Gravissimum educationis vita hominis
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Teaching Poetry
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January 4, 2024Preliminary Observations
One of the distinctive aims of a Catholic classical education is imparting to the students what an authentic human life looks like; this flows from the natural law and, ultimately, the supernatural truth of the incarnation wherein God “fully reveals man to man himself,” as the Second Vatican Council puts it. Genuine, flourishing humans read and talk about great books; they pray regularly; they have an appreciation for the wonders of mathematics and science; they appreciate fine music and art, and can reasonably engage in those fine arts themselves. All of these things – writing, praying, understanding, singing, drawing – are things humans do. Yet another thing humans do is write poetry, to encounter life on the poetic level, which is why poetry plays an important role in our humanities courses.
Our chief goal in teaching poetry should thus be to get the students to realize that poetry forms an integral part of every well-developed human life. Reading, reflecting, discussing, and arguing over poetry is something we would like for our students to do at any time in their lives – we are providing them with many of the necessary tools for making their experience with poetry as fruitful as possible. The three or so weeks we spend each year doing poetry should not be approached as ‘time off’ from the history and the literature – there is real work involved in getting the students to approach poetry with the proper spirit.
Although it is strictly impossible to define poetry, a good working definition might run something like this: the attempt via spoken words (no reading it on your own in your own head!) to capture and convey some experience, usually tied in with emotive experience, and an experience that cannot be conveyed using ordinary, ‘scientific’ language and modes of expression.
General Pedagogical Approach to Poetry
Let us first address a particularly tempting yet bogus approach to teaching poetry. First of all, it is deadly to suppose that the ultimate point of reading is figuring out its meaning, as though it were some kind of logistical puzzle. Good poems, like good musical compositions and paintings, do not strictly speaking have a meaning, a particular point they want to make about life, about what is good or bad, about how we should live our lives. (Just ask yourselves what the meaning of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is, or of Van Gogh’s Starry Night.) Rather than having a meaning per se, what good poems have is a certain experiential charge – the attempt to capture in sounds a certain distinctively human experience. Many poems have difficult metaphors or symbols in them, or are just a little obscure – in teaching such poems we need to help students figure out what the poem “is about,” of course, but once we have done that the hard work is only beginning. In the sample analysis which concludes this essay, for example, what is meant by the poem’s lacking a meaning as well as its having an experiential charge should become clearer.
Keeping in mind that a poem is meant to be spoken aloud, the first thing always to be done is to have several students read the poem aloud (they may read it silently first to get some idea of how to articulate it). Depending on the poem, different students may have wildly different ways of articulating the poem—that’s a very good thing! Throw out for general discussion why someone’s reading was better than someone else’s, who spoke it with the correct tempo, who emphasized the right words and phrases, who was erratic, etc. Such discussions will invariably lead the conversation to a discussion of the kinds of emotions the poem conjures up. Is it a happy poem or a sad one? Is it despairing, or full of hope? Is it dark, or light; is it serious or sarcastic? Does it want to horrify, does it want to seduce? There may naturally be some disparity of initial answers to these questions about the poem’s emotive qualities, but that’s alright.
To arrive art a more refined understanding of the general emotive shape of the poem an analysis of the basic sounds of the poem should always be done. Start with the vowel sounds. Are they generally or predominantly bright and happy (as the ‘ay’ in ‘day,’ the ‘I’ in ‘bright,’ the ‘e’ in ‘me,’ the ‘o’ in ‘host’)? Or are they generally or predominantly dark and sad (as the ‘a’ in ‘bad’ or ‘dark,’ the ‘I’ in ‘hit,’ the ‘e’ in ‘bed,’ the ‘u’ in ‘slug’)? It is particularly helpful to note what kinds of vowel sounds are in the rhyming words (assuming the poem has rhymes), as the soul naturally gravitates towards the rhymes. Consonant sounds can also hold clues to the overall emotive texture of the poem; a hard ‘c,’ ‘g,’ or ‘d’ can indicate a harsher outlook, whereas a softer ‘w,’ ‘m,’ or ‘n’ can betoken a softer one. Of course, the hissing ‘s’ is always to be noted.
