Unit Strategies
Timeline
This unit can take place over several weeks, for example three hours per week for ten weeks, with a total time commitment of about thirty hours. Students need to reflect upon and digest the poems over time. Teachers with less time can of course pick and chose among the unit activities. Optional additional activities are also included in some sections. In each section students brainstorm, write, peer edit, and revise one short essay (300 to 500 words) and one poem, for a total of three short essays and three poems. Spending about half an hour on each poem analysis leaves about four class hours per section for writing activities.
As a brief overview, section one deals with the topic of leaving home, focusing on literal poems of leave-taking. In terms of craft, we focus on sonnet form, assonance, consonance, concrete images, and fairly straightforward metaphors. In section two we study poems in which the poet looks back on his home from a distance, poems which closely mirror my students' current situation. The style elements we focus on include various types of rhyme, exploiting multiple word meanings in poems, iambic pentameter, rhythm and meter, free verse, and enjambment. In section three, we read and study poems from the point of view of the person left behind. Students learn about anaphora, and study a progression in the poems from concrete details, to simple metaphor, to controlling metaphor. Next, students consolidate their learning from the unit in a long essay, approximately 1000 words. Students analyze a topic of their choice, using several poems we have studied and one other 'home' poem of their own finding. Last, students collect their chosen poems, revised essays, and own revised poems in a small bound volume.
Content
The first section of the unit deals with the topic of leaving home. The first two poems feature young women leaving their familiar and presumably beloved homes, a situation many of my immigrant students have experienced. In the third poem a man imagines his journey's end in glowing detail. This poem challenges my students to compare their imaginings of America with the reality they have found here.
The section begins with Natasha Trethewey's "Signs, Oakvale, Mississippi, 1941," a poem students immediately enjoy for its vivid imagery and for its clear narrative. In Trethewey's poem, a young woman leaves home for the first time with a man who drives a "fine car." As they travel down Highway 49, she superstitiously counts the roadside omens she sees. Students can begin their 'serious study' of poetry by simply listing either in discussion or on paper the many concrete images (signs) in the poem. The underlying meaning of this poem, which students grasp immediately, is that the young woman is worried about whether she has made the right decision. In class one day, a student speculated angrily about what the young woman's family must think, which led to a thoughtful discussion of the ambivalent emotions and ethics of striking out independently, providing an excellent beginning to this whole unit.
Trethewey's poem also offers generous material for the study of poetic craft. In a carefully designed Shakespearean sonnet, the poet follows the contemporary sonnet practice of enjambment, disguising her rhyming line endings until they melt into the fabric of the narrative. Students are surprised when we go back and look at the ends of the lines, and find such straight rhymes as "luck" and "tuck," and "farm" and "alarm." As an activity, they can use this poem to discover for themselves the abab cdcd efef gg Shakespearean sonnet rhyme scheme. Rhythmically, this poem is sophisticated and difficult and probably not the best venue to begin discussing iambic pentameter. I'd focus instead on sound qualities, introducing the concept of assonance. An example occurs in lines three and four with the 'o' vowel sound, "the pine woods roll by, and counts on one hand / dead possum along the road, crows in splotches" [underlining mine], giving the reader the feeling of rolling movement, and also a first hint of ominousness. You can also point out the difference between visual and audible assonance; though all the words contain the letter 'O,' the sound of the vowel changes. ESOL students need to be especially alert to enunciation, and these two lines can lead to a whole discussion on varying vowel sounds in English.
The second poem in this section is Gwendolyn Brooks' "my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell." On a surface level, a woman (first person narrator rather than the limited third person point of view in the Trethewey poem, probably worth noting to the class), is leaving home. Again students can enumerate the many concrete details the poet gives us. Looking deeper, the poem begins and ends with the image of bread and honey, Brooks' metaphor for the home she is leaving. Students easily grasp that when Brooks speaks of bread and honey, she is actually talking about all the comforting aspects of a familiar home. That both are nourishing food items can lead to a discussion of nurturing, and of how food often takes on the metaphor of nourishment both in everyday conversation and in literature. For example, we bring "chicken soup" to someone who is sick, even if what we bring isn't really chicken soup. Students may also want to discuss the religious symbolism of bread, or manna, and discuss why the narrator might be leaving home for a sojourn in "hell." Perhaps the poet envisions a return to religious roots with her hope at the end of the poem that, "My taste will not have turned insensitive / To honey and bread old purity could love."
