‘Hi Alice.’

‘Hi Miss.’ This is Alice, the last of today’s five students.

Alice goes to her seat. She takes out a folder and begins to draw. The page already has scores of little drawings on it. Faces. Vases. Vine leaves. Nudes. She’s been doing some life drawing classes. She wants to paint a big picture, but she doesn’t think she’s ready yet.

Alice, pale skin, short auburn hair, jeans and top both paint-flecked. Alice spends every available moment in the Art Department, with its open-door workshop pro- gramme. Alice loves it. She hasn’t made any close friends. She works on her own. She is still reserved, a little doubtful that she has any talent. But she loves the way the art teachers encourage her, gently push her.

She is from rural Victoria. She misses her mum and the small farm. She hates living with her aunt, who is a racist and impatient with Alice’s vegetarianism. But she’s so glad she made the move. School in her local town was hell. Loud boys, classes out of control. No-one in their district, it seemed, valued the arts, apart from Alice and her mother.

Alice rarely speaks in Jess’s class. She likes it though. Likes the discussions they have. Occasionally likes the texts. But it’s not like the Art Department.

man walking towards opened door — Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

IV. The English lesson

‘Just five,’ I thought as I walked from door to desk. But it was too late now for any major adjustments. I wondered if, with this small group, a slower, more relaxed pace might be possible. But it was an odd mix of students. I couldn’t imagine them working as a small group, couldn’t imagine (for example) Scott at ease chatting about poetry with Jamila.

But then what I’ve come to love about teaching English (or at least teaching it the way I like to) is its unpredictability. I never know whether a lesson will go the way I imagined it.

‘In a moment I’m going to ask you to shut your eyes,’ I said. ‘Not just yet Scott. In a moment I’m going to read something to you. I don’t want you to try to understand it. There isn’t going to be a quiz at the end, I’m not going to ask you to analyse or dissect or even talk about this thing. Instead, I want you to hear its music. It’s made of words and the words have meanings, but that’s not what I want you to concentrate on. Words are made up of sounds, and sometimes we can listen to words the same way we listen to music, just hearing the rhythms, the pace, the sounds, the mood. I want you to listen to the sounds of this piece as if it were music.’

‘If I shut my eyes, I’ll go to sleep!’ said Jamila and Helen offered her rolled up jumper as a pillow. They didn’t usually sit together, but both were now smiling. Nathan, I noticed, was staring vacantly out the window, seeming a million miles away. Scott was looking anxious, embarrassed perhaps that he’d shut his eyes too soon.

‘Can I draw instead of shutting my eyes?’ asked Alice. ‘I like drawing when I’m listening to music.’

‘You can draw,’ I said. ‘The rest of you, eyes closed.’

So I read the poem. I read it slowly, seeing in my mind’s eye the island, the field, the cliff, the gull, the ships . . . hearing the pluck and knock of the tide, the scramble of the shingles and the suck of the surf.

I was half-watching the group as I read, and noticed that Nathan was still looking out the window. ‘Keep your eyes shut,’ I said, ‘while I read it again.’ I caught Nathan’s eye. Almost sullenly he put his hand over his eyes, then lay his head on his arm.

I read the poem again. The five slowly emerged from their cocoons. The silence, I thought, seemed contemplative rather than awkward. I think they were waiting for me to say something, but I just raised my eyebrows, as if to invite their responses.

‘Awesome,’ said Jamila. ‘Read it again.’

I read it for a third time. Jamila seemed transfixed. Scott, though, was looking increasingly uncomfortable.

‘I loved it,’ said Jamila.

‘In a minute I’ll ask you to say some more,’ I said. ‘But what about you others. What did you hear?’

‘I didn’t get the first bit,’ said Scott. ‘The leaping light bit. What was that all about?’

‘Let’s leave questions about meaning to one side, just for the moment Scott. We’ll come back to your question later. What did you hear?’

‘Words,’ said Nathan dryly.

‘Words that sounded like what they described,’ said Jamila. ‘The pluck and knock of the tide. It’s got that hollow sound, the tide has, and the words sort of echo the sound.’

‘I don’t think the waves sound like that at all,’ said Nathan. ‘They swish and wash. There’s a ‘sh’ sound to waves, not a knocking sound.’

‘Not in Greece,’ said Helen. ‘The Mediterranean’s not like our seas here. When I was in my family’s village last year, we used to go down to the beach. The beaches are completely different there. There aren’t those big waves. Especially when you’re in a cave, these gentle waves come in and there are these more echo-ey sounds, plonky sounds. Maybe ‘pluck’ and ‘knock’ work? I’m not sure.’

