Activities
TPCASTT
This is a method used by teachers to afford students access to challenging poems.
The following is an analysis of “King Lear in Respite Care” by Margaret Atwood and it will be done using the TPCASTT method of poetry analysis as an example of what you may want to see from your students. For this to work, I ask that students work in small groups of three to four teammates. They will begin with each taking a turn reading the poem. This can be modified with poems of substantial length by chunking the poem into smaller sections, but that will cut down on their ability to notice intricate patterns that are often missed on initial readings. After the reading is complete the students will work to find consensus on the meaning of each stanza or section. This is usually timed by the teacher. I suggest a minimum of 5 minutes per section, but that is, of course, dependent on the amount of time you have with your students and their ability to thoughtfully work through the specific poem in question. After this is done, I usually ask each group to present and follow up each presentation with time for questions or additional comments about what may have been missed.
Title- The title of the poem immediately furnishes crucial information. It allows the reader to know that the poem is tied in some way to the famed King Lear of Shakespeare’s creation, and it is tied to some form of needed environment of calm. “Respite Care” is typically viewed as needed when someone is infirm. This can and should lead to the character of King Lear, who loses a sense of self in the play, undergoes intense fatigue, and descends into the deranged anger of what could be considered early-stage senility. The students should be able to grasp all of these points.
Paraphrase- This poem is about a man who is in a nursing facility and is not happy about it. He is being visited by his youngest daughter. Below is a brief paraphrase of each stanza.
The opening stanza gives us the image of a man confined to a facility and he is confused. This can be deduced by his confusion about being controlled by “snow” or “wallpaper.” That he still attempting to hide something is clear from his need to be “sly and stubborn”.
Stanza two leaves us with an image of the man as without control of his hand, either from a stroke or because he is not lucid enough to control it.
In stanza three, we are made aware of a man who has knowledge but it is dispersed for an unknown reason. It may have been caused by the nursing facility but it also may have been caused by some sort of mental illness. The reference to a “cave” brings to mind images of Plato’s cave and its effect on the man who leaves, and the “hovel” brings to mind living conditions that are squalid. It also brings to mind the cave that offered shelter to Lear, Edgar, and the Fool during the storm.
In stanza four the character bemoans the loss of time, ceilings, and air. The reader considers why he thinks these things that are around him are gone. This could be a man who has lost control or power he once had, or it could be a man who is in the throes of dementia.
Stanza five is a meditation on the early death of men as well as a reference again to a man who has lost control over his way of life.
Stanza six refers back to the rage of the weather that is so powerful in the play King Lear. Tellingly this scene is tied together with a loss of a common human attribute- the ability to taste food.
Stanza seven gives us the return of his youngest daughter who sits with him and holds his hand. She asks basic questions about nutrition and he only asks to leave.
The last stanza leaves off with his youngest daughter telling her father that she “loves him like salt”. At this point the students should have a question. It would be my expectation that the majority come to the same conclusions I did, and I would answer the rest of the questions. First among others will be a question about the last line, “I love you like salt”.
Connotation- The last line is a wonderful case in point for this section. At this point, I would need to outline the various fairy tales that surround this quote. While they appear in many countries they all seem to have the same meaning, as documented by University of Pittsburgh Press.12 The salt is necessary to eat food and the sugar that is offered by the other sisters only makes one sick if consumed in high quantities. With this groundwork, I would ask the students to reference the play in ways that are subtler and more nuanced, specifically looking at the role of the daughters in relation to the salt and the sugar. References to the storm and the snow have value too, as will a consideration of how Atwood understands Lear’s state of mind.
Attitude- This section asks the students to consider the speakers and the poet. They should understand that “Lear” is frustrated and his youngest daughter is attempting to offer comfort to him. The speaker will be more challenging to decipher for the students. As noted by Sara Jamieson in volume 48 of Canadian Poetry, “Her inability to cope with her father’s illness causes her to compare herself to the elder daughters…Similarly, the Cordelia-like figure who appears at the end of the poem is an idealized vision of herself”.13 With this in mind, it is important for them to see the two roles taken on by the speaker.