In terms of form, Brooks' poem is a departure from the traditional sonnet. Students can look for a rhyme scheme like that in the Trethewey poem. They will soon find vestiges of the abab pattern, but not a complete sonnet form, leading to a discussion of how a poet uses form and departure from form to create meaning. You could begin to talk about iambic pentameter here, as the first four lines are fairly easily scanned. For example the first line can be read:
/ / / / /
I hold my honey and I store my bread
The slightly unnatural stress on the word "and" can lead to further discussion of how poets use conventions such as meter but often feel free to innovate for whatever reason they choose. I'd leave a discussion of meter versus rhythm for later in the unit, when students are more familiar with recognizing regular metrical patterns. I also wouldn't go beyond line four of this poem for discussing iambic pentameter, as Brooks gets creative in line five with four strong beats, and line six with six strong beats. You might want to notice with the class that she does return to fairly regular iambic pentameter for the last three lines of the poem, as well as to a (sort of) rhyming couplet for the last two lines, a fairly common poetic method for giving the reader a sense of closure at the end of a poem.
The last poem in this section is William Butler Yeats' famous "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." The poem doesn't fit the pattern of leaving a familiar home for uncharted territory, but instead introduces the topic of expectations, a topic we return to later. Students begin by making notes on white boards about what they expected to find in America. We share the notes in discussion and come up with a list of common expectations on the overhead or computer projection screen. Next we read the Yeats poem several times, first simply enjoying the sound of the language, and then beginning to notice specific images. Students can then list images either individually or in groups, or perhaps as a whole class exercise. We also discuss unfamiliar vocabulary, such as "wattles" and "linnet." Students may work in groups to draw a picture of Yeats' image of Innisfree, leading directly to one of the essay suggestions at the end of this section.
On a craft level, I would use this poem to consolidate an understanding of end rhyme and of assonance. Students can easily find the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef. The class can discuss why this poem is not a sonnet, and if they already know the ballad form, you can also discuss why it is not a ballad. If students aren't already familiar with ballads, I wouldn't confuse the issue by introducing them with a not-ballad! The poem is also full of examples of assonance, which students can identify and share with their colleagues. If students begin to notice the recurrence of consonants, you can introduce the concept of consonance. Poetic devices the student "discovers" will linger in the memory far longer than those introduced on a vocabulary page.
The essay students write for this section may reflect the themes and/or the craft of the section. For example, a gifted student might choose to write about how the use of poetic devices in Yeats's poem contributes to a deeper understanding of the poem. A challenged student may choose a simpler topic, for example something already discussed in class. Students can also work in groups by poem to brainstorm details they can use in their papers. Another relatively simple essay would be to use the artwork created for Yeats' poem to generate details for a paragraph, perhaps comparing the poem to the student's own expectations of a new place. My expectation for junior and senior students is that this will be a literary essay, though for younger learners or less fluent English-learners, writing informally about their own experience of leaving home may be appropriate.
For their own poem, students choose a familiar object from their homeland, perhaps something they brought with them and can bring into class, and write about it, focusing on details and moving perhaps into metaphor if they choose. Following the example in the Brooks poem, they may choose to write about a familiar food or meal. In terms of form, a gifted student may wish to attempt a sonnet, or to imitate one of the authors studied. A simpler assignment would be to give students a template, or a starter line. The teacher's focus in encouragement and eventual evaluation should be on the wealth of detail the student brings into the poem.
