Playing with Poems: Rules, Tools, and Games

Overview

Thus far in my teaching career, nothing brings more sighs and moans in my classroom than when I begin a poetry lesson. Poetry is, without a doubt, the most off-putting genre to a majority of my students. This is frustrating for many reasons. I love poetry and cannot understand how my heightened excitement does not readily transfer to my students; most, if not all, of my students are highly musical and recite hip-hop lyrics on the spot and expound upon their meaning, which tells me they have the tools to discover meaning in the poetry I present to them. I write on the board each time: poeTRY. I plead with them to try, and I am at a loss when my teaching gets lost in translation and students continue to remain locked out of the most beautiful expressions of language available to them.

I study poetry for pleasure, and I am always looking for a poem that will ignite a spark in my students. In thinking about this unit, I knew right away that I wanted to create something on William Blake and his illustrated poems. His ideas expressed in Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are gripping and very telling about the times in which he lived. While reading these poems, I began to think about my own students' experiences; what do they know of innocence and experience? How do they view the world around them in relation to these concepts, both socially and politically? What do they fear and how does this fear contribute to loss of innocence? How can they use Blake's illustrations and poems to express their concerns about their current lives and situations?

William Blake believed that "innocence" and "experience" constituted the two "contrary states of the human soul." One can relate innocence to childhood, and experience as the loss of childhood caused by fear, inhibition, or social and political corruption. ¹ Blake's first exploration of innocence is introduced in "Song by an Old Shepard." He defines innocence as " a winter's gown which helps us abide life's perpetuating storm." He stresses that innocence is not necessarily the opposite of experience per say, but rather the opposite of "experimental life, its storms and follies." Harold Bloom carries this idea further by noting in his work William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience that "innocence is a state of the soul that warms our hearts against experience, and reproaches the errors of a supposedly mature existence." ² Blake had a profound grasp on the interrelationship between the individual and societal problems that highlight cruelty, injustice, and violence. He sought understanding of how to free man's natural mind from the "illusionary opposites" of the divine/human, as explored in the poem "The Divine Image." He also explored the relationship between the spiritual/material and the self/other that are found in all individuals. ³

This three-week unit is designed for 50 seniors in Advanced Placement Literature and Composition at Thomas Jefferson High School in Richmond, Virginia. At the completion of this course, students are required to take the AP Literature exam, which, with a passing score, gives them credit for one college-level English course upon entering college or university. Forty percent of this exam asks them to analyze and evaluate poetry through a written essay, as well as through several multiple choice questions based on 2 to 3 randomly selected poems. While ensuring that students are adequately prepared for success on this exam is certainly the focus of most of the instruction in my classroom, it is also my desire to help my students become more confident readers of poetry and to show them how to experience the pleasure in the language of poetry.

I have selected four poems and illustrations from William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience for my students to study throughout this unit: "The Lamb," and "The Tyger," and "The Chimney Sweeper" (from both books). Through the use of annotation, reader response writing, Socratic seminars, as well as the creation of original poems and illustrations, students will be afforded the opportunity to see poetry in a new way. Each poem is creative expression, a unique riddle of the imagination. Each illustration is a door that I ask my students to walk through, into the poem itself