Students Find Elements in Poems
I teach students to analyze poems by introducing them to a list of elements that appear in many poems and helping them learn to find these elements themselves and think about how they work together. Rather than asking them what the poem means, or inviting them to respond only in a personal way, I show them that many poems contain elements that we can all see, such as patterns of repetition and contrast; images; and diction that can be identified as, for example, violent, or bureaucratic, or borrowed from botany, astronomy, or law. We begin by looking at Robert Hayden’s apparently simple “Those Winter Sundays,” discuss what we can find there (What is the effect of “too” in the first line? What kind of work does the father do? How old is the speaker now, and how old was he during the time of the events in the poem? How did the speaker feel about his father then? How does he feel now?), and then work through the handout called “Approaching a Poem,” identifying the various elements in the poem. Students quickly see how the poem is built around contrasts of hot and cold, then and now, ignorance and knowledge, and shot through with gratitude and remorse. As they then explore poems on their own, they may not all be able to come up with productive interpretative questions, but they all can see the patterns at work, and those patterns can often take them far.
Issues this Best Practice Addresses:
Many students approach poems as opaque riddles, with all their meaning hidden away. The systematic approach described above gives more students the tools and the confidence to read poetry with fuller understanding and pleasure.
Major Challenges to Implementation:
Once students have begun learning the approach, some are satisfied with simply listing elements they’ve found, and have to be encouraged to think about how each contributes to the poem, how they work together. Students also need to learn to pay attention to punctuation and sentences, when the poem has those, so that they don’t wrench words out of context. Sometimes students forgot to notice the elements of a poem, and satisfy themselves with paraphrase. And, crucially, teacher and students can get so caught up in analysis that they overlook the importance of those parts of the poem-reading experience that don’t yield fully to analysis, to the mystery the poem offers, to what poet James Tate calls “the prayerful, haunted silence between words.” Finally, some poems may not yield much to this approach, including many poems published in the U. S. in the past twenty years or so.
Benefits Derived from Implementing this Best Practice:
Students learn to read with understanding and often with pleasure a great variety of poems in English from the 8th through the 21st century, and many approach poetry reading with much more confidence.
Evidence Illustrating Success:
In class discussions, written work, and class presentations, most students show an understanding of some of the things going on in a poem, and many of them notice a lot. Presented with a difficult poem such as Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” for example, some of them will get right to work, noting such things as the patterns of repeated bright colors and repeated darkness and the religious language.
Additional Materials:
Submitted by: Margaret Smith, Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics and Humanities