In the second section of the unit we study poems in which the poet looks back on his home from a distance, poems which closely mirror the ESOL students' current situation. We begin with a poem in which the narrator looks sadly toward home. The poem combines images and abstractions, and shows a transition toward free verse which provides a platform for discussing form. The next poem is ripe with images of a left-behind homeland which resonates with many of my students, and provides a straightforward model for emulation. The last poem in this section raises the question of what would you find if you did go home. The contrast of rosy memory versus harsher reality should provoke thought and discussion, and perhaps some interesting student poems.
The first poem in this section, Ralph Waldo Emerson's "I Am an Exile from my Home; Heavily," is the subject of Lesson Plan 1 in this unit. The second poem in this section, Judith Ortiz Cofer's "El Olvido (Según las Madres)," is the subject of Lesson Plan 2. The final poem in this section, T'ao Ch'ien's "Returning to My Old Home," raises the question of what you would find if you did go home. Begin by asking ESOL students what they think their homeland is like now. This should be a voluntary activity. A student from the Sudan, for example, may find it too painful to share thoughts about relatives still in Darfur. Some, for example students from Afghanistan and Iraq, may be able and willing to share insights into the changes in their countries. Encourage students to talk about what their country was like when they left, and what they would expect to find if they went back. Then read T'ao Ch'ien's poem several times. As with most other poems in this unit, the surface meaning isn't hard to figure out. An old man goes home after many years and sees that the fields remain but the houses are gone and many neighbors are dead. The second half of the poem is philosophical, with the old man thinking about time passing and his own death. Students will enjoy the ending, when he decides, "A little wine still brings me to life." If the class includes Asian students, they may be able to explain the references to Eastern religion. I couldn't find out exactly what the "Great Transformation" is, perhaps a political upheaval in ancient China. "Ch'i" is the life energy that circulates through the body. A lovely and fun bit of rhetoric is "hot and cold" as a symbol for summer and winter. As a translation, the style is more the craft of the translator than that of the poet, so I don't discuss poetic sound devices in this poem.
Essay topics for this section again reflect the themes and/or the craft of the section. Students may choose one poem and talk about at least three aspects of that poem, for example the theme of remembering, how an example of multiple word meanings in the poem supports the theme, and how a single word might represent more than one of their own memories of their native country. They might want to pick three poems and talk about one aspect of poetry as it occurs in all three poems, for example rhyme in three poems, or what memory of homeland means in three poems. They might choose to write about memories of home in two poems, and relate those to their own memories. They might even want to interview a relative and write about memories illustrated in one poem, their own memories, and the memories of that relative.
For their own poem, I ask students to bring in, instead of an object, a photograph or piece of artwork that in some way represents their native country. They can find an image on the Internet as a last resort, though a personal item will probably inspire a more thoughtful effort. The poem may describe the art, or may be a narrative inspired in some way by the art. Encourage students to experiment with rhyme, or if they are inveterate rhymers, encourage them to experiment without rhyme. Encourage them to try some specific meter and see if they can work with and against it to create rhythm. I also allow them to simply write whatever feels right, and hope that the lessons of the section have informed their subconscious. Practicing poets often find they have to let go of specific goals in order to produce a satisfying poem. My only requirements are that the poem be grounded in concrete images, and that it deal in some way with memories of home.
In section three, we read and study poems from the point of view of the person left behind. The four poems demonstrate the universality of sadness at being left behind, and are also the most sophisticated stylistically. The first poem uses a wealth of details and introduces the rhetorical device of anaphora; the next poem creates a new metaphoric image in each stanza; and the third poem carries a single controlling metaphor throughout the poem. The last poem gives the thoughts of a man who first pouts, then imagines himself with his absent friends, and finally realizes that he can find what he needs right where he is. In terms of style, this culminating section of poems provides a platform for discussing metaphor, which students will then model in their own poems.