In short, every good poem is a stand-alone experience. It is the task of the teacher to get the students to dig into the poem to discover just what that experience is – and doing this is also key to discovering what the poem’s meaning or point also is (insofar as it has one).
A Case Study: Tennyson’s “The Eagle”
As one among a seemingly inexhaustible set of possible examples, let’s consider Tennyson’s “The Eagle.” The poem reads as follows:
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Although an extremely brief poem, it is positively brimming with interesting human experience. Turning first to the sounds, there are many things to note – that is, there are many things you want to prod the students into noting. First, the vowel sounds are all flatter, duller, darker. The bright ‘I’ sound, in fact, occurs in the last line in the word ‘like;’ this is significant, as we shall see. Second, there is obvious alliteration with the hard c’s in the first line and the ‘close’ in the second line. In fact, the c’s are followed by either l’s or r’s, reinforcing the sound ‘clasp’ and ‘crag.’ Similarly, the w’s in the second stanza are also alliterative. Thirdly, we note that all the words have at most two syllables – until the word ‘thunderbolt.’ This word should, in fact, be the highlight of the last line, and probably the entire poem. Note that there is no punctuation in the final line, yet is impossible to read it well and not pause after intoning that ‘thunderbolt.’
The above analysis of the sounds (or one similar to it) leads effortlessly to a consideration of some of the imagery. The personification of the eagle is evident from the very get go, when the poem refers to the eagle as ‘He,’ and claims that he clasps the crag with ‘hands.’ The eagle, then, is a kind of human, but what kind? The next two lines hold some important clues. He is ‘ringed’ by the azure world, as he stands on the crag that is so high up that he is close to the sun. The image of a ring may get one to imagine a halo (the corona of the sun) – or perhaps even a ‘crown,’ as the lingering scent of the ‘cr’s’ may encourage one to do. The eagle is likened, in fact, to a king. (Note the hard ‘c’ sound in ‘king’.) this isproved further by the ensuing line, which states that the ‘wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.’ The sea is such a mighty, majestic thing, and yet it ‘crawls’ before the eagle? This eagle is indeed a king. Moreover, the fact that he falls like a ‘thunderbolt’ helps to remind the reader of Thor or Zeus, kings who also dwell on high.
It is worthwhile repeating that in none of the above was there any discussion of the meaning of the poem. Its meaning is really nothing more than the experience of the poet Tennyson had at a particular time and which he tried to convey in the medium of poetry. That experience of the majesty, the sublimity, the power, the terrifying nature of an eagle, that experience which we the reader join in, and by joining in deepen our own humanity – that is what teaching poetry should always do.
Conclusion
In our case study, we began with a basic analysis of sounds and used that to inject the poet’s experience into our own. As a result we grow as humans, in as much as every morally legitimate experience helps make us understand the world better as well as in greater depth. This approach to understanding and teaching poetry will, of course, not work smoothly for all poems – there are plenty of good modern poems that are ‘experimental’ in nature. But at RJDA we do not generally worry about those. More interestingly, the above approach will not work for bad poetry (most lyrics to songs, for example). The creators of lyrics are not usually poets, and hence do not worry about using sounds to fashion a unique human experience; in music, lyrics generally serve as just other sounds to complement the music.
When it comes to teaching particular poems, it can be helpful to look online (or elsewhere) for ideas about what the poem generally is trying to do. As teachers we need to make sure that we have an idea of the general direction we want the seminar discussion to go. But, be careful! Many erroneous claims about literature float around on websites tailored only to dream, fantasy and unreality; they often suffer from an overly eager desire just to puzzle out its meaning. The strategies laid out in this article are sufficient unto themselves for rhetoric stage pedagogy of poetry within a Catholic classical worldview.
Dr. Jon Beane teaches at the Trinity School in River Ridge
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