Inference words - How to teach poetry

How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Inference words
How to teach poetry

To deal with complex ideas, students need vocabulary to properly articulate complex thinking. The big difference between a very able student and an able one is in the subtlety of the former’s use of vocabulary. If we take ’The Tiger’ again, what happens if we introduce the words ’inferior’ and ’superior’? Who in the poem is which or what?

Inferior: voice/reader/tiger/God?

Superior: tiger/God?

The interesting thing is that, as soon as you introduce a choice of vocabulary — generally, abstract nouns work best — you start to develop and extend their thinking and the complexity of their ideas. Just by introducing the words ’inferior’ and ’superior’, you can completely change a student’s understanding of the poem.

The poet makes the tiger seem superior to the reader and, by the end, makes even God seem inferior when he uses the word ’dare’.

These words change the interpretation of the poem. It is now about power and a battle between two entities. Look again and you’ll see the poem is full of this imagery.

Getting students to use abstract vocabulary to summarise a text is a powerful tool. I often call these ’inference words’: ones that don’t necessarily appear in the text, but allow us to infer something about it. What is really going on? Take this poem:

The Eagle

He clasps the crag with hooked hands;

Close to the sun in lonely lands,

Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.4

Of course, you could make the same inferences about power. ’The Eagle’ is quite similar to ’The Tiger’. In addition to ’superior’ and ’inferior’, you could add inference words such as ’sadness’, ’power’, ’control’, ’regal’ and ’godlike’. Suddenly you have a greater level of engagement with the text. The vocabulary students use to describe ideas is important and it is up to us, as teachers, to develop this ability. Depending on the level of the student, you can develop the level of understanding through vocabulary:

✵ powerful

✵ superior

✵ omnipotent

Each word has a different shade of meaning, and they build in complexity. That’s why vocabulary is so important. The same question with one different word changes the level and type of understanding.

✵ How does the writer show us that the eagle is powerful?

✵ How does the writer show us that the eagle is superior?

✵ How does the writer show us that the eagle is omnipotent?

Think of the words you’d use to describe the poem, because you can raise the quality of understanding simply through your own use of vocabulary. After all, you could always take a word and go one step further. What if I used the word ’biblical’ to describe ’The Eagle’ and ’atheist’ to describe ’The Tiger’? Now, Blake was religious, and ’atheist’ isn’t a word you might generally associate with him, but this gives you a starting point for discussion. To what extent is the poem religious? We can then introduce to students the fact that Blake was against organised religion and the constricting nature of its formal structures. How does that change our understanding of the poem? Maybe words like ’biblical’ and ’atheist’ don’t help us to describe the poem precisely, but they do help us to then search for the right word to describe the idea. Blake isn’t denying the existence of God, but questioning how something so large and powerful can be controlled, contained and ’framed’. We can then add words like ’spiritual’ and ’agnostic’ to the mix.

One simple word has the power to transform the meaning of a text and to develop, improve or alter a student’s understanding of a poem.