Friday

7 April 2017

— sparrows and finches observing pecking order rules

Good Morning All, 

In the wake of the three Day-Book entires on how I used Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to introduce my tenth graders to poetry, one of you wrote: "It does seem that many (most?) of your post-retirement actions are efforts to rebuild the classroom with you as teacher and forty or so of your carefully chosen friends and family as pupils.”

I suspect that’s pretty much on the beam. Old habits die hard. But I do hope I didn’t make too many of you feel like pupils! 

One of you wrote somewhat less charitably that for my students and Day Book readers alike those three entries were not about the poem but about the teacher showing off egotistically, preaching, being a moral bully, and letting his students (and Day Book Readers) know that he knows better.

I’m pretty sure that does not come in under the category of damning with faint praise. If the assertions are true, God knows, then I have been a colossal failure as a teacher, not to mention as a human being,  and behaved like a damned fool for close to forty years of my life.

My hope, certainly, is that those three entries were not about me or—for that matter—about the poem, but about how poetry works. From 10th to 13th grade, my students and I looked at quite a few poems, but I can’t recall ever teaching the poem itself. The kids would eventually write their IB exams, which would include writing a commentary on a poem they were unlikely to have seen before. As such, creating lessons about poems themselves did not make sense. My normal approach was to find poems that could be used as vehicles to illustrate how poetry works.

What I was trying to do in those early 10th grade lessons was to show how music, metaphor, symbol, and a few other devices are used to make poetry work on more than one level at once. Stopping by Woods lends itself very well to all that as a kind of poetry primer.

We did look at a couple of possible reasons for why Frost wrote the poem, other than the obvious one—of course—that he wanted to share with us a beautiful and emotionally complex moment in his life. We also considered whether he wanted to suggest something to us about the relationship between freedom and obligation, beauty and duty, and I also suggested that there might be enough evidence in the poem to suggest the speaker is having a coded conversation with himself on the subject of suicide.

But I was very careful to say these were only possibilities. I told the kids—and probably repeated it 500 times during those four years—that there were no definitive interpretations, only defended ones.

That said, I will readily confess to you that if those three Day-Book entries gave you even one more insight into how poetry and language work, then I am glad for that. I’m not going to feel guilty about it.

But if in the process I sounded preachy, moralistic, and egomaniacal, if I made you feel like an ignoramus, then I am truly and abjectly sorry for so doing.

As penance, I offer you today’s poem, The Solitary Reaper,  by William Wordsworth. Johs, whose Masters thesis at Oxford was on Wordsworth  counts this poem among his favorites all-time. So, do I. In my top-ten, for sure. 

On one level, Wordsworth is merely sharing with us—like Frost—a beautiful and emotionally complex moment, listening to a woman singing to herself in a field as she gathers in the harvest. But on a deeper level, of course, it’s really about her homicidal urges to murder King George III.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron