Playing with Poems: Rules, Tools, and Games

Information on Figurative Language

In order to teach this unit well, a basic understanding of what figurative language is and how it is used effectively in poetry is paramount for the teacher to understand and impart to his or her students. The idea that sometimes what you mean is not exactly what you say, and may in fact be the opposite, is an intimidating idea for readers at all levels, including teachers to grasp. Robert Frost said, "Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." ⁷ Teachers should highlight, translate, and help their students to understand the difference between figurative language and literal meaning when teaching poetry. You don't have to hold the key or answer to a poem's meaning. You need to open the instruction and give the students the information necessary to find their own meaning. In my ELD class, we looked at Sandra Cisnero's "Hair" which describes the different members of her family's hair and how they are all different. In it, the father's hair is described as "like a broom, all up in the air" while her mother's is likened to "little candy circles all curly and pretty." The discussion eventually led to a debate over why she described his hair being like a broom and not cotton candy or something else sweet, the way she described her mother. They wondered if her father was the one who made the author do chores and her mother baked with her. They were surprised I didn't know the answer to their query, but I think they also liked that I was a part of the discussion and the discovery. The use of the similes was straightforward and made sense to the students in painting a picture that they could see, and that gave a sense of Cisnero's view towards the members of her family. Right or wrong, we left the classroom not knowing, but it didn't matter. Students were left feeling like they "got it" and started to understand the power a simile can have for a reader.

Similes and Metaphors

A simile is something that you use to compare two different items that share a common element (the man is as strong as an ox, my mind is like an ocean) in order to vividly describe a scene or emotion. The word comes from the Latin word similes, which means like; in order to be a simile, like or as must be used in the phrase. ⁸ The sort of similes that a child may create while writing about an animal, whether it be a pet or wild creature will be unique to their life experience. Exploring the ways that animals appear in a child's writing—the choices they make when comparing two dissimilar objects in a simile will allow us to enrich how we understand a student and their view on relationships and even how their view on the environment changes as they mature. ⁹

Metaphors similarly compare two distinct items to suggest a likeness between them. How metaphor differs from simile is in that the word as or like are not used, instead: the man is an ox, my mind is an ocean. Instead of just a comparison, metaphor implies an identification, which is a stronger tie than showing similiarity. Rooted in the Greek word metaphora which means to transfer or to carry across, the idea is that a metaphor can present a clear and fresh meaning in a concise and memorable way, bridging complex ideas and creating depth in the flat landscape of the page. ¹⁰

While metaphors and similes can sound lovely, why are they important to student learning, particularly at the elementary level? Margaret Metzger, a long-term teacher of high school English, explains, "If students do not understand metaphor by sophomore year, they are lost in their literature courses." ¹¹ I would equate this to a student who enters into a seventh grade algebra class and has not memorized multiplication and division facts. Without a strong foundation, it becomes much more difficult to do more advanced and complex problem solving. Understanding metaphors that are presented in elementary school will give students a chance to assimilate their new vocabulary and make meaningful connections between different ideas, people and periods of time. Metaphors can appeal to any of the five senses in a way that cuts the lines that divide people by race, gender or age. Children have common experiences related to animals: a bee sting, being licked by a squirming puppy, watching a bird soar overhead, to name a few. These universal experiences become the basis for metaphor and simile in order to accurately describe our lives to others. Several years ago I was swimming in the Mediterranean Sea and after about six strokes a jellyfish stung me. As I described the shooting fire-like pain that made me think I was electrocuted, the lifeguard knew instantly what had happened. You don't have to have been burnt with fire or electrocuted to imagine how it would feel and diagnose a situation. After becoming familiar with this type of figurative language and its purpose, it may make it easier to understand metaphors framed around the human-to-human experience. These common experiences around this subject matter will allow students to see and find things that they can relate to in characters, in historical figures, and even in their peers.

A common experience that children have had is being afraid of the dark or an unknown monster. Accessing that fear that everyone has had will allow students to read a poem told from the perspective of a mother seal, comforting her pup.

    Seal Lullaby
    By Rudyard Kipling
    Oh! Hush thee, my baby, the night is behind us.
    And black are the waters that sparkled so green.
    The moon, o'er the combers, looks downward to find us
    At rest in the hollows that rustle between.
    Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow;
    Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!
    The storm shall not wake thee, no shark overtake thee.
    Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas.
  

