The qualities of poetry

Primary English: Knowledge and Understanding - Medwell Jane A. 2014

The qualities of poetry

TEACHERS’ STANDARDS

A teacher must:

3. Demonstrate good subject and curriculum knowledge

✵ have a secure knowledge of the relevant subject(s) and curriculum areas, foster and maintain pupils’ interest in the subject, and address misunderstandings

✵ demonstrate a critical understanding of developments in the subject and curriculum areas, and promote the value of scholarship

✵ demonstrate an understanding of and take responsibility for promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher’s specialist subject.

4. Plan and teach well structured lessons

✵ impart knowledge and develop understanding through effective use of lesson time

✵ promote a love of learning and children’s intellectual curiosity

✵ contribute to the design and provision of an engaging curriculum within the relevant subject area(s).

8. Fulfil wider professional responsibilities

✵ take responsibility for improving teaching through appropriate professional development.

Curriculum context

National Curriculum programmes of study

This knowledge is designed to underpin the teaching of the Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 programmes of study for English, which state, for example, that pupils should be taught

in reading to:

✵ develop pleasure in reading, motivation to read, vocabulary and understanding by:

image listening to and discussing a wide range of poems Y1/2/3/4/5/6

image learning to appreciate rhymes and poems, and to recite some by heart Y1/2

image learning a wider range of poetry by heart Y5/6

image preparing poems to read aloud and to perform, showing understanding through intonation, tone, volume and action Y3/4/5/6

image recognising some different forms of poetry [for example, free verse, narrative poetry] Y3/4

✵ participate in discussion about poems that are read to them and those that they can read for themselves, taking turns and listening to what others say Y2

✵ explain and discuss their understanding of poems, both those that they listen to and those that they read for themselves Y2.

and in writing to:

✵ develop positive attitudes towards and stamina for writing by:

image writing poetry Y2.

Early Years Foundation Stage

The Early Learning Goals specify that, by the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage, children should:

✵ listen attentively in a range of situations.

Introduction

Trainee teachers need to know as much about poetry as they do about stories. The word ’poetry’, though, is used to cover a whole range of rhythmical and rhyming texts and it is as well to establish a few definitions from the start.

At home, preschool children are likely to hear, learn and recite lots of nursery rhymes. These are generally bizarre, often surreal, and always packed with symbolism of one kind or another. In their early years at school children continue to hear, learn and recite a lot of verses and rhymes and they add to their stock with the verses that form part of what lona and Peter Opie (2001) call ’The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren’ — their own childhood culture. These additions might include clapping rhymes, skipping rhymes, rhymes for ball games, and subversive rhymes about teachers and school dinners, as well as the range of rude, often bodily function and underwear-related rhymes that most children delight in for no other reason than that they are rude. Adults can be quite shocked by some of these. For instance, two very well brought-up eight-year-old Asian girls startled their teacher when they sang and clapped to When Susie was a Baby and celebrated Susie’s adolescent years with:

Ooh, ah, lost my bra,

Left my knickers in my boyfriend’s car.

Though these rhymes are a lot of fun and certainly have a major significance in children’s cognitive, emotional and social development, they should not really be categorised as ’poetry’. They belong more to an imaginative oral tradition that uses rhythm and rhyme very effectively but which lacks the linguistic complexity and emotional richness of more deliberately written ’poems’. The boundaries between rhymes, verses and poetry are hazy and hard to define but nonetheless poetry is different from the other two. However, in this chapter, for the sake of simplicity, the term ’poetry’ will be used to cover all three generic forms, though unless it is made clear otherwise the main emphasis will be on the more complex literary manifestation of poetry rather than the orally inspired rhymes and verses.

PRACTICAL TASK

Make a list of as many nursery rhymes as you can recite from start to finish. Choose three of them and try to work out what they are about. This does not just mean restating the obvious meaning of, say, Little Miss Muffet sitting on a tuffet, but means thinking about implicit meanings. That particular rhyme is a pretty scary one and seems to be about the dangers that confront little girls when they are out and about alone. Does any pattern emerge from the rhymes you best remember?

In some respects, the knowledge about poetry is more demanding than that required for stories. This is because poetry is not a form that all adults find particularly accessible or pleasurable whereas story, on the whole, is. Children, on the other hand, like the rhythm and the rhyme of poems a great deal — particularly if they are delivered with enthusiasm and verve. The reason for the unease that some adults, including many teachers, feel is probably something to do with the fact that poetry is a much more concentrated, contrived (poets would say ’crafted’) and artificial medium than prose. The language of poetry is further removed from the language of everyday speech than the language of stories. We don’t naturally speak in poetry and sometimes feel uneasy when confronted with unfamiliar language used in unfamiliar forms that do not necessarily offer up meaning at first try. Perhaps because their language development is still in its early stages, children seem to feel less anxious about these things and can simply give themselves over to the rhythm, the rhyme and the general feel of a poem with far less nervousness.

Whilst it is true that the language, forms and structures of poetry make it obviously different from prose, this should not be seen as a problem. Because poems generally have fewer words to work with than stories, the words simply have to be made to work harder in order to supply the same depth of meaning. The meaning of a poem is conveyed as much in its rhythms and sounds, and the associations and figurative use of its language as in the strict lexical meanings of the words used.

