Poetry and Public Life

Content

Overview of the role of each primary text

The class will begin with Shakespeare’s King Lear. It is a preeminent AP text that explores the depth of friendship, power and their impact on familial relationships. Margaret Atwood’s “King Lear in Respite Care” has been chosen here to help the students understand the challenges Lear faces with the inevitable act of aging. While the time period and setting are much different from the plays the hopelessness that Atwood’s Lear feels is clearly emphasized and will hopefully serve to help the students’ understanding of this character’s march toward madness.

We will stay in England with our next novel, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. It will be imperative for the students to understand the importance of post-World War 1 as the setting for this novel. The importance Woolf ascribed to this time necessitates a clear understanding of the state in which many soldiers returned from the horror of war. “Dulce et Decorum Est” has been chosen here because it mirrors the struggle of Septimus Warren Smith as he attempts to reintegrate into a society he once knew, or in any case anticipates a struggle the speaker might have. This poem will also outline the human struggle to cope with past events that have personal significance.

Heart of Darkness, the next novel, shares the importance of the passage of time in a text. It will be paired with Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”.  Both texts focus a great deal on the symbolism of the river in their work. Both also deal with the issues inherent in slavery. It is the river, in both texts, that is able to symbolize both history and life at the same time. This poem should give the students the chance to see how an author can use nature to represent various occurrences over the passage of time.

The next novel will contain many of the same themes as Heart of Darkness but will move from The Congo to Nigeria. Things Fall Apart will be paired with a text set to music that employs aspects of Gospel, spoken word, and rap in its poetic structure. Kanye West’s “Ultralight Beam” considers the role of God in the lives of modern people in the United States. It will allow students to access the struggle presented when a colonizer’s religion stands in contrast to the previously held beliefs of the people. 

The work of Achebe had a direct influence on the next novel, which is Purple Hibiscus. This novel is, much like King Lear, a study of power and family- specifically the relationship between a father and daughter. To understand some of these challenges we will consider Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”. This poem captures the challenges arising from familial struggle, a daughter who at one and the same time loves and hates her father as she struggles to understand the complexity of parenting. It can also be read to be about her lover. In Adichie’s novel the protagonist, Kambili, has grown up under the control of a religious zealot who is also her father. He has also given her a tremendous education and has also given her sanctuary from the outside world.  

Our next prose text will maintain the gender struggle we saw in the last and will blend it with modern love relationships. We will be pairing Streetcar Named Desire with “The Unfaithful Housewife” by Federico Garcia Lorca. This poem will allow my students to better understand the complexity of love and sex. Lorca also sounds the same alarm as Williams concerning the threateningly dominant male archetype. The use of figurative language will allow the students to better understand the male chauvinism underscored in both texts.

Passion can come in many different guises, and it will be studied next in Albert Camus’ The Stranger and Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night”. Working with both of these texts will allow the class to compare the desire of two characters who experience loneliness in very different ways. The point of comparison is not just loneliness, however: Frost’s poem will help us consider how value and happiness are individually defined. Nihilism and Existentialism can be a challenge for many high school readers to understand, and it is my hope that this pairing will help students consider the more nuanced differences.  The nameless speaker of the poem drifts aimlessly though his city, challenged to communicate his thoughts to any person and quite possibly himself. To compare this character with that of Meursault will allow students to tease out subtle yet important distinctions surrounding one’s belief in their place in the universe.

As we walk away from Camus, we will dance directly into the theater of the absurd for our last work. We will consider the supremely entertaining, if totally confusing, Waiting for Godot with the supremely childlike, yet incredibly complex “Dreamwood” by Adrienne Rich. The Rich poem exposes the students to the symbolism that will be incredibly important in working with Beckett. It will allow for multiple interpretations, but it will also serve as a vehicle to understand overarching themes. As the students begin to extract meaning from Vladimir and Estragon’s conversation there will be disagreement among the students surrounding exactly what Beckett is trying to get across to his readers. The poem’s speaker will provide them with a simplified version of the issues surrounding Beckett’s meaning. Can the simple piece of wood provide a map for life? How do we as thinkers ascribe meaning to things in our world? These are the questions we will discuss with the help of this poem.

Extended Analysis of “Dulce et Decorum Est”

Below is an example of how a poem can help the reader better understand both a specific time period and a character. The speaker of the poem will be compared to Septimus Warren Smith, The poem outlines an aspect of World War I that is helpful for understanding the novel it is paired with during this unit.