‘When she read the poem,’ said Jamila, first of all looking at Helen sitting next to her and then over at me, ‘ . . . when you read the poem Miss G, I felt myself going to another place, like when I’m reading a really good book. It’s like for me the music of the poem took me to this place where there are cliffs and light and where you can hear the sounds of the sea. Pluck and knock, words like that, help me be there. So does the music in that bit about the . . . the chalk walls . . . Read it again.’

I activated the smartboard and the poem appeared. I read the section:

Here at a small field’s ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide

Again there was a silence after I’d read. There seemed to be present a mixture of sceptical bemusement (Nathan, maybe Scott), and pleasure (the girls?). I wasn’t sure where to go, what to say, or whether to say anything at all. The words, their sounds, their affect, hung for a moment in the air.

‘Assonance,” said Jamila.

‘What-in-ants?’ said Scott.

‘Assonance,’ said Jamila. ‘When words have the same internal sound. Chalk . . . wall . . . falls . . . tall . They all have the same vowel sound . . . aw . . . chalk, wall, falls, tall.”

As Jamila listed the words, I pointed to them on the screen.

‘In the line above too,’ said Alice. She’d been drawing during this conversation, but had looked up and was studying the poem on the smart board. ‘Small . . . pause . . . ’

‘That’s a poetic technique, isn’t it,’ said Scott. There was a kind of surprised epiphany in his voice, as if he’d suddenly found something he’d been looking for, as if something had suddenly clicked.

‘It is, Scott.’

‘How do you spell it?’ asked Scott, pen poised. ‘And are there others?’

I wrote ‘assonance’ on the whiteboard, but had a vague sense that something was being derailed, that I didn’t want to go too far down this path.

‘Other what?’ asked Nathan. His tone seemed to have lost its barb. ‘Do you mean other poetic techniques?’

‘Yeah. Are there Miss? Are there other techniques?’

A moment of indecision.

On the one hand I was pleased for Scott. Scott was so gutsy, I thought. He wasn’t shielding a vulnerability behind a scathing facade. As always, Scott was bravely and anxiously trying to put all the different things he learns in their proper place. He knew there would be assessments about poetic techniques; he’d read the rubric. And I guessed that he assumed that a poem is a poem because it has poetic techniques. He was trying, honestly and bravely, to get his head around what felt slippery. He’s told me a few times, privately, that he wishes I would explain things more clearly. And now he seemed to have found a path out of his thrashing around.

I was also pleased to hear Nathan’s tone soften; I hoped it was because he had entered the circle of the engaged, a circle that I care deeply about.

Still, I was wary of this move towards identifying techniques. It might benefit the Scotts and Nathans of the world – all of them if it came to that – when the inevitable assessment arrived. But it felt like a diversion from what was a promising engagement with the poetry in the poem: its affect, its impact, its potential imprint. What would Mary Barker, my own English teacher in Year 12, do in a moment like this one? I wondered.

‘There are other techniques, Scott, and bravo for helping us identify this one,’ I said. ‘There are others. We’ll get to them, but not just yet. It’s important that we don’t fall into the trap of seeing this poem as if it’s a dead butterfly which we’re peering at through a microscope, trying to identify and name all its bits.’

As soon as the words were out, I regretted them. I could see the air seeping out of Scott’s balloon. I tried to make amends.

‘Peering through the microscope isn’t a bad thing. We have to do it, and you’re helping us to do it Scott. And we’ll do more of it later on. We’ll find other poetic techniques, and we’ll name them and add them to this list. But sometimes looking too hard scares away shy animals.’

Here I go again, I thought.

‘Let’s go back to the music of the poem for a bit, and perhaps, like this one, other shy poetic techniques will feel comfortable enough to come out of hiding.’

Clunky. But it was out now.

‘What else have any of you felt as you heard this poem? What other spells has it cast? What other music have you heard?’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Scott, again bravely, looking as though this time trying to control some new inner turmoil. ‘I don’t get the poem. I don’t get what it’s all about. You keep asking us what music we’re hearing, which I don’t really understand. It’s not music. It’s words and words have meanings. And I don’t get what all these words slapped together actually mean. It’s mumbo jumbo. Like that second line. The leaping light for your delight discovers. It’s just words. Are you saying we’re not meant to understand it, we’re just meant to hear it? Doesn’t it have a meaning? Is it just a whole lot of words randomly put down because they sound good? And if so, what’s the point? What’s the point of poetry?’