It is valuable to a teacher to know some of the technical terms relating to these aspects of poetic analysis and be able to apply them, but this must not become the be-all and end-all of working with poems with children. Like stories, poetry has the potential for giving children enormous emotional and spiritual stimulation as well as classroom pleasure and fun. If teachers ignore this then they are not working with poems particularly well or delivering what children need.

Like stories too, poems are an important resource for all aspects of Literacy because they provide language, structural models and ideas that relate to all of them. In reading, the words, rhythms and repetitions of poetry help to develop children’s phonological awareness and prediction abilities, which are important in the early stages of learning to read. The themes, language and structures of poems for Key Stage 2 children enable them to scrutinise texts carefully in order to understand implicit meanings. In writing the forms, themes and language of poems can be imitated by the children before they go on to develop their own work. In speaking and listening, ideas contained in poems and the way that those ideas are expressed give opportunities for discussion and part of the particular pleasure of a good poem lies in saying it aloud. Analysing poems can be done with a similar battery of straightforward literary critical procedures and technical terms, but evaluating different kinds of poetry is just as subjective and hedged around with just as many (some would say more) provisos.

Why are poems important?

Poems are important to children for many of the same reasons that stories are important. Like stories, they have the capacity for stimulating imagination, interest and enjoyment. They help children to understand the thoughts and feelings of others, to enter their world, see things through fresh eyes in situations sometimes similar and sometimes different from their own. They provide a similar cultural heritage and bond (what British adult cannot recite Jack and Jill or has never read or heard Wordsworth’s Daffodils!). In doing all this, they help to improve children’s literacy. This last point needs further comment.

PEDAGOGICAL LINK

Make sure that poetry books are properly represented in any classroom book collection, and in your ’emergency’ collection of books to read to classes. It is unlikely that children will read poems unless they are easily available to them.

One important strategy in children’s acquisition and development of reading is phonic knowledge — the ability to match the sounds of the language to the way they are represented on the page, i.e. to match phonemes to graphemes. It is well understood that English is a phonically highly inconsistent language and that this searchlight alone can only provide partial illumination but it is also well understood that a child with a knowledge and understanding of phonics is in a stronger position to do battle with unfamiliar words than a child without. In order to develop phonic knowledge and understanding, a child must be able to hear and to distinguish between the sounds of the language — to have ’phonological awareness’. Much research has demonstrated that substantial early experience of rhythm and rhyme is highly effective in developing children’s phonological awareness and in positively influencing their future literacy achievement.

RESEARCH SUMMARY

Peter Bryant was involved in several projects aimed at clarifying the relationship between children’s early experience of nursery rhymes and their subsequent phonological awareness and phonemic understanding. In one, Maclean, Bryant and Bradley (1987) worked with 66 preschool children over a year. The children were selected to represent a balanced gender, social and IQ group, and with parents with a wide spread of educational achievement. The result of the work demonstrated that children’s early knowledge of nursery rhymes was very strongly linked to the development of a wider set of phonological skills and was a highly effective predictor of and contributor to later literacy skills. Interestingly, it was not linked at all with achievement in other school curriculum areas.

In another project, Bryant and Bradley (1985) worked with 400 non-readers between the ages of four and five who were tested initially on their ability to hear rhyme and alliteration. When 368 of the children were followed up four or five years afterwards, it was found that those children who had scored highly on these initial tests were progressing well in their reading. When similar tests were also given to a group of what Bryant and Bradley call ’backward readers’, the children scored very poorly.

It is extremely important that children have experience of as much rhyme and rhythm in their preschool and in their Key Stage 1 primary classrooms as possible. This is not only because the rhyme and rhythm have long-term functions in relation to children’s overall literacy development, but also because they introduce children to ways of structuring language poetically into lines and verses, to vivid, sometimes even bizarre or surreal, language use (think about the contents of contrary Mary’s garden, for instance, or the medical treatment for Jack’s broken crown) and, most importantly, because they help to liberate children’s imaginations and are fun. All of these benefits are not only to be found in nursery rhymes. There are similar imaginative, linguistic and structural rewards in finger rhymes, action rhymes, songs, chants, playground games and even advertising jingles. All of them are grist to the phonemic mill as well as providing rich opportunity for shared play and enjoyment.

At Key Stage 2, poetry has further potential. Inevitably, it will still make its contribution to children’s imaginative development and their language and literacy skills because it will need to be analysed, discussed and tried. In that process children will learn much about the ways in which language can most effectively be manipulated to produce particular effects. Getting properly to grips with a poem demands and develops high level comprehension skills because words work harder than they do in prose where the demands of meeting a tight form are not so intense. But in dealing with such cognitive matters, teachers must not lose sight of the fact that poetry has the power to enrich children’s imaginative and emotional lives. It is not easy to make this kind of point without making the whole area sound ’wimpy’ — and it has suffered too long with that kind of reputation. Wimpiness is one of the reasons why boys in particular lose interest in poetry as they approach adolescence and why comparatively few adults read poetry for pleasure after they leave school, but poetry is not wimpy. Most good writers for children can produce poems that are realistic and very tough. When Kit Wright in Useful Person writes about a Down’s syndrome child in a crowded grumpy railway waiting room or Charles Causley in Timothy Winters about an abused child in morning assembly, they are writing tough poems for primary school children. What these poems do is to touch on areas of deep personal feeling in very intense ways. It is the compression and resonances of language that only poetry offers that allow the feelings of such poems to be so powerfully expressed and which in turn give so much to children’s personal and imaginative lives.