The first poem in this section is Muriel Rukeyser's wonderful "Waiting for Icarus." A recording of Rukeyser reading the poem is available on the CD that accompanies the book Poetry Speaks. Students immediately grasp the surface meaning, that while she waits for him to come back, Icarus' girlfriend remembers all the things he told her before he took off, what the morning was like, and the boyfriend-advice her mother gave her. Students may need to be told or reminded of the Icarus legend. A good account can be found at http://thanasis.com/icarus.htm. Students can be assigned to find details in the poem that help them understand the relationship between Icarus and the narrator, between Icarus and his father, and between the narrator and her mother. They can discuss and/or make notes of details that would let a reader know what their own relationship to someone is like. These notes might eventually lead to an interesting poem.
Another avenue for discussion lies in the poem's final lines; "I would have liked to try those wings myself. / It would have been better than this." Knowing the end of the story of Icarus, students can discuss under what circumstances risking is better than waiting. Some who took risks to emigrate may be willing to share the story of leaving their native country. They may also want to talk about frustrations, either difficulties in their native country that led them to leave (much like Icarus), or frustrations of waiting for a better life now that they are in America (somewhat like the narrator). A personal example would be a student of mine whose mother was a lawyer in Chile and is now working as a teacher aide while she tries to save up enough money to move out of public housing.
The poetic technique of the poem that jumps out at the reader is anaphora. The repetition conveys the impression of someone trying hard to convince themselves. An interesting activity would be to ask students to make a list of arguments they might use to convince themselves of something, for example to study for an exam the next day, or to finish a homework assignment. You could also brainstorm a list of arguments on the board, and then have students use anaphora to reformat them into a class poem. Another poetic device worth mentioning in this poem is the use of end stopped lines. Rather than enjambing the lines, Rukeyser chooses to put a complete thought on each line. She also chooses not to put periods at the ends of the lines, except for the last stanza. You can ask students to speculate why she might have made these choices. I have no pat answers other than that the end stopping enables the anaphora, but students may come up with more interesting speculations.
The second poem in this section is "If You Were Coming in the Fall," by Emily Dickinson. On the surface, Dickinson writes of the uncertainty of waiting for someone's return. Much of the beauty and poetic interest of the poem lies in the memorable metaphors for time that she creates in each stanza. In the first stanza, she compares a brief wait to brushing away a fly. The second stanza compares a wait of months to winding yarn in a ball. She counts centuries on her fingers in the third stanza, and would toss time away "like a rind" if she could be certain of an afterlife in stanza four. In the final stanza, she compares uncertainty to waiting for the sting of a "goblin bee."
A fun way to introduce the poem would be, before reading it, to ask students to fill in a chart with the headings, "very small things," "middle-sized things," "large things," and "gigantic things." They should list about ten things in each column. Then they could create their own metaphors for the passage of different amounts of time using the columns they've brainstormed. A prompt might be, "How long is a minute? An hour? A day? Your whole life?" When students have finished creating and sharing their metaphors, you can read the poem several times and enjoy Dickinson's images.
On a technical note, the "Van Diemen's land" in stanza three is the historical name for the Australian island of Tasmania. Van Diemen's Land was the main penal colony in Australia from 1803 to 1853, when transportation of felons was outlawed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Diemen's_Land). The lines "Subtracting till my fingers dropped / Into Van Diemen's land" take on an even more ominous tone when you realize she writes of dropping her fingers, the metaphoric centuries (already a rather grisly image), like felons into prison. Children played a game involving Van Diemen's land, so the image may not be so terrible, but reference to the game doesn't seem to explain why the fingers "drop" (http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/fall.html). The "goblin bee" of the last line is not a scientific kind of bee, but rather a bee which is like a small, scary monster. You may want to ask students to differentiate images in the poem which suggest waiting as a not too unpleasant thing, for example a fly or balls of yarn, from images of waiting that are distressing. They can also create more and less painful images of waiting for themselves, perhaps to use later in their own poem.