‘So what’s the point of music?’ said Jamila, but not harshly. ‘Is it just a whole lot of notes randomly put down because they sound good? I mean, I think your question is a good one Scott. Maybe if we think about music, that will help somehow.’

There was another silence, thoughtful this time. Jamila, unlike me, had sounded the right note with Scott.

‘They’re not random, the notes I mean,’ said Helen. Helen plays the piano, and plays it really well. I’ve heard her. ‘There are notes that sound good together, that make harmonies that our ears recognise and which somehow connect with our emotions. Not just harmonies. Also tunes. And pitches. And tempo. Music can affect our emotions. It makes us sad, or energises us, or it can be exciting, or calming, that kind of stuff.’

‘Words too,’ said Jamila. “I think that’s what Miss G means when she says to listen to the music. Like that line you asked about Scott. The leaping light for your delight discovers. There’s something energetic about the music of that line, the sounds it makes. It wouldn’t sound so energetic if it said something like: ‘Hey look at that island all lit up by the sun.’

‘So that’s what it means!’ said Scott. ‘So he’s saying it that other way because it makes it sound . . . .’ But he can’t think of the word.

‘More energetic. More alive. There’s a rhythm to it as well as the sound of the words,’ said Jamila. ‘The leaping light for your delight discovers. Di-dum-di-dum-di-dum-di-dum -di-dim-di. Hey, that’s iambic pentameter, isn’t it! That rhythm. Like Shakespeare.’

‘But it’s got eleven syllables,’ said Nathan. ‘Iambic pentameter has just ten.’ Nathan was back in the thick of the discussion. He gets As in English. He knows this stuff.

‘Shakespeare sometimes added that extra syllable to a line,” I said. ‘It’s a form of iambic pentameter, but I can’t remember what it’s called.’

‘Iambic pentameter with a feminine ending?’ said Jamila.

‘I think you’re right,’ I said, though to be honest I wasn’t sure.

‘So,’ said Scott slowly, ‘he says it this way to make a rhythm that has a feeling to it. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘It’s exactly what we’re saying!’ I said. ‘That’s right Scott. Very good.’

‘And it’s this iambic thing, which has . . . ’ says Scott.

‘Iambic pentameter. It is, Scott, but don’t lose sight of the main thing here. The main thing isn’t to label all these techniques, all these forms, though it’s great that you’re seeing them and can identify them. The main thing is that you’re all now seeing – or rather feeling – that the words make a kind of music that can affect a listener just like music can. So the order of the words matters. The rhythm or mood that the words make matters. The sound of the words – individually and together – matters.’

‘So it doesn’t matter what the words mean? It’s just what they sound like?’ said Scott.

‘The meaning of the words also matters. Or it does usually. I’m imagining that the poet here was trying to do at least two things at once. He was trying to find the right words to describe the scene, the words that had the right meanings. And at the same time he was trying to find words and a word order that created the right kind of music. Something like that.’

At this moment I was tempted to tell them the story of Auden’s friend, Christopher Isherwood, saying that when they lived together Auden used to read poems to him as they were completed. If Isherwood didn’t like the poem, Auden would throw it away. But, said Isherwood,

If I liked one line he would keep it and work it into a new poem. In this way, whole poems were constructed, which were simply anthologies of my favourite lines, entirely regardless of grammar or sense.

But I resisted the temptation. Perhaps another time. I sensed that enough had been said, maybe more than enough. It was time for a change of pace.

‘There’s so much more to explore in this poem,’ I said, ‘but that’s probably enough for now. I want to take this in a different direction for a while. I’m going to read the poem to you again, and then we’re going to have a silent ten minutes of writing. You can write about anything that comes up – the poem, a bit of the poem, this lesson, something someone has said, something entirely unrelated. At the end of the ten minutes you can read out what you’ve written, or you can give it to me at the end of the lesson, or you can keep it private. Completely up to you. All I ask is that you keep the pen moving, or that you keep typing if you’re on a tablet, even if that means you’re just writing complete nonsense. We’ve done this before, you know the drill.’

So I read the poem again.

During the following ten minutes, all five wrote. I wrote too.

‘OK,’ I said when the ten minutes was up. ‘Now silently read through what you’ve written. As always, there will be some of you who are surprised by how well you’ve expressed yourself, how well you’ve written.’