The poem has clear echoes of the lullaby, "Hush Little Baby" so it is quickly apparent who are the speaker and listener. This is so strong that after reading it a few times, a reader is moved to attempt to sing the lyrics. The imagery paints a picture of the sea at night with the seals at rest on a beach after a turbulent day. The use of the repeated /s/ and /sh/ sounds throughout the poem further evoke the sounds of the sea. While the subject and the scene are different from a child's bedroom, the fears of a child and an animal may not be that different. I remember being scared of Jaws and thunderstorms as a child. The irrational fears that parents and lullabies help to alleviate are something people of all ages can relate to. It then wouldn't be difficult to turn this poem into a science lesson about the perils of being a young seal and how sharks patrol the shallow waters looking for an easy meal.

After seeing examples of normal life being creatively written about, students may start to do as Muriel Rukeyser says, "Breathe in experience, breathe out poetry." Metaphors and similes are born out of an individual's life experiences. Young children unknowingly create them to describe things they can't name or quite understand. When my nephew was three, a Harley motorcycle went down his street and he said it "roared like a lion." While his vocabulary wasn't huge at the time, he was able to relate a new experience to an animal he'd seen. Flashes of images that have stayed with us over the course of our lives have left a distinct impression on our senses: the sweet smell and warm feeling of cookies baking, the loud thunder and flash of lightning during a storm, the cooking of tamales at Christmas. In school and at home fairy tales and fables are told and retold to us and then passed on by us. Lullabies and songs from church, the playground and the radio stay in our minds, play in the background, a soundtrack that runs through our lives. The rhythm and rhyme of the melody that each person hears is as individual as our pool of life experience. ¹² Culture, language, class, and environment provide us with differing metaphors at our fingertips that can surprise students, peers and teachers when these are accessed. Students with a range of abilities are able to succeed in creating something that rings true in an emotional and intellectual way.

Alliteration, Idioms, and Rhyme

In deliberating what sort of poem to begin with, I think "The Eagle" is a great place to start. The many elements presented in such a short piece make it more easily digestible to reluctant readers, and the impressive imagery is magnetic. At our school it works doubly well because our mascot is an eagle, and the large Mexican population are familiar with the eagle found on Mexico's flag.

    The Eagle
    By Alfred, Lord Tennyson
    He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
    Close to the sun in lonely lands,
    Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
    The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
    He watches from his mountain walls,
    And like a thunderbolt he falls.
  

The poem above is simple and filled with great imagery. The simile in the last line, "And like a thunderbolt he falls" creates a relationship between the eagle and a thunderbolt. The speed with which an eagle dives, the danger presented to an unknowing prey, the suddenness of the attack—the image captures all this. A lightning bolt strikes quickly, it is dangerous, and one can't see it coming until it already is there.

The link between alliteration, idioms, and rhyme is not obvious, but the three can be leveraged in teaching English Language Learners ELLs. All have a repetitious element that is noticeable and memorable and can be easier for ELLs to remember. While it may seem that in reading rhyme is more prevalent, when looking at advertisements and the way people speak, alliteration is found in much greater abundance. The "monitoring of language encountered in day-to-day reading and listening has resulted in a list of approximately 1,400 current alliterative sequences but only 110 ones that rhyme." ¹³

Alliteration occurs when you have the same sound at the start of every word or closely connected words. This is something we've heard in tongue twisters: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. The challenge associated with physically being able to say these kinds of things correctly and quickly is something children enjoy doing and practicing. But alliteration is more than just fun tongue twisters in the hands of a knowledgeable teacher! It helps students to remember certain phrases and idiomatic expressions.

In the Tennyson poem above, alliteration occurs several times. In the first and second line, "He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close," the /cr/ and /cl/ starting sounds are repeated two times each. One way to look at this is to see the scene that has been created. There is a huge rocky wall (like Half Dome) that the eagle is clinging to while surveying the valley below. Imagine a small rock knocked loose, and the cracking, clacking sounds made as the rock tumbles down the steep face of the cliff. The /cr/ and /cl/ are meant to evoke this sound and add to the atmosphere of the poem. The alliteration not only makes you start to hear the tumbling of small rocks but it ties the eagle to the craggy cliff with his crooked claws. They are seen as one together. Build upon this and continue thinking about what might be heard in this kind of setting. Echoes. The continued alliteration "lonely land" and the use of the words "He watches from his mountain walls" become an echo of one another. In such a short piece the discussion of the placement of these phrases, sometimes close together, and other times far apart can help a student to experience these sounds in the poem. ^s