Stylistically this poem provides an opportunity to talk about the ballad stanza, which alternates lines of four strong stresses with lines of three strong stresses (iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter). Students may be familiar with this pattern from popular hymns. In fact, this poem can be sung to the tune of "Amazing Grace" (with comical results). You can find a rather tinny rendition of the tune without words at http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/a/m/amazgrac.htm. The music starts as soon as you open the site. Students should be so adept with rhyme by now that they quickly point out that only every second line rhymes. Lots of fun things can be done to explore the ballad stanza. Students can work in groups to create a country love song, adhering to both meter and rhyme scheme, about a love who goes away, again using the tune of "Amazing Grace." An interesting note is that while poets often vary iambic pentameter freely to create rhythm, ballad meter tends to be more strictly adhered to, perhaps because it already offers variety of line lengths.
The third poem in this section is Sylvia Plath's "The Rival." Plath extends the metaphor of the absent love as similar to the moon throughout the poem, giving us a poetic progression from concrete details, to metaphors by stanza, to overarching metaphor. Beginning by looking for surface meaning, students need to pay attention to the last stanza, "No day is safe without news of you, / Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me." The one fact we know from the poem is that the "rival" is not present with the narrator. The rest of the poem gives concrete details about the absent person ñ the identify remains ambiguous ñ as well as about the narrator's feelings are toward that person.
Students in pairs can begin their analysis by looking for specific citations and conclusions about the "rival," for example that he or she smokes, deduced from "looking for cigarettes." Another example would be that the "rival" sends the narrator unpleasant letters: "Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, / Arrive through the mailslot…." Next students can look for quotes that directly give the narrator's attitude toward the "rival." An example would be "beautiful, but annihilating." Third, ask students to list all the references to the moon in the poem. Then students should make notes in a parallel column on how the "rival" resembles the moon. The groups can then each report one of their findings, so that everyone can find and appreciate all the instances of the extended metaphor. Students can also speculate about what kind of rival the narrator describes. Is the moon in the poem a rival of the sun? Is the "rival" another writer? Is he or she a competitor for someone's love? The poem and the poet's life provide no clear answers. Students may notice that in this poem the narrator seems glad to have been left behind. In the first two poems, the narrator waited more or less patiently for the return of a loved one. In "The Rival," the reader can easily imagine that the narrator hopes the absent person never comes back.
The final poem in this section, and of the unit, presents a third view of being left behind. In "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison," Samuel Taylor Coleridge laments the absence of his friends as they take a walk without him. One obvious difference from the other poems is that his friends aren't gone for long; another and more significant difference is that he ends up deciding that where he sits waiting for them is just as interesting as where they are. At least on a surface level, he ends the poem quite content to have been left behind. The circumstances of the poem are interesting and kind of fun. Coleridge's wife Sara, with whom he was having marital difficulties, one morning upended a pot of boiling milk on his foot. The accident prevented him from going for a walk with friends, including Charles Lamb who is mentioned in the poem. The poem opens with Coleridge (no need to call him the narrator when he so clearly identifies himself) pouting as he sits under a lime tree. Feeling sorry for himself, he describes the trail his friends are taking in gloomy terms. The mood switches in the second stanza, when he begins to feel happy that his friend Charles is out of the city (ironically, Charles himself felt more comfortable in London) and enjoying the beautiful, no longer gloomy, sights along the walk. A third transition comes when Coleridge looks around his "little lime-tree bower" and realizes that everything he needs to appreciate nature is right there. He ends the poem remorseful for having pouted in the first place, and sending good wishes to his friend Charles.
This long and complicated poem will benefit from several readings, with frequent pauses to clarify. A good activity to help students understand what is going on, and to encourage them to find details in the poem, is to have them work in small groups to draw a four panel cartoon of the 'plot' as outlined above. As a longer activity, they can put quotes from the poem onto the drawings to justify the concrete details. My ambitions for high school students for this poem don't go far beyond straightforward enjoyment. If they understand the story and appreciate the twists Coleridge's mind meanders through, I'm happy. The language is endlessly rich, and by this time at the end of the unit I would encourage students to appreciate and to share whatever poetic devices they find. In fact, an educational "test" could be to have students find and identify twenty poetic devices in the poem. Students may also naturally think of and want to talk about loved ones left behind in their native country. This poem may help them think of those loved ones as content, especially if they hadn't wanted to leave in the first place.