There was a minute’s silence, and then I asked if anyone wanted to read their writing to the group.

Alice was first. This is what she wrote:

I don’t say much in class discussions, but I really liked this one. I thought about what it must be like to be a poet, and how that compares to what it’s like to be a painter. I think it’s pretty much the same. When I paint a picture, I start with an idea, or a bit of an idea, and then I see where it goes. I paint a bit, or I do a sketch if I’ve got a picture of the whole thing in my mind. And then I try things out, roughly at first, but with the bits that are working, I then start to use my knowledge of brush techniques to get the effect that I want. So my unconscious is making some decisions, suggesting ideas, sometimes prompting me to try some twist of the brush or mix of colour or composition that I’ve never tried before. And my conscious mind, and all I’ve been taught and all I’ve discovered, also directs much of what I do in order to get the effect that I want. So I’m drawing on traditions and training, and I’m drawing on intuition and the unconscious. Isn’t this what poets do?

‘And maybe composers of music too,’ said Helen when Alice had finished reading. Helen herself was next.

I remember standing on a cliff looking out to sea when I was in Greece. It wasn’t really a big cliff, and there are other things that made it unlike the poem. I was with some of my cousins, and there was this path that led down to the water, which was blue and still and really beautiful. Well, it wasn’t exactly still. It was gently lapping at the edges, like there was some kind of a tide, but it wasn’t like an Australian beach. So I followed my cousins down to the beach, and we played games with a ball and paddled in the water, then just sat around and talked. They wanted to know what it was like in Australia, and I wanted to know what their lives were like in Greece, and it was so frustrating because I couldn’t speak much Greek and they couldn’t speak really good English. It was kind of fun and frustrating at the same time. I’ll never forget that day. When we were playing games, or when we were just sitting on the beach (we stayed there for hours, til the sun disappeared), I felt like a part of this big Greek family. It was like a part of myself that I hadn’t really thought about.

Scott said he wanted to go next.

I don’t get poetry. I don’t like it much. Actually, to tell you the truth, I don’t like it at all. It makes me feel stupid. Other students say stuff about it that sounds so intelligent, and sometimes I wonder if they really think it or whether they’re just saying stuff that sounds good. Today was good though, because I thought Jamila listened to me and didn’t put me down. Sometimes in discussions like this, I begin to see something, or understand some- thing, but then it goes. Like now I can’t remember the points people were making about poems. It’s all just slid out of my head. I think this is probably because I’m a commonsense sort of person and poetry is just not my thing. I think the world of poets can do without me and I can do without the world of poets.

‘Nice,’ said Jamila, and others were smiling, including Scott. Including me.

‘Jamila?’ I asked. ‘Nathan?’

‘I’m working on something,’ said Jamila. ‘I want to work on it more. It’s not ready yet.’

‘Nathan?’

‘Just a tick,’ said Nathan. He looked down, obviously reading through what he had written. ‘Yeah, OK, I’ll read it,’ he said.

Ms G said something about putting poems under the microscope as if they were dead specimens. That got me thinking. I’ve never really understood what English is meant to be about. In science we study the natural world and the natural world is a part of the real world. In geography we study the physical and man-made world, and that’s a part of the real world. In history we study the past, and that’s a part of the real world. In maths we study numbers and shapes and so on and that helps us understand and get on in the real world. And so on. In every subject we put things under the microscope (in a sense) so we can study them. But English? In English what do we study? Stories and poems and plays. Why? I don’t really get it. I don’t see how knowing that an iambic pentameter has ten syllables, or that some poet had this idea of a stranger standing on a cliff, helps us live in the real world. I just don’t get it. I can do it, I know how to get As in English, but I don’t really see the point.

And that night I got an email from Jamila.

Hi Ms G. Cool lesson. I’ve been working on this poem for a while, and wrote a bit during our writing time today. Finished it tonight. Enjoy!

The Bar
I took a breath of smoky, bitter air,
The skirt I wore was stiff and scratched my knees.
I clutched my tray, and looked down in despair,
And trembling, asked him: ‘Can I help you please?’
His bleary gaze rolled up, toward my face.
His puffy cheeks were crowded with burst veins.
The suit and tie were oddly out of place.
A matted beard held crusty lunch remains.
He eyed me up and down; his eyes were hard,
A sneering grin spread slowly and he slurred:
‘They’ve brought a new one into this graveyard -
Where the dead are drunks; the living . . . ‘ It was blurred.
I dropped the tray and headed for the door.
I didn’t want to work here any more.

person writing on white paper — Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

V. The email

Dear Jess,
How wonderful to hear from you. I have wondered, often, how you were getting on. To hear some of your news and to read your fulsome report of the lesson with the five students, was a real joy to me. I remember you so well, responding with such freshness to the various works we studied in that English class.