PEDAGOGICAL LINK

Poetry book covers are just as attractive and stimulating as storybook covers. Make sure that at least some poetry books are displayed in the classroom so that the covers can be seen in all their enticing glory.

What is poetry?

Once, the story goes, Duke Ellington was asked, ’What is swing?’ The great jazz composer gazed at the questioner through his wonderful baggy eyes and considered lengthily and deeply. Finally he uttered, ’Man, if you have to ask, you ain’t got it.’

That evasive answer doubtless did not satisfy the questioner and Ellington could certainly have defined swing technically perfectly well. If he had, his answer would probably have involved the consideration of aspects of rhythm, emphasised offbeats in 4/4 time, syncopated and slurred sounds, musical dynamics and a host of arcane aspects of musicology. But any definition would not have clarified the appeal of swing, which is as much physical and emotional as intellectual. In the end, a musician and listener understand swing in music by feeling it. If you have to ask, you ain’t got it.

The same is true of poetry. Dorothy L. Sayers (1946) makes the point vividly when she argues that each word in Shakespeare’s great line about honey bees in Henry V:

The singing masons building roofs of gold

can be analysed and explained perfectly well and might actually be questioned for its scientific accuracy by pedantic readers. Bees, after all, do not sing; they buzz. What the bees are creating are not roofs — they are more like walls, which the bees are filling, not building, and beeswax is actually white in its pure form. But that analysis and explanation would not explain the emotional impact of the line, what Dorothy Sayers describes, deliberately pedantically, as the effect on blood and tissue known as ’making one’s heart leap’ or the reaction from the tear-glands, resulting in a measurable quantity of brackish water that the line can produce.

Poetry cannot be responded to entirely through its content, forms, rhythms and language. In the end it is creativity of spirit, freshness of vision and intensity of feeling that lie at the heart of poetry and these cannot be defined; they have to be felt. Also, as with swing, that feeling is best nurtured and developed by experiencing it — in the case of jazz by listening to it and in the case of poetry by reading and listening and tuning in to get the feel of it.

This is not to say that a knowledge of technical terms and the ability to apply them to poems is not useful. It does give children and teachers some tools with which to analyse poetry — to enable them to talk about aspects of language, rhythm or form. But the main problem with poetry is that it is so compressed that any crude attempt to decompress it can easily result in the whole thing imploding. In over-analysing poems, there is a danger of destroying them. Though teachers are expected to understand and to be able to handle some of those tools, they should be used carefully and sensitively.

Here are four definitions of poetry provided by four different writers:

Nature to advantage dress’d

What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed.

(Alexander Pope)

The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.

(William Wordsworth)

The best words in the best order.

(Samuel Coleridge)

The sort of stuff that doesn’t reach the edge of the page when you write it down.

(Michael Rosen)

That last was an off-the-cuff response to a student questioner at a lecture. There is probably just a touch of Ellington mischief about it!

All of these definitions are interesting, and, even though they are very different, they are all good ones. Their differences simply reflect the attitudes of the particular periods in which they were written or spoken. Pope, writing in the early eighteenth century, was clearly concerned with the intellectual content at the centre of any poem and its relationship with form and language. Wordsworth, writing in the late eighteenth century, was much more interested in the surge of emotion that poetry can express. Coleridge, in the early nineteenth century, was commenting on the language and structures of poetry, while Michael Rosen, in the late twentieth century, found layout of particular interest. The simple fact is that poetry is diverse — there are so many different kinds of poetry about so many different things written in so many different ways that any one definition, unless it is long and complicated, cannot cover everything. However, what is true is that all of them, intellectual content, form, language, emotion, structure and layout, have a contribution to make to the ’meaning’ of any poem. Sometimes some are more important than others, but all are important.

Poetic devices

It is easier to deal with these through examples.

John Agard (1990), a poet born in Guyana, offers a very dynamic view of what poetry is in Poetry Jump Up and in doing so demonstrates some ways of achieving effects through skilful use of poetic devices. A ’jump up’, by the way, is a dance performed behind the costumed floats and characters by children at carnival time in the Caribbean. This is a brief extract from the poem:

Words jumpin off de page

tell me if Ah seeing right

words like birds

jumpin out a cage

take a look down de street

words shakin dey waist

words shakin dey bum

words wit black skin

words wit white skin

words wit brown skin

words wit no skin at all

words hug gin up words

an saying I want to be a poem today

rhyme or no rhyme

I is a poem today

I mean to have a good time.

Here, a poem is seen as a joyous dance performed by language. The words are vivacious and exuberant and active — jumping, shaking, hugging — and are seen as people intent on enjoying themselves. As Agard shows it, they put on their best dresses, make themselves as attractive as they possibly can, and then get out and dance. They have a good time. They show off. They snuggle up to one another, try to surprise one another, excite one another, intrigue one another, tempt one another, and make interesting and sometimes surprising relationships with one another. The poem is a celebration of the excitement that poetry might offer. All that can be felt in the poem without any knowledge of poetic devices, but there are technical terms that can help to explain how the joyous effects are achieved, because they are certainly not accidental.