As a personal growth medium, this poem can launch a discussion of how much attitude matters. When he is gloomy, Coleridge pictures the trees as "unsunn'd and damp," surrounded by "the dark green file of long lank weeds." When his mood lightens, all of a sudden the water is a "smooth clear blue," and instead of the weeds, he focuses on the "purple heath-flowers." Another interesting exercise would be to have students describe a scene, perhaps from a landscape photograph or painting or even the classroom, imagining themselves in different moods: happy, sad, angry, remorseful, etc. The key to the exercise is that by choosing concrete details that reinforce a given emotion, they are in essence creating or at least acknowledging metaphors.
This unit section raises many possibilities for essays. On the third time through this essay-writing exercise, students should be able to create a topic for themselves that falls within the general guidelines for literary essays. If your curriculum specifies that students must practice a certain kind of essay, those restrictions can certainly be applied here. A couple of ideas would be to look at the use of metaphor in three poems, certainly a focus of this section, or to write about differing attitudes toward being left behind. As before, students might also choose to write about several aspects of one poem that has particularly captured them. Watch out for Internet crib notes, as all four poets are considered masters and have been written about extensively.
For their own poem, again many possibilities arise from this section of the unit. The Dickinson and Rukeyser poems lend themselves to imitation, at least in the devices of anaphora and metaphor by stanza. Students may also have some good notes from a class exercise that they wish to build into a poem. Remind students that their poems should be grounded in concrete details. If they can lift the images in the poem into the realm of metaphor, what an accomplishment! Once again, students can play with meter and rhythm, with rhyming, assonance, and consonance, and with enjambment and end stopping.
After studying all the poems, students write a longer essay, approximately 1000 words, analyzing a topic of their choice, using several poems we have studied and one other related poem of their own finding. Students can imagine breaking the 1000 word essay into essentially two or three shorter essays. If students write about 11 paragraphs of about 100 words each, they will easily fill the length requirement. The key is to find either three related themes with three paragraphs each, or two related themes with four paragraphs each. Add an opening and a closing paragraph, and the student has an essay. A relatively easy example would be to look at metaphor and the theme of remembering, and to pick four poems (one the student finds himself) each of which exemplifies those topics. The student could then structure the essay either by writing about each poem in turn for both topics, or by writing about one topic in all four poems, and then the other topic in all four poems.
Students need to pick a topic they really care about. Make sure the student creates a plan, filled-in boxes in rows and columns work well, before they start. The essay is not as hard as it is impressive, and the word count in Word is a great motivator. My students last Spring worked more diligently to get their 1000 words than they did on any other project of the semester. Plus they were jumping-up-and-down proud when they finished their first drafts. You need to allow four class hours for drafting, one hour for peer editing, and one hour for revising on the computer and printing the revised draft for marking.
To conclude the unit, students collect their favorite poems, short essays, culminating essay, and own revised poems into a small bound volume. Each student picks at least one favorite poem from each section and either types the poem herself or gets a clean copy from the teacher. Each student also makes a final copy of each essay, incorporating the teacher's suggestions from the marked second draft. In addition, each student makes a final copy of each of his own poems. Students who want to include more poems on the theme of home, either their own or ones by a poet they have found, should be encouraged and rewarded. I give bonus marks for extra poems and for especially careful attention to design. You may also want to create a class book incorporating poems and/or essays from each of the students. Try to arrange a public venue for students to read their poems to friends and family and to formally receive their books. At the least, have a lunch at the school and invite school officials to join in congratulating the students. An explanation of the creation of the final book is included in the third lesson plan at the end of this unit.
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