I am retired now, and enjoying it more than I thought I would. I potter in the garden, read books, walk the dogs, enjoy a bit of cooking each evening. I have such a lot to be thankful for.

You said in your email that you’d been unsettled by Nathan’s writing, and also by Scott’s conclusion that English was not for him.

You say you’re also wondering if you’re doing the students a disservice by not addressing knowledge about poetry more explicitly, especially in the light of a looming common assessment task.

Well, as you’ll discover when you open the attachment, you’ve touched on a complex issue for the profession generally.

Do let’s continue to correspond. It’s a shame we now live so far apart, as a coffee or a meal and a long chat would be such a pleasure.

With warmest best wishes,

Mary

Attachment: subject English

A good English teacher knows stuff. A good English teacher can share her disciplinary knowledge with her students so that they, too, come to know it. The English classroom is (or should be) so much more than a site for a kind of literary sociability, where texts of various kinds are used as spurs to stimulating discussion about internal and external worlds. Despite the way you have described your classroom as a site ‘where students create and share responses to texts of many types’, it’s clearly much more than that.

Being able to respond to your students’ insights about the poem, to better understand the music in the order of words, is part of the knowledge you bring to the encounter – to help them feel the sound in the sense. Jamila, Helen and Alice responded so movingly to the poem in their written reflections.

But I am most interested in your response to Scott’s complaint about what seems to him a lack of meaning in the arrangement of words. For him, the poem does not make sense and this brings up shame about his failure to participate in the lesson. For Nathan, the difficulty lies elsewhere, perhaps in his class formation or his family expectations so I will concentrate on Scott for the moment. He wants to understand and his seizing on the concept of assonance may have been a lost opportunity for you. As you acknowledge in your email, ‘The order of words matters, as does rhythm and mood and sound’. I am wondering whether Scott’s difficulty with the first lines of the poem – could be a point of departure for investigation of word order in poetry (perhaps in a later lesson, as I love the structure this lesson had). Thinking further about this, I looked again at the poem and tried to understand why the language might have tripped him up and made him angry at the lack of apparent meaning in the wording.

I think we can use our knowledge of grammar here to understand the source of (at least some of) Scott’s struggles with the poem. Mother tongue speakers of English often have the unconscious expectation that a sentence will adhere to the typical pattern of ‘subject, verb, object’. Scott cannot make sense of the first lines in large part because the pattern is so strange. How does a leaping light discover? What does it discover? And what does this have to do with the island of the first line? In the grammar of everyday life, Scott can reasonably expect that a verb like ‘discover’ will take an object. We discover something. But this poem leaves the verb intransitive. His expectations – or at least the expectations shaped by the grammar of standard English – are not met. In fact, several verbs like ‘stand’, ‘wander’ ‘pause’, ‘scrambles’ and ‘lodges’ are intransitive. They do not extend to an object but remain processes without an object and often without agency. I mean things happen but no one makes them happen. The world just is and apprehending it in the way Auden invites us to do is coded into the wordings of the poem. When Jamila re-phrases the first lines of the poem as ‘Hey, look at that island all lit up by the sun’, Scott is able to grasp the meaning implied by the poem’s wordings. But of course, he misses the implication of the utterance too – what Jamila calls ‘the energetic music’ of the poem, the sound-sense.

There is more we could say about the unusual order of wordings like ‘And silent be’ or ‘Here at a small field’s ending pause’ or even the last line ‘And all the summer through the water saunter’. Most of us would make better sense of a pattern that mirrored everyday syntax, as in ‘And be silent’ or ‘Pause at the end of the small field’ or ‘Saunter through the water all the summer’. Scott, like other readers who just want a poem to make clear sense, would find everyday ordering much easier to understand. This poem (deliberately it seems) works to frustrate that ease. Auden’s use of poetic syntax renders the experience of the moment captured in the poem un-familiar.

