Poetry analysis can be both one of the easiest things to do and one of the hardest things to do. What is the poet saying about X? It sounds like an easy question, but it is so much more complex than we think. When we explore things in literature, we are getting students to make a number of inferences:
# Inferences for character / topic (the character is jealous);
# Inferences for the reader (the reader would be shocked) ;
# Inferences for the writer (the writer is highlighting the lack of power women had in society).
It is no surprise that students are good at making inferences about characters because they are doing it every day with their and other’s body language. Inferences around feelings are hard because it is about their own reactions. A teenager is a bag of mixed emotions and they can rarely pinpoint their precise emotion let alone others.
The problem we have in English is that the drivers for lessons tend to be the texts and not the people. That’s why it becomes hard when we are analysing texts, because students see texts and they don’t see living (well, they were living at one point) person behind them. The writer becomes the afterthought and therefore so removed and disjointed from the process. When you’ve spent several week’s looking at the story and the character of Scrooge, it becomes jarring when the emphasis switches to the writer. I don’t know why Dickens did it. He just did it, didn’t he?
Forming a picture of writers is something we actively have to do. Shakespeare the person. Dickens the writer. Stevenson the author. Owens the poet. We need students to infer something about the writer’s personality. Their opinions. Their perspectives. Their hopes. Their fears. The problem is often bogged down with the factual knowledge of the character rather than the inferred personality of the writer. Students focus on the historic figure rather than the human person. My favourite questioning around texts goes like this:
Who does Shakespeare really like?
How do you know he likes them?
Why do you think he likes them?
I like the route of this question because it is about the person and the personality inferred from a text. The best work I have read always has their grasp of the writer’s personality. They pick the stitching and unpick so much. The great thing is that students see so many different things. Mercutio because of his joy for life. The Nurse for her bawdiness. Juliet because she defies social norms. The ability to form an opinion about a writer is such an important aspect of English.
Writers are like us. They laugh, breath, cry, make jokes, use sarcasm and find things boring. Students don’t see writers as people. They are ghosts. They are ghostly apparitions that the English teacher holds seances in their classroom to communicate with. Knock twice if you used that alliteration to highlight the extreme nature of war. Knock once if you didn’t think about it all when writing.
I have never been a fan of giving students a load of verbs around the writer’s intent. You end up getting sentences with verbs in a sentence around the writer’s intent. You don't have the students working to build an opinion of the writer, their personality and the reasoning behind things. Instead you get lots of nice words.
Students are pretty good at spotting language features in texts. That isn’t the problem. To be honest, it never has been a problem. The problem has always been the reason why. The writer’s reason why. We have largely told students the writer’s reason as fact. We haven’t really taught students to build those inferences themselves when reading the text. Look at how our writing structures Point Evidence Explanation / What How Why place inference around the writer’s reasoning at the end. We leave inferences around the writer towards the end. It is an afterthought. We don’t put the writer’s personality in the driving seat. We hide it in the trunk and we wait for a suitable place to dump the body.
Therefore, there is a duty for us as English teachers to resurrect these dead / alive writers. There’s a reason why in academic and degree essays we write about writers in the present tense. The analysis is when we see them as alive. They become alive. They breathe in my lessons. Shakespeare is the guy who would probably drink me under the table but has such a subversive humour. Dickens is the well meaning guy but does go on a bit. Austen will probably laugh at my jokes and then go to critique me in her writing. We the teachers bring them alive and the students help us to build the inferences around their personality. We co construct a person around the reading of a text. Anyone get the sense that Dickens is bored here? Shakespeare’s up to his old tricks again, isn’t he? That Stevenson! You would see Dickens do it like Stevenson, would you?
Now, before you start dedicating a lesson a week to finding a writer’s personality lessons, we don’t need to do much to change this emphasis. Simply tweak our way of questioning and exploring. This week I spent some lessons looking at Exposure.
[1] We read a small section of the poem and explored what we thought the writer felt and thought.
[2] Next, we read the full poem and explored anything else we noticed.
[3] I then shared this with students to decide on words to describe the writer’s perspective on things. Often students lack the words and the precision of words. We put too much stock on their vocabulary in the first instance. Students need to build those connections up between writers and thoughts.
[4] Student then took a whole page and wrote this sentence down in the middle. As a class, we decided what was wrong with it. Together we changed the words and phrases. At this point we are exploring and refining inferences and rewording them accordingly. I think this is a skill we largely undervalue - the selection of the words to enable precision. X isn’t the right word, by Y is.
Wildred Owen's positive and simple poem 'Exposure' highlights the bravery of the soldiers fighting in WW2 and how they feel valued and appreciated.
[5] Then for each part of the sentence we explored where we could see it in the poem. What did the writer do with language to show that idea? We wrote them down and where possible we looked for more than one device to show those ideas. This was all on a spidediagram around that original sentence.
[6] Finally, around the outside we wrote our inferred reasons for the writer thinking or feeling this way.
Not positive but emotionless - ‘nothing happened’ / ‘ice in their eyes’ - Owen’s bleakness as he doesn’t think things will change
Students then did the same for Charge of the Light Brigade.
From the start, we were looking at forming inferences around the writer’s thoughts and feelings. That was the focus and not the techniques. Structuring the analysis around the person then makes the choices more personal.
We like to think English is about characters, but I think we undermine the subject if that’s all we discuss. It is more about personality and personalities. Maybe, we need to make the subject more about the people and less about the texts.
Thanks for reading,
Xris
P.S. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or actual events is purely coincidental.
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