To begin with, the whole poem is a metaphor. A poem is compared with a dance. It jumps with the rhythm of a Caribbean jump up, helped along by its repetitions, its short fairly staccato lines, its occasional rhymes both at the ends of lines (page/cage, rhyme/time) and inside lines as internal rhymes (words/birds) and it is given directness by its use of non-standard words and structures. The spelling of ’jumpin’ and ’shakin’ and ’huggin’, perhaps the use of the slightly suspect ’bum’ and certainly the spelling and use of ’Ah’ for ’I’m’ and ’dey’ for ’they’ when really the standard form should be ’their’ and the pronoun/verb mismatch in ’I is a poem today’ all contribute to the lively and colloquial tone of the poem. The poet is amazed by what he is seeing in his imagination and speaks directly and conversationally to the reader. The extract is little more than a series of quick impressions of activity. The sections in which Agard describes the words strutting their stuff are rapid phrases rather than sentences because the participles ’jumpin’, ’shakin’ and ’huggin’ are not finite verbs. If I were one of Dorothy L. Sayers’ pedants I would have to say that the grammar is technically wrong! However, I’m not and the fact is that the non-standard forms actually work to the poem’s advantage, not only because they give a sense of immediacy and vitality, but also because they provide a dynamic additional syllable to each verb, which the grammatically correct ’jumps’, ’hugs’ and ’shakes’ would not give. There is one telling simile that gives us the idea of words in poems fluttering and flying like liberated birds, and a series of metaphors. There is personification as the words in the poetic dance shake their booty and hug and speak and flash their various coloured skins.

On the page, the poem looks long and straggly, and is carried along by the natural rhythm of Caribbean speech rather than by any imposed form. Lines are of inconsistent length and the rhythm continually shifts in its emphasis. It may not be stretching things too far to suggest that the poem has the loose, flowing structure and the look of an improvised dance and that the lack of a tight form is actually part of the meaning of the poem.

That kind of analysis demonstrates clearly the dangers of too much emphasis on poetic devices. In treating Agard’s joyful celebration in this detailed way we are in danger of chilling it and even killing it. Understanding how the effects are achieved does not necessarily increase the pleasure that the poem will give if it is simply responded to. Even that small extract sparkles. The writer has certainly made the language work hard to get the best out of the words to make them jump up off the page to best effect. As John Agard says later in the poem, A little inspiration — plenty perspiration. Part of the craftsmanship of the poet, though, is in disguising the perspiration and by analysing the poem in this way we are drawing attention to it. It is important that children do understand how the language is being made to work by the writer, but teachers still need to tread with great care, and it is important too that once having understood some of the craftsmanship at work in the poem, children are given the opportunity for testing it out for themselves in their own imaginative writing. John Agard would certainly be seen as a writer of good quality modern poetry for children and his work is, as ever, redolent of a non-white culture.

Here are the first and third verses of John Masefield’s well-known classic poem Cargoes (1979, first published in 1903):

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory.

And apes and peacocks.

Sandalwood, cedarwood and sweet white wine.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack

Butting through the Channel in the mad March days.

With a cargo of Tyne coal.

Road-rails, pig-lead.

Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

This is obviously a very different kind of poem from John Agard’s. To begin with, it is shorter and is much more formally organised into stanzas, each with precisely the same rhyming pattern and a very similar rhythmical pattern too. However, within that similarity of formal structure Masefield has created quite different effects. The first verse is exotic, elegant, flowing and sensuous while the third is grimy, ugly, grimly practical and even brutal. He has managed to make the two verses so different with a string of clever linguistic and technical devices.

To begin with, each verse is dedicated to one ship and the names and natures of the two ships is important. One is a quinquireme, the other a coaster. The very sounds of the words establish a mood. We may not know what a quinquireme is but it certainly sounds a lot more romantic than a coaster. It is actually a Middle Eastern ship propelled by five banks of oars (hence the prefix ’quin’) so it may not have seemed quite so romantic if you had happened to be sitting in the middle of the bottom bank, having been rowing for a month or so with the Palestinian sun hammering down! However, Masefield does not give us the opportunity to consider this because first of all he personifies the ship to make it do the rowing itself — that would save the rowers a good deal of effort! — and second the language of the verse diverts us and points us in other directions.

Why should a ’quinquireme’ sound a more attractive seagoing proposition than a coaster? It is because the word is more languorous and slides off the tongue more easily — given that it is tri-syllabic with two of the syllables beginning with the comparatively unfamiliar (at least in English) ’qu’ sound. Coaster is a more mundane bi-syllabic word with the second being the most familiar, workaday and commonplace vowel phoneme in English — ’uh’.

If we were in any doubt about what Masefield intends by these names, he helps us out by further language-juggling in the first lines of each verse. There are no adjectives to describe the quinquireme — he lets that single noun carry all the overtones for him — but we are told that it is travelling from Nineveh to distant Ophir. The ’distant’ is, of course, significant. Not many readers, certainly not many British child readers, could confidently point out Nineveh and Ophir on a map. They are simply faraway places with strange sounding names. Nineveh again is a tri-syllabic with a very foreign looking ’veh’ ending and Ophir has the soft ’ph’ at its heart and a similarly remote ’ir’ ending. The two lines of the verse flow smoothly and without vocal effort from the reader, helped by the fact that ’distant’ is next to Ophir’ so its final consonant merges effortlessly into Ophir’s’ opening vowel, by the softly aspirated alliteration of ’home’ and ’haven’ (rather like a gentle breeze), by the temperate warmth of ’sunny’ and by the tri-syllabic exotic welcome of ’Palestine’.

The lines also have a prevailing set of vowel sounds, which contribute to their effect. In the first line the prevailing sound is a thin T and in the second line this is supplemented by a string of open vowels — of ’o’s and ’a’s. This assonance, too, helps to give the lines a lightness and delicacy of tone.

The cargo that the quinquireme carries is equally attractive. It exudes Middle Eastern luxury and indulgence for use by opulent Palestinian hedonists. Every item on the bill of lading has overtones and associations of wealth and pampered ease, but not only that; there is a similar smoothness of construction and careful selection of sounds as in the first two lines that helps to give the stanza its particular musicality and tone. There is, in particular, a syllable slipped into line four that is missing from line four of the third stanza. The additional syllable is ’and’, which is a connective serving to make the line flow more elegantly. This elegance is emphasised by the soft alliterative sibilants of the last line, the aromatic and pampering associations of ’sandalwood’ and ’cedarwood’, and the seductive assonance and alliteration of ’sweet white wine’.

In short, the effects of the first stanza have been deliberately created by a writer who is far more interested in what poetry can offer beyond rhythm and rhyme. There is very tight control and where structural patterns are broken they are done so quite deliberately in order to create specific effects. The same is, of course, true of the third stanza. Here, the details of the sailing conditions are rather different. If matters were set fair in the sunny Mediterranean, they are a lot wilder and windier in the grey English Channel. The difference of effort in the movement of the ships is conveyed in the participle that opens each second line. The quinquireme may row itself smoothly and gracefully home; the British coaster has to fight every inch of the way. The metaphorical and onomatopoeic ’butting’ hits the reader like a Glasgow kiss!

The whole stanza has a far jerkier feel to it. The rhythm of the two stanzas is, actually, much the same, with four strong stresses in the first, second and fifth lines and two in the third and fourth. It is easy to recognise these by simply saying the stanza aloud and clapping where the strong beats come. However, the feel is totally different. The effect is achieved by a deliberate selection of words that it is comparatively difficult to get the tongue round — the first line in particular, with its string of monosyllables, with each one demanding a preceding pause in order to reshape the mouth for its initial consonant, almost reads like a tongue twister — by a deliberate use of hard alliteration and by control of associations. The soft and lingering alliterative sibilants of Palestine have been replaced by harsh consonants. Even where Masefield does use sibilants for alliteration (as in line 1) the c’s have their hard form.

The overtones of the language are different too. The final syllable of Palestine is ’tine’, which is pronounced exactly the same as Tyne. Yet somehow ’tine’ in ’Palestine’ creates a quite different mental association from ’Tyne’ in ’Tyne coal’. All the items of cargo are different in quality too. Gone is the luxury. It is replaced by harsh practicality and tawdry cheapness — a practicality and tawdriness emphasised by the associations of ’pig’ and ’tin’.

In overall terms, the poem, like Agard’s Poetry Jump Up, is highly impressionistic and direct. Masefield does not write in sentences. There is no finite verb in any of the stanzas. The poem is given greater immediacy and colour because of this. In breaking the grammatical rule that teachers work so hard to teach children — that every sentence must contain at least one finite verb — the poet has written a better poem.

REFLECTIVE TASK

Choose either a poem by a significant modern children’s author or a classic poem and examine it carefully for poetic devices. Do not be content simply to identify them, but try to determine why the poet has chosen to use them and what contribution they make to the overall meaning of the poem.

PRACTICAL TASK

Use Masefield’s Cargoes as a model for writing two additional verses about motor cars. Why not try a Bentley and an old banger? Try to use as many of the poetic devices that Masefield uses as you possibly can and then add some others, just for you.

Rhythm

The word ’rhythm’ has recurred regularly through this chapter and it needs some clarification. It means much the same in poetry as it does in music and most people have little problem in understanding it as a concept. Poetry, like music, falls almost naturally into small units. In music the unit is a musical bar, in poetry it is a metrical foot. In music, a bar is generally of a regular length with one or more regular strong beats and the same is generally true of a metrical foot in poetry. The position of the strong beat or beats in both cases is variable. In popular music, the commonest form is a bar of four beats with the second and fourth being emphasised. In poetry, the commonest form is a metrical foot of two beats with the second being emphasised. This pattern of stresses is then repeated to give a recurrent and regular pulse, which is rhythm. This is a massive simplification, however, and there are numerous other patterns that both music and poetry can follow. In the hands of the most sophisticated composers and poets rhythm can become extremely complicated. Whether complex or simple, though, rhythm is always very important in the overall ’meaning’ of any musical work or any poem.