Students access things by reflecting on their personal experience. But the beauty of poetry is that if you don't see one thing, maybe you see and identify with something else. My interpretation of this poem reflects a raptor management class I took in college in which we were able to help rehabilitate injured birds of prey. I remember the instructor told us that you hold an eagle on your upper arm, never your lower, because the strength of their feet can snap the smaller bones of your forearm. The tension with which they grasp onto a perch seems to be reinforced by the repeated use of the same sound. By carrying the sound to the next line, and using the word "close," Tennyson seems to by implying that the eagle is close and tight to both the crag and the sun, as if he were part of both. To me, the alliteration helped create tension in the poem and a sense of the danger to come.

Providing effective English language instruction for ELLs has become a focus of schools all over the US. Whether the student is newly arrived or advanced, the question of how to best serve these students who are all in the same classroom is an important one. Needs are different, but the material being introduced is most often the same. A way to approach both effectively is to look not at individual words or complete sentences, but phrases.

    My First Best Friend
    By Jack Prelutsky
    My first best friend is Awful Ann—
    she socked me in the eye.
    My second best is Sneaky Sam—
    he tried to swipe my pie.
  

When providing instruction on a piece that uses alliteration to ELL students, teachers should give direct instruction on the alliteration that occurs. What we might consider obvious is not always apparent to ELLs when they initially read a text. Using the above poem as a model, students should note that the form of the poem is consistent. Each odd line provides a sequential ordinal number for the best friend and then an adjective shares the same first letter as the friend ends the line. The even line then provides an example of how the nickname was earned for that best friend. Students may start to think about similar nicknames they may give to characters they have read about. Assigning a descriptive alliterative trait will help them to see how a character evolves (or doesn't) in a story. Because students have a greater recall of phrases that use alliteration (day dream) than phrases that don't (phone call), ¹⁴ this may help with recalling and then analyzing character traits.

When students attempt to use alliteration in their own work, I have found that this is the time they will seek out a thesaurus to find a better word that has the sound they are looking for. While the connotation and denotation of that word are not always aligned with the meaning the student was going for, their effort, excitement, and now exposure to a new word outweigh the impreciseness of the usage. In the process, some new discoveries occur. They now own a new word that they are relating to their own lives. Every year around Mother's Day I've had the class do an acrostic poem for their mothers or someone in their family that they love. Inevitably someone will look for a synonym for love and find passion. They will write something along the lines of, "I have passion for you because you do nice things for me." Clearly this doesn't sound like what one should write to one's mother, so in the revision process, I clarify situations that fit using the word passion.

Idioms are expressions that can't be understood by knowing the meanings of the words that make up the phrase. However, they can be understood to have a different meaning from what the words in the phrase would imply. There is a generally accepted meaning to each idiom, but they can differ between cultures and countries. The word stems from the Latin idí"ma meaning to make one's own. ¹⁵ English Language Learners find idioms particularly vexing to understand because the literal meaning provides no hint at all as to the actual meaning of the phrase (i.e. kick the bucket). Implicit instruction or scaffolding around a story containing idioms is often done at the elementary level to provide exposure to learners.

It is interesting to note that alliteration occurs in 28% of idioms that have two parts, (black and blue) and 42% of similes (fit as a fiddle). ¹⁶ Evidence suggests that those idioms that contain alliteration are more memorable to ELLs than those who do not have a phonemic pattern. This mnemonic effect, meaning a pattern of letters that helps you to remember something), should be recognized and leveraged when presenting idioms to students with the goal being to comprehend and remember figurative idioms.

Rhyme occurs when words end with the same vowel and consonant sound as in like, bike and blue, shoe. When I taught kindergarten, the ELL students had a really hard time hearing the rhymes on their own when asked if two words rhymed. They would almost always describe words that started with the same sound as rhyming, matching box with boat instead of fox. The focus on rhyming helps students recognize and make word families. By starting with bad a student who has mastered this idea can switch out the starting sound to create dad, mad, sad, etc. This simple idea of word families can help ELLs with starting the reading and writing process.