TheApple

 We can all learn something from students' struggles with poetry, no matter what we teach

By ART SCHECK

I'm not sure whether students or instructors learn more from lessons in poetry. Nor am I sure who suffers more.

"I'm tired of reading," I lie. "Would someone like to read this next sonnet?" Hope springs eternal, as Pope says, more or less, and I wait for a volunteer. The classroom sinks into such perfect silence that I can hear my watch ticking. And quartz watches don't make much of a tick.

A young woman commits the error of making eye contact with me. She's stuck. I smile. "Go ahead," I say. "Read it. With expression. Don't be afraid to act a little."

She sighs and begins. "Let me not to the marriage of true minds." Students stop at the ends of lines of poetry. Stop dead. No matter how many times I tell them simply to obey the punctuation on the page, they stop and breathe at the end of every single line.

She takes a breath and continues: "Admit im ... impee ... impeeduhments?"

"Impediments," I say, smiling.

"What's impeeduhments?" a lad with a baseball cap athwart his skull asks. At least he's not sleeping today.

"Impediments," I say again. "It means 'obstacles,' 'obstructions.'" I nod to the young lady to encourage her to continue reading. Her face bears the same expression it probably does when the dentist says, "This won't hurt much." (For a second, another poet's words flash through my mind: "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.")

She resumes, "Let me not to marriage of true minds ... admit impediments. Love is not love ... Which alters when it altercation finds — "

"Not altercation," I suggest. "Alteration."

"What's altercation?" someone asks. I hear a cellphone vibrating off to my right.

"Alteration," I say. "It means 'change.' An altercation is a fight. But the word is 'alteration.'"

"So they're gonna have a fight?" he of the crosswise cap asks.

"No. No fight. Shakespeare is saying that love isn't really love if it changes with time and age." A student to my left checks the time on her cellphone. She sighs.

"Can I stop?" my young volunteer says. "I really don't like reading out loud." And who could blame her? She has suffered through 30 syllables. (More Keats pops into my noggin: "O for a beaker full of the warm South. ..." He meant wine. I'm thinking Old Grandad. A beaker should about do it.)

Many students struggle mightily with poetry — and lose. Most give me the impression that they'd just as soon never read another line of verse. Their struggles with and dislike of poetry stem from the same causes and might have lessons for all of us, no matter what we teach.

A lot of students just don't know many words. I don't mean the kind of words you find in Elizabethan verse. I'm talking about everyday modern words, including many monosyllables. When we use a word such as "paucity," "hierarchy," or "realm," we need to write it on the board and define it. Then add a couple of synonyms, and maybe an antonym or two. We need to find excuses for vocabulary lessons, and not just in the vocabularies of our respective disciplines.

Many students don't know the parts of speech, and they can't recognize the parts of a sentence. You'll see that if you ask students to paraphrase a sentence from a traditional poem, the kind that rhymes and scans. I'll write a line that stumps students on the board. "This line seems hard because the words aren't in a normal order," I'll say. "So let's put them in normal order so we can figure out what the line says. Then we can figure out what it means. Now, this line happens to be a clause — it has a subject and a verb. Which word is the verb?"

Silence for 10 seconds. Finally a student guesses. She nominates an adjective.

You really can't grasp how poorly many people read until you hear them read aloud and ask them to paraphrase a few lines of verse. They can handle a simple declarative sentence consisting of short, common words. If it contains a subordinate clause or a semicolon, a relative clause, and three words they don't recognize, the sentence becomes a string of meaningless noises. Most of your students may well have looked at the chapter or article you assigned last week. But not all of them can read it.

Many students think very literally. Sentences mean only and exactly what they seem to mean. Metaphors, parallels, analogies, and paradoxes escape them. "So what?" you may think. "I don't teach poetry." But maybe difficulty with figurative language is just one facet of trouble with analogies: As A is to B, so C is to ... ? Problems with metaphors and analogies might explain why many students cannot carry concepts from one problem to another, or, for that matter, even learn the concepts in the first place. We need to make analogies and parallels explicit, to point out, again and again, that the three examples we've covered in class are not the only applications of a concept.

Many young people have very, very little general — call it common if you want — knowledge. References and allusions mean nothing to them. Nor does historical context. If we mention "the decade after the First World War," we cannot assume that even half the class knows that we're talking about the 1920s. If we mention Victorian sensibilities or Roman virtues, we can't assume that students have any idea at all what we're talking about, or even which came earlier in history. One semester, not a single student in one of my classes knew the years of the Civil War. I live in South Carolina. We cannot assume that students can put even a seemingly obvious idea or fact in context. We are all teachers of history, art, music, technology, and Western culture every day.

The job is a hell of a lot more work than any of us who teach signed up for, and more work than people who don't teach our students every day can possibly understand. But the effort is worth making. This semester, as in semesters past, I had students read this sonnet:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'est;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou growest;

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

My students and I probably took as long to hack our way through that sonnet as Shakespeare took to write it. I had to define many of the words, including "temperate." The syntax of several lines flummoxed my students. But, a clause at a time, sometimes a word at a time, we got through it. And when they began to understand the couplet, when they grasped the meaning of "this" in the last line, when they comprehend the speaker's gift, several students had the right response. Their eyes got big. They smiled.

"Oh, wow. Now I get it," one young woman said. "She'll live forever. That's so beautiful."

Yes, I thought. Yes, it is. And, sometimes, that is all ye need to know.

Art Scheck is an English instructor at Tri-County Technical College, in Pendleton, S.C.