Rhythm contributes a great deal to the tone of a poem and poets know that a bad choice of rhythmical form can have dire consequences in creating a mismatch between tone and meaning. For example, in this extract from The Song of the Low Ernest Jones laments the Victorian working man’s lot, doomed forever to poverty and hunger whilst at the same time serving the wealthy. This would appear to give it all the makings of a deeply depressing poem — which is certainly what Jones intended. Unfortunately, he chooses to voice the lament largely in a cheery di-di-dum rhythm and with this one stroke manages to turn tragedy into something approaching an after-hours raucous drinking song:

We are low, we are low, we are very very low,

As low as low can be;

The rich are high for we make them so

And a miserable lot are we, are we,

A miserable lot are we.

Sadly, the rhythm doesn’t support the claim! On the other hand, rhythm can be used to support meaning as Robert Louis Stevenson demonstrates in the ’classic’ From a Railway Carriage:

Faster than fairies, faster than witches.

Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches:

And charging along like troops in a battle.

All through the meadows the horses and cattle;

All of the sights of the hill and the plain

Fly as thick as driving rain;

And ever again, in the wink of an eye.

Painted stations whistle by.

It is not just the choice of words with their associations, the figurative language, or the rhymes that give this poem its appeal. They have a significant part to play but they are supported by the control of rhythm, which makes the poem actually sound like a rushing train. The lines brilliantly meet Alexander Pope’s demanding requirement for poetic lines:

’Tis enough no harshness gives offence

The Sound must seem an echo to the sense.

PRACTICAL TASK

Find any poetry collection directed at primary school children, skim through it and select two poems that appeal to you. Look particularly at the rhythm of the poems and decide whether it contributes anything at all to the poem or whether it is simply there as an organisational tool to give the poem shape. If it does make a greater contribution than this, what is it? If you do not know where to start on this task, use one of Kit Wright’s collections. If you can’t feel the variety of rhythms in the range of poems there, ’Man, you ain’t got it!’

Poetry forms

Poetry, as we have seen, can take many forms. Some of them are not particularly demanding in terms of rhythm and rhyme; others are. Children need to become familiar with a number of these forms over their primary years. Many are familiar and need no clarification but others are less so and these are considered here.

You are referred to examples of the forms to check up on for yourself rather than having them quoted in full, which means that you have to pick up some poetry books and skim through them to find appropriate pages. Who knows what other treasures and pleasures you might stumble across in that process!

Riddles can be of any length, take many forms, have a variety of rhythms and rhymes — or none at all — and exist in every culture. They are ancient and they are modern. Some are easy to solve, some are difficult and some are downright impossible. They occur, sometimes in prose and sometimes in poetry, in numerous folk tales and legends.

Children will know many riddles of their own because wordplay is an important stage in the development of their language and sense of humour. More literary supplements for this store of knowledge can be found for Year 2 in The Orchard Book of Funny Poems (Cope, 1993), for Year 3 in Who’s Been Sleeping in My Porridge? (McNaughton, 1994) and The Kingfisher Book of Children’s Poetry (Rosen, 1985) and for Year 6 in A World of Poetry (Rosen, 1991), Ο Frabjous Day (Brownjohn, 1994), Catching a Spider (Mole, 1990) and Wordspells (Nicholls, 1993).

Shape poems are poems in which the appearance of the poem on the page reflects the theme of the poem. Sometimes the shape can be drawn first and the poem arranged inside it, but more ambitious versions do away with the drawing and simply let the words themselves make the required shape.

Examples by John Agard are in We Animals Would Like a Word With You (1996), and by Wes Magee in Madtail, Miniwhale and Other Shape Poems (1991). Further examples by other writers can be found in The Kingfisher Book of Comic Verse (McGough, 1991) and in Word Whirls and Other Shape Poems (Foster, 1992).

Performance poems are poems that are written especially for or benefit from being acted out or otherwise performed — perhaps by a dramatic reading with sound effects. Performance of one kind or another, as simple or as complex as you want, is a splendid way of focusing children on aspects of tone, language, rhythm and rhyme in poetry. There is no special shape or structure to a performance poem. The only requirement is that it should sound well — and a strong rhythm and rhyme does help in that respect.

Good examples can be found in Gio’s Pizzas (Boon, 1998), Mango Spice (Connolly, 1981), Heard it In the Playground (Ahlberg, 1989), Classic Poems to Read Aloud (Berry, 1997) and Talking Turkeys (Zephaniah, 1995).

Cautionary tales are narrative poems that give examples of boys and girls behaving badly. The individuals concerned generally come to a very nasty end and the moral of the story is always perfectly clear even if it is not always stated. It is invariably the case that if boys and girls do not conform to social and parental rules then the consequences are likely to be extreme.

The acknowledged master of the form is Hilaire Belloc and all of his cautionary tales are collected in Cautionary Verses (Belloc, 1940).

Nonsense verse can take a number of forms. The two most common ones are:

✵ those in which a realistic story is told but many of the words used to tell it are made up;

✵ those in which normal words are used but the events of the poem are surreal and far detached from normal experience.

These two can be, and often are, combined.

