I am not a student, but a teacher. I'm trying to make studying British poetry more interesting for the students by centering our poetry unit around Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. I am interested in suggestions of poems by British authors on any of the following themes:

war
death
birth
greed
money
insanity
heaven
the busyness of modern life... etc.
free will & choices

I would appreciate any input!

I would try Brownings murder poems. If you provide a vocabulary list and get them through the language, they are very interesting to discuss! Horrific actually. Maybe you can compare some with the murder ballads of nick cave. See which are more intersting and subtle for example.

Bartleby, what country/city are you in? What age and sex are your students? Are they a streamed group or a community cross-section? What syllabus must you cover? Is there any anthology prescribed for you and the class to work with?

Apologies in advance if my comments below misunderstand your teaching situation or don’t give you the kind of answer you find useful.

There are a zillion poems on the themes you mention (especially if you include that 'etc'!) and I doubt whether more than a tiniest fraction can be found that are centered around that Pink Floyd album, beyond the lyrics in the album itself.

[en.wikipedia.org]

It seems to me that the approach to teaching poetry that you are proposing (centering it about that album) risks giving your students a stunted idea of what poetry is, and failing to give them the kind of experience of the treasury of British poetry that would whet their appetites to explore more of it for themselves.

Even grouping poems according to themes may be stultifying. The New South Wales education authorities have for years inanely insisted that Year 12 students relate all their poetry studies to the concept of a ‘journey’, see

[www.onlineopinion.com.au]

as if that was the be-all and end-all of poetry learning and appreciation. For many NSW students, I imagine it does end all that.

By all means include a lyric from TDSOTM (or from any other album, e.g. something from one of the classic stage musicals, or from Bob Dylan) in the mix of poems you present to your class, if you think the words have poetic merit divorced from the music - and that's a big if - but don't give your class the impression that the study and appreciation of poetry can be adequately centered around the album.

Your aim to make the subject more interesting recognizes that too many students in too many schools find it otherwise. The main reason students find it so is, I suspect, that they are forced to read and pretend respect for poems that bore them because they are archaic, obscure, difficult, soppy, lacking in rhyme and rhythm, plain mediocre, too post-modern, or selected for political correctness, or related to some adult issue or navel-gazing that young people can't relate to. (I remember being bored in primary school by Sir Walter Scott's 'Young Lochinvar' who 'rode out of the west' to snatch a woman he loved from the church where she was about to be forced into marriage with ‘a laggard in love and a dastard in war’). Deconstruction and a mechanical approach to poetry analysis are other turn-offs. They kill the spirit.

The best way to encourage an interest in poetry is, I suggest, to start young children with nursery rhymes and older children with good light verse (there are umpteen great writers of that, but you could start with Harry Graham, Shel Silverstein and Wendy Cope) and with some of the popular story-telling ballads. Those don't have to be modern. Australian children still get a thrill when they read for the first time Banjo Paterson's 'The Man From Snowy River', and are amused by his humorous verse such as 'The Man From Ironbark', 'Johnson's Snakebite Antidote' or 'The Old-Timer's Steeplechase'. Young men should still be inspired by the heroism against fearful odds recounted with great rhyme and rhythm in Macaulay’s ‘How Horatius Kept the Bridge’ and Tennyson’s ‘The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet’. Examples of less classifiable poems that many newcomers to poetry find intriguing are ‘The Listeners’ by Walter de la Mare, and ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost.

Coupling a good original poem with a good parody of it can be another interest arouser; for instance ‘The Passionate Shepherd to his Love’ by Christopher Marlowe and ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’ by Sir Walter Raleigh.

All students of poetry should be given a taste of Shakespeare. For beginners, maybe something readily understandable such as the ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech from ‘As You Like It’.

There are ample opportunities in such works to impart, incidentally and painlessly, desirable knowledge about poetic technicalities and figures of speech. Some old words in the Marlowe, Raleigh and Shakespeare pieces need explaining, but that isn’t difficult, and shows students how good poetry preserves parts of our language that would otherwise have been lost. Give your students the fun homework of dropping some of those old words into a conversation with their friends.

If you throw in some more challenging poems for the advanced or gifted students, I suggest you encourage others in the class to say why those poems are not to their taste (if that’s the case). Make it clear that sincere negative comments are as welcome as positive ones. People are entitled to have different likes and dislikes. If you have a prescribed anthology, an interesting exercise might be to have a class ballot for the best liked and most disliked poems in it. Then explore in a class discussion why the least popular poems are that way. Each disliked feature implicitly identifies its opposite as a poetic virtue to be looked for, which can be a stepping stone towards connoisseurship.

Finally, I suggest the most important instrument for arousing students’ interest in poetry is a teacher passionate about the subject. (I’m not implying you’re not). Even apparently undisciplined or inattentive students will remember with respect and be influenced by a teacher’s huge enthusiasms. That’s one of the reasons eccentrics can make great teachers.

I haven’t been a teacher. The nearest I’ve come to it is helping my kids with their homework. If my comments show I don’t understand what teaching a class requires nowadays, please correct me.

Ian

Bartleby type any of the keywords you've chosen into the search feature here: [www.poemhunter.com]


Les