Monday
In Friday’s post I promised to talk about teaching poetry to my 8-year-old grandson Alban, which I’ve been doing since May. After dutifully following his teachers’ lesson plans for a month, I jumped at the permission they granted to us teachers-at-home to switch to other topics if they desired. Alban liked the poetry so much that, at his request, we continued our lessons through the summer and they may last until Christmas as an afternoon extracurricular offering. (His Hearst Elementary zoom classes occur only in the morning.)
Alban maintains a running list of poetic terms and is proud to have filled up a page and a half so far. As a good violinist, he has a musical ear and loves poetry’s aural side, prompting me to put more emphasis on meter and metrical feet than I do with my college students. Doing so came in handy when we were discussing T. S. Eliot’s cat poems.
Alban fell in love with these poems, reading them all and then ranking them. His favorite is “Skimbleshanks, The Railway Cat,” which makes great use of anapestic tetrameter (four feet of unstressed, unstressed, stressed), punctuated periodically with effective spondees (multiple hard stresses in a row):
There’s a whisper down the line at 11:39
When the Night Mail’s ready to depart,
Saying ‘Skimble where is Skimble has he gone to hunt the thimble?
We must find him or the train can’t start.’
Alban picked up that we hear, in the rhythm, the sound of train wheels beginning to take off—only to be stopped by the spondee (“train can’t start”). Fortunately Skimbleshanks shows up to set all in motion:
You may say that by and large it is Skimble who’s in charge
Of the Sleeping Car Express.
From the driver and the guards to the bagmen playing cards
He will supervise them all, more or less.
Down the corridor he paces and examines all the faces
Of the travelers in the First and in the Third;
He establishes control by a regular patrol
And he’d know at once if anything occurred.
He will watch you without winking and he sees what you are thinking
And it’s certain that he doesn’t approve
Of hilarity and riot, so the folk are very quiet
When Skimble is about and on them move.
You can play no pranks with Skimbleshanks!
He’s a Cat that cannot be ignored;
So nothing goes wrong on the Northern Mail
When Skimbleshanks is aboard.
Alban also became attuned to the internal rhymes and to the difference between masculine and feminine and half and full rhymes.
I first noticed that Alban was alert to poetic rhythm when he observed that Eliot’s Gumbie Cat (#4 on his list) has a different rhythm at night than during the day. The daytime stanzas, like the daytime cat, move slowly with long and slow iambic octameter, but the poem picks up pace at night with half the feet (tetrameter) and mainly anapestic rather than iambic rhythm. Alban didn’t yet have names for what was occurring but noticed the difference on his own:
I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;
Her coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots.
All day she sits upon the stair or on the steps or on the mat;
She sits and sits and sits and sits – and that’s what makes a Gumbie Cat!But when the day’s hustle and bustle is done,
Then the Gumbie Cat’s work is but hardly begun.
And when all the family’s in bed and asleep,
She tucks up her skirts to the basement to creep.
Alban’s sense of humor draws him to limericks and to the poetry of Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl, especially the latter’s rewriting of fairy tales. But he also likes the golden oldies in Louis Untermeyer’s Golden Treasury of Poetry, including poems by Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, A. A. Milne, and Eugene Fields. Robert Louis Stevenson, and others. He particularly loves poems that work as puzzles and conundrums.
He does not go for some of my own childhood favorites, perhaps because romance is not on his eight-year-old agenda. In any event, he shrugs his shoulders at “The Highwayman,” “Lochinvar,” and “Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight.” Nor does he go for mysterious poems like “The Listeners” and “The Raven.” On the other hand, he did enjoy Rime of the Ancient Mariner, in part because of its mesmerizing beat. Oh, and he liked the zombie crew.
Alban loves large, complicated words so I got him excited about onomatopoeia, such as that found in the following poem:
Onomatopoeia
by Eve Merriam
The rusty spigot
sputters,
utters
a splutter,
spatters a smattering of drops,
gashes wider;
slash
splatters
scatters
spurts
finally stops sputtering
and plash!
gushes rushes splashes
clear water dashes.
We now engage in regular onomatopoeia sightings.
And so and so forth. I don’t give Alban exams—I figure that regularly circulating back to the terms in his notebook will get the concepts to sink in—but I’m open to feedback from teachers on this.
I also haven’t asked Alban to write any poetry of his own although this is a route I’m contemplating.
After we’ve spent 15 or 20 minutes or so on poetry, we round out the half hour lesson with Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain series, which I also read to Alban’s father. This is producing its own series of words for the notebook—protagonist, antagonist, character, plot, suspense—and has led to many rich conversations about human behavior. Alban is very good figuring out some of the story arcs, especially when a character with a name like “Magg” enters the picture.
It all feels like a game for both of us. I remember my best elementary school teachers making my education feel this way, and I feel privileged to continue that tradition.
Further thought: We found useful the following lyric, supposedly written by Coleridge for his son:
Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks; strong foot! yet ill able
Ever to come up with dactyl trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long;—
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng.
