Death and Dying
I will bring in short clips from several war movies. Students will watch each clip and write a response to each one. We will look at Saving Private Ryan, Forest Gump, and We Were Soldiers.
We will view each clip twice. The first viewing will focus on the visual aspect and the second will focus on the sound/music accompanying the scene. Each time, the student will do a quick write. I will show the scene in Saving Private Ryan in which families are receiving notice that their son is dead. The Forest Gump scene shows Forest in combat and saving a fellow soldier. We Were Soldiers has both types of scenes. I will not lead a discussion because I feel the emotion of the topic is enough. If students want to share their feelings here it will be in a casual forum, after which we will move on to the next part of the lesson.
Wallace Stevens's "The Death Of A Soldier" and Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" express the grim reality of death.
I will put the students in groups of three or four and give each group several spring leaves and several fall leaves. The leaves will be a combination of real ones and silk ones. Their job will be to write down ways in which they think a war poet would use leaves. Their job will be to look at the basic symbol first. Next, they will work on simile and metaphor. With glue, scissors, magazines, and markers the students will create and post their best work. I want their work to focus on war. I like to give each group a dictionary and a thesaurus to help them with words. You can move about the room assisting students with all of this. The exercise will help lead us into looking at "The Death Of A Soldier". In addition, a close look at a few lines of Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode To The West Wind" will illustrate the use of autumn leaves and metaphor.
Wallace Stevens wrote this poem for one soldier. Eugene Leerier was a young French painter killed in 1915. His letters were collected as Lettres d'un soldat and read by Stevens in 1917(Longenbach).
Reading the entire poem two or three times before talking about it is important in the case of this poem. Have several students read the poem. Listen to male voices and female voices read it. Does the poem say violence is as natural as autumn? The students will see that the poem uses simile and that each stanza is a tercet. Each of the stanzas slowly tells the story of how the death of a soldier is as minor and as natural as a single autumn leaf.
Imagine autumn leaves falling from trees, slowly gliding to the ground. Now, imagine men. Men not ready to die. Imagine men who are too young to die and men who have stopped breathing—"the wind stops"—and are now dead. The religious connection to a "three-days personage" examines how a soldier's death is final, unlike that of Christ. Their death is "absolute" and the world continues ignoring them, "without memorial." The soldiers are not returning but the season of autumn will return. Students should look at the tone of the poem closely. Has the poet created an attitude of callousness or caring? What is the poet's or the speaker's attitude towards war?
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