That definition is a grotesquely pompous attempt to define the undefinable. Nonsense verse at its best is a joyous romp through sound, rhythm, surrealism and all the bizarre possibilities that life and language can offer — generally, with a bit added on for effect! At its worst it is just silly. The best known writers of nonsense verse are Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear and Spike Milligan but playground rhymes are a rich source too. Numerous examples of these can be found in The Sausage is a Cunning Bird (Curry and Curry, 1983) and The Beaver Book of School Verse (Curry, 1981) while more ’literary’ models are in The Kingfisher Book of Children’s Poetry (Rosen, 1985) and Michael Rosen’s Book of Nonsense (Rosen, 1997).

Calligrams are poems in which the look of the poem — the size and shape of the letters, the fonts used, their boldness and effects — support the poem’s meaning. Examples by John Hegley (I Need Contact Lenses) and Doug Macleod (O’s) are in The Kingfisher Book of Comic Verse (McGough, 1991) and many other examples can be found in Picture a Poem (Douthwaite, 1994) and in Word Whirls and Other Shape Poems (Foster, 1992).

Haiku is a Japanese verse form that is based on a syllable count and not on patterns of stress. A haiku contains 17 syllables in all and they are distributed over three lines. The distribution is normally five syllables in the first line, seven in the second and five in the third. The first two lines often set a scene and the third comments on it. The build-up of syllables in the second line almost inevitably gives the final line a dying fall. Examples by Kit Wright (Irish Haiku and Acorn Haiku) can be found in Cat Among the Pigeons (Wright, 1987) and by Sandy Brownjohn (A Norfolk Haiku Bestiary) in Both Sides of the Catflap (Brownjohn, 1996).

Cinquain is a form that originated in America and is said to have been invented by the splendidly named Adelaide Crapsey. Again, it is syllabic. It has 22 syllables in five lines, which are usually divided 2, 4, 6, 8, 2. This distribution not only means that the last line generally comes with a bump but also that the poem has a pleasingly symmetrical appearance on the page. The content of the lines normally is the subject of the poem in the first line, a description of the subject in the second, an action involving the subject in the third, a feeling aroused by the action in the fourth and a final comment in the fifth. Original Crapsey cinquains, The Warning and November Night, can be found in Ο Frabjous Day (Brownjohn, 1994). There are also examples by children in Does It Have to Rhyme? (Brownjohn, 1980).

Couplets are simply two consecutive lines of poetry that are linked by rhythm and rhyme. Couplets are almost always bits of a poem rather than poems in their own right. All of the poems in Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes (1982) are written in couplets.

Thin poems are exactly what they ought to be. They are poems in which the lines are very short syllabically (there is no rule but the fewer the better!) so that on the page they look skinny and straggly. There is no rule about rhyming either, though if the lines do have a regular rhyme the poem sounds longer and thinner. There are examples by David Orme (Horribly Thin Poems) in The Second Poetry Kit (Andrew and Orme, 1990) and Brian Patten (Growing Pains) in Thawing Frozen Frogs (Patten, 1990) and in Long Tales, Short Tales and Tall Tales (West, 1995).

Conversation poems simply record the conversation between two or more voices. They are often, but not always, funny and they make good reading aloud or performance material. The structure is often very loose with no strong rhythms or rhymes. The effect and meaning of such poems is to emphasise the quirkiness of human behaviour and relationships and they often suggest a moral, social or political authorial point of view. There are examples by Eric Finney (Whoppers), Jerome Fletcher (Dialogue of the Deaf) and Judith Nicholls (Camping Out) in the Oxford Primary English Unit, Whoppers!, by Kit Wright (Dialogue Between My Cat Bridget and Me) in Cat Among the Pigeons (Wright, 1987) and by Lesley Miranda (Don’t Hit Your Sister) in Poetry Jump Up (Nichols, 1988).

Free verse is the loosest of all poetic forms because it is simply spilled onto the page with no regard for rhythm or rhyme. Much adolescent verse falls into this category, but better examples are in Let’s Celebrate (Foster, 1989) and This Poem Doesn’t Rhyme (Benson, 1990).

Concrete poems are related to calligrams and shape poems in that all of them link language and visual appearance. The meaning of such poems is given additional emphasis by the way it looks on the page. Concrete poems are more complex than the other two, though, because they often look like sculptures in which individual words or groups of words are used as material from which to construct the sculpture. Examples of concrete poems by Robert Froman (Quiet Secret), Pamela Gillilan (Invasion) and Judith Nicholls (Ars Mathematica) are in A Fifth Poetry Book (Foster, 1983) whilst Picture a Poem (Douthwaite, 1994) and Madtail, Miniwhale and Other Shape Poems (Magee, 1991) are collections dedicated to poems that use layout as a key element in their meaning.

Ballads are poems that tell a dramatic story — often bloody, or ghostly. Traditional ballads, which were often sung and were sometimes used as means of circulating news, tend to follow, however vaguely, a regular structure of metre and rhyme that is known as ballad form. This form is a four-line verse (or quatrain), rhyming abcb, with lines one and three having eight syllables and lines two and four six. Many modern narrative poems are also written in ballad form. Examples of ballads, both traditional and modern, are in The Oxford Book of Story Poems and The Oxford Treasury of Classic Poems (Harrison and Stuart-Clark, 1990, 1996).

Narrative poetry is a poetic genre that has no requirement of form or structure. It simply tells a story. Some narrative poems, particularly traditional ones, do follow ballad structure, but there are as many different poetic ways of telling a story as there are prose ways. There are examples everywhere but some of the best known ’classic’ ones can be found in The Oxford Book of Story Poems (Harrison and Stuart-Clark, 1990) and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Other Classic Stories in Verse (Waterfield, 1996). A particularly popular narrative poem with Year 5 and Year 6 children is Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman.

Sonnet is one of the most demanding of all verse forms in English because it is of specific length, requires tight rhythmical control and has a rigorous rhyme scheme. It is often regarded as the most English of forms, not only because it was Shakespeare’s favourite form but also because virtually every significant poet writing in English has had a go at writing a sonnet — not always very successfully. In fact, the form originated in Italy and was brought to England in the fifteenth century. The sonnet is a 14-line form with ten regularly stressed syllables to the line. The regular stress normally goes ’di-dum’. Early sonnets, modelled on the Italian form, rhymed abbabccbcdecde. This caused the sonnet to fall into two sections — the first of eight lines (the octet) and the second of six lines (the sestet) though the carry over of rhymes still emphasised the unity of the two sections. Poets attempting this strict form in English found it difficult to stick to because the limited number of rhymes available in English (as opposed to Italian where there are plenty) made the whole thing sound very artificial. Shakespeare changed the form slightly to give it a rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg. This represented three quatrains and a concluding couplet. It also meant that the octet/sestet divide, though still available if required, was not a natural one and poets could think in slightly looser structural terms. The Shakespearean form is the one that most poets now use when they write sonnets.

Sonnets abound in English, though not many of them are written for children. The best bet for Year 5 children is to read one or two of the more famous ones for adults — Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day? or Wordsworth’s Composed Upon Westminster Bridge and supplement these with sonnets by children to be found in Does It Have to Rhyme? (Brownjohn, 1980).

Rap is probably more familiar to chidlren than adults because the form is such a common one in pop music. What now passes for rap, however, has very little in common with its origins. Rap emerged around 1976 and was the term given to a musical style associated with urban American black and hispanic groups. Its form was loose — but it was highly rhythmical, used rhyme when it suited and not when it didn’t and was oral. Often rap was improvised, went very fast and used a great deal of slang and obscenity. Its main themes were highly political, involving black experience of urban deprivation, drugs, violence and sex. Rap has, over the years, become greatly watered down and has largely lost its political impetus. It now means little more than a rhythmical chant that is easy to dance to. Lyrics of original rap records can be found in Rap: The Lyrics (Stanley, 1992), but these, for obvious reasons, should be used highly selectively. More specifically Year 5 targeted examples of the rap genre are in Royal Raps (Mitton, 1997) and in Rap with Rosen (Rosen, 1995).

Choral poetry is related to performance poetry in that it is poetry that is suitable for reading aloud in groups. However, where performance poetry contains potential for actions to gain effects, choral poetry relies entirely on the voice. The poems may be scored for choral speaking, using solo voices, groups of voices in various combinations or contrapuntal effects, but it is the voice that does the work. Poems are not generally written simply for choral purposes but many do lend themselves to such treatment.

The sources recommended for performance poems will provide many examples of poems that are suitable for being spoken chorally.

Kennings are two-word phrases used in Anglo-Saxon and Ancient-Scandinavian poems. They name something without actually using the common noun. A Viking spear and a modern dentist might both have the kenning ’pain giver’. My own literary favourite is the kenning used to describe Flashman by the Native American Indians in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman and the Redskins. Flashman, they think, rides so fast that his speed breaks the wind. Consequently, they always refer to him as ’wind breaker’. More proper examples can be found by Sandy Brownjohn (Kennings Cat) in Both Sides of the Catflap (Brownjohn, 1996), by John Agard (Don’t Call Alligator Long-Mouth Till You Cross River) in Poetry Jump Up (Nichols, 1988) and by a number of children in The Ability to Name Cats (Brownjohn, 1989).

Limerick is a verse form reputedly from Ireland, first developed rather dully by Edward Lear but then exploited gleefully, and often very rudely, by any number of authors — only some of whom were prepared to put their names to their efforts! In technical terms, the limerick is a five-line regularly rhythmical form. The basic rhythm is di-dum-di though slight variations on this are common. The first, second and fifth lines each contain three of these di-dum-di’s while the third and fourth have two. The rhyme scheme is aabba. The trick is in the fifth line. Edward Lear simply used it as a minor variation on the first line. This will not do nowadays! A modern limerick really does have to clinch the poem in a wittier way with a pun or a joke of some kind.

Year 6 children will almost certainly know a number of limericks. You ask them to repeat them at your peril! It is much safer to start from the examples by Edward Lear in The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse (Blake, 1996), and then work through the examples in Poems of A. Nonny. Mouse (Prelutsky, 1992) and A World of Poetry (Rosen, 1991).

Tanka is a Japanese syllabic poem related to the haiku. The form is 31 syllables altogether, divided into five lines of 5, 7, 5, 7 and 7 syllables each. Those who have been reading carefully will immediately see that the tanka is