Shift- At this point, I would like the students to note the challenges inherent in dissecting a character of questionable mental lucidity. So much is hinging on that key point. Also, there are shifts after the mention of the “daughters” as well as another shift with the arrival of the youngest daughter.
Title (Again)- Traditionally, the title is referred back to for a more nuanced offering after critical analysis. Here I would hope that my students could see that this poem could easily be considered an elegy. The father, while alive in the poem, is dead in real life. This presents an interesting chance to dialogue about the challenge of committing to a poetic style in full, as we suppose elegy to impose certain thematic constraints.
Theme- This poem carries with it the theme of the two stories that it references. There is a savage brutality in the institutionalization of an elderly adult against their will. There is also the theme of love--the love a child can have for a parent and vice versa: a love that in universal terms is timeless.
Question Paper
The question paper is an Advanced Placement14 activity that has been used for many years. It asks the students to write a paragraph that is completely made up of questions. The idea is that each question will probe deeper into the one before, thus allowing the students a micro view of the poem. So often the students begin with a macro assessment of what they “feel” the poem is about without examples of how they got there. This activity seeks to remedy that issue. You can find various examples of how to setup a handout for this online with a search of the topic. I suggest not using a handout and allowing students to go through this process in a poetic journal that they keep. This way all of their notes are kept together for future reference.
The use of this activity can get messy if it is not properly implemented. The students can go down many paths with this type of analysis and sometimes they lose track of the intent of the activity. The intent therefore must be made clear to them- a deeper understanding of the themes of the poem with evidence to support that belief is the goal. The activity must continually revolve around the poem and not deviate into something other than that. A caveat here is that the students do need some latitude to intellectually wander, and that is why I recommend implementing questions categories. They can choose to ask questions centering around the speaker, subject matter, punctuation, or even the use of nouns and verbs. This is a list of the types of question categories I have had good luck with, but it is by no means comprehensive. One of the joys of this activity is that it can be manipulated to fit your unit of study. It also lends itself as a great jumping off point for the strategy of the Socratic Seminar as the students are busy asking questions that they feel will help them better understand the text. It is therefore recommended to use these questions to begin the strategy of the Socratic Seminar.
Not So New Criticism
The lens of New Criticism that was developed by John Crowe Ransom and other southern poets during the mid-20th Century is enduring and incredibly useful, especially to a student taking the A.P. Literature exam. This movement while important to teach our students sometimes misses the mark when reading poems that have specific historical references that they simply do not know. While they will not have the ability to research on the AP exam, the classroom needs to function as a place where they can learn information so they can bring it to bear on the day of the test. The AP exam is a mix of having literary knowledge, but also being able to know about literary movements and important historical events that have shaped our poetry and literature.
Yes, you could read Yeats’ classic Easter Sunday, 1916 without any knowledge of The Easter Uprising and still understand aspects of the work, but it would be wholly more interesting and meaningful to have a basic understanding of a few different pieces of information. The “Not So New Criticism” uses aspects of the strategy of space and time to allow students access to poems in meaningful ways. This work, as its name evokes, requires the students to provide as much background information as possible on a poem. During the activity, the students are generally given about 15-20 minutes to research an aspect of the poem. It could be the author, the time period, the title, or any other piece of information that would allow them to bring into more clear focus an aspect of the poem. If this was done with Ultralight Beam, I would ask the students to research either Chinua Achebe, Ibgo, Christian colonization of Nigeria, or Gospel music. In this way, each person will have some piece of unique information that they can use to solve the puzzle of the text in question. Instead of feeling like they have nothing to bring to the table when accessing a poem like this, they have information to contribute, and the teacher is now, after the activity, comfortable calling on any student and knowing they have some type of information to bring to bear on the class’s understanding of the text. This is a gift, especially in classrooms where students are reticent to initially participate in class discussion.
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