This work of Wilfred Owen can be read as a denunciation World War I. It is a movement away from the celebration of dying for one’s country to the understanding that death is a painful and sometimes accidental horror that befalls men. This poem offers a similar time period to that of Woolf. It will also clarify the role of Septimus Warren Smith, a returning war soldier.

“Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you. Holmes and Bradshaw are on you. They scour the desert. They fly screaming into the wilderness. The rack and the thumbscrew are applied. Human nature is remorseless”.³It is in this quote the character of “Dulce et Decorum Est” is most fully realized. Owen, in stark terms, presents the “rack” and “thumbscrew” as the young man in his poem fails the task of slipping on his mask. The screw continues to turn as the man dies a gruesome death. Many soldiers returned from war burdened down with their memories. This is a point that Ms. Woolf is attempting to get across to her readers. Owen, though, was not just writing down a fictional story, he was responding to what he saw as on the battlefields of France.

This war was brought the doorstep of England and it took a toll on the highest levels of the social order to an extent that was that was shocking to the people. As Guy Keleny points out, “for the first time, the respectable classes saw their sons swept up into the a British mass army of volunteers and conscripts, and killed in large numbers. For the first time, any household in the land, even the kind that breed poets, might receive the terrible telegram”.⁴ It is in this way that both Owen and Woolf’s works are what might today be called a Public Service Announcement. Owen furthers his announcement with a beautiful last four lines of apostrophe that are a plea for sense:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori⁵

This is a call to action. This is in plain terms the author recounting a horror from war and attempting to converse with the public about it. This resort to apostrophe makes poetry a dialectic in the public sphere. Owen is speaking directly to all of us about the death that gets the last word in this text. The ascription of honor to the giving of one’s life for the good of the country is a problem for Owen, one that he believes needs to be considered and rectified.

Extended Analysis of “Ultralight Beam”

Making use of this song allows students to understand the challenges posed by colonization over a course of time. While it does not focus on the specific time period of the colonization of Nigeria, it does provide a thoughtful correlative to its paired novel, specifically regarding the taking on of the colonizer‘s religion even if it is at odds with the personal beliefs of the colonized people in question.

Things Fall Apart is a classic novel of Nigerian colonization that was published by Chinua Achebe in 1958. This novel explores the ramifications of English Christianity usurping power from traditional religions in the region. It takes its title from a line in W.B. Yeats’ poem entitled “The Second Coming” which has apocalyptical overtones. For Achebe this applies to the religions of Nigeria coming into direct conflict with Christianity.

The tension that is presented in Things Fall Apart is brought to us in the modern day by the work of artist Kanye West. West’s Gospel-inspired search for redemption is brought into contrast with visions of a return to Africa, and it ends with apocalyptic overtones about war.

The song begins heavily rooted in the Gospel tradition of the Baptist south with expressions like “We want the lord (Yes Jesus)” and “Hand over Satan (Yes, Jesus)” and at this point it seems have a devout Christian message.  Quickly though, there is a prayer for “Paris” in reference to the Paris attacks and the modern challenge of war brought on by religious differences. This verse is followed with another delivered by fellow musician “The Dream”. In it he begins to question the religions that he has evoked thus far. He states:

I’m tryna keep my faith

But I am looking for more

Somewhere I can feel safe

And end my holy war

The artist is making a statement here; he is made uncomfortable by something. He is pointing to a holy war that is within him. This challenge is furthered in the next stanza where Kelly Price questions her God with lines like “why, oh why’d you do me wrong? More you persecute the weak because it makes you feel so strong to save”. This is a God that seemingly persecutes and not the God of the above stanza. This is clarified in the next verse where Chance the Rapper plays the role of Earthly savior. He states, “I will field your questions, I will feel your pain”, and this is the role of a Christ figure, except he is not positing himself to be that because he goes on to state that, “I’m moving all my family from Chatham to Zambia”. He is a leader and in that role he is challenging the Christian God and questioning, quite profoundly, whether or not it would be prudent to move back to Africa.⁶

This is the challenge presented to us by Achebe. He recounts living with dueling faiths in an autobiographical journal entry in the publication Guernica. In it he states, “Those two- my father and his uncle- formed the dialectic that I inherited. Udoh stood fast in what he knew, but he also left room for my father to seek other answers. The answer my father found in the Christian faith solved many problems but by no means all”.⁷Achebe rightly sees God as powerful and capable of changing lives. His family was educated by Christian missionaries and those that became Christian went on to hold powerful roles in the government when the British passed control, tacitly, back to Nigeria. Achebe also, like Chance the Rapper, questions the role of Christianity. a major player in the transatlantic slave trade. The challenges of colonization are complex and varied and I believe this song begins to point to some of those root issues.