I am not sure if I ever taught you about the principle of ‘end weight’ in our discussion of texts like this. English is a language that gives salience to what comes last in sentences. You will have noticed that verbs like ‘discover’, ‘pause’, ‘lodges’, ‘enter’ and ‘do’ come at the end of the line (and in the case of the last verb, ‘saunter’, at the end of the poem). What we put first has a particular kind of importance (coding the meaning of ‘what I am on about’ in this message). But what comes last is treated as ‘news’. Here, it is as if the poet wants us to rest on meditative processes like pausing, discovering, be-ing and entering as crucial to the noticing and feeling of this moment of epiphany in the view of the island. They come at the end of the line because they are intended to take on particular salience. They have the significance that only end-weight can give them. The poem’s unfamiliar syntax forces us to slow down and hear the music implied by the wording of the poem. Is it a bit like Brecht’s notion of ‘defamiliarization’ that perhaps we once talked about in our English classes. This seems lost on Scott but Jamila and Helen are able to let the unusual order in the wordings of the poem play upon their senses without any ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (to borrow a phrase from Keats).

We can draw on knowledge about grammar to better understand this re-structuring of our awareness. And I suspect, it helps us to better understand the good sense in Scott’s querying of what seems like non-sense. I have found over the years that we need to seek the good sense in our students’ problems with the texts we offer and to use our knowledge of language, of literary language in this case, to better understand the source of their difficulties.

And this brings me to the issue I alluded to earlier. Bringing knowledge about language to bear on a poem like this one of Auden’s is difficult – better, impossible – if teachers have only a fragile or superficial understanding of how language works. Although the national curri- culum acknowledges the importance of a meaning-centred approach to grammar, too often grammar is reduced to narrow concerns with correctness and treated as a kill-joy part of English. But a grammar of ‘deficit’ or even one of ‘conventions’ fails to come to grips with the creativity of the poet, the novelist and even the filmmaker. It makes me wonder what linguists with an interest in subject English have failed to do that teachers approach the powerhouse of language like this. Our students need to be able to read and critique the short form texts that emerge in Twittersphere or Instagram. They also need to be able to unpack the language of complex nominalised reports about climate change, population movements, scientific experi- mentation and the lexically dense texts of novels and essay. And they need to be able to explore in informed ways, as Jamila and Helen do so beautifully, the sound-sense in poetic syntax. This knowledge is something you bring to bear on the discussion with your students and seems to me a rebuttal of those who lack fulsome and meaningful knowledge about language or deny its importance for the cultivation of literary sociability for all students.

Jess, it’s been a joy to peek into your classroom, to meet those wonderful students and tune in to the rich conversations you have had with them. Do write to me again, either to challenge any of what I have written, to get me to clarify what is unclear, or just to tell me what your class is doing. It does my old heart good!

Warmest,

Mary Barker

green ceramic mug beside book — Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

VI. Flashback: a moment in space

The Poem
I have to admit I rather enjoyed that lesson.
All that attention.
You know the feeling,
when others are respectfully curious,
even surprised by what they find and feel,
and where that takes them.
I come alive.

The Room
Just a classroom, you might say.
Just bricks and mortar, glass and wood.
But the morning light has moods which seep into bodies. Associations and memories, felt as intensities,
roam and pulse and simmer
and are felt by those inside.
No-one is unaffected.

Jess
The lesson is over,
The students begin to shuffle out.
It had gone well, the lesson,
And she thinks Mary would have approved.
But Scott ignores her goodbye, his eyes downcast.
Has he made himself a place outside the magic ring?
Or is it she who shuts him out?

Nathan
Untethered touchy-feely stuff
Swirling around in some mysterious ether,
Beyond the reach of categories and definitions.
Girls’ stuff.
Last year’s English was easier to grasp,
With its outcomes and rubrics.
Then he reads her note again.

Helen
Helen, in the corridor, quickly finds the poem online.
It is as she suspected!
They’d remarked on the long vowels,
but they’d missed what followed:
pluck, knock, shingle, scrambles, sucking, gull.
All short!
O, evocative music!

Scott
Could he risk saying something to her,
Or would he be out of his depth?
Better safe than sorry.
It felt good, though, to read out his writing
And see her smile.
It felt good to write what he really thought.
Life can be very confusing.

Alice
Before she stands to go
Alice looks again at her sketches.
A gull on its side.
Sunbeams on an island.
Could this be part of a big painting?
Art is next.
Eagerness stirs.

Jamila
The rest have gone,
But still she hasn’t moved.
The heavy weariness is back,
And worry for her father.
The teacher looks over, a concerned frown.
Jamila smiles and tries to shake away the weight.
‘Cool lesson Miss,’ she says.

black metal floral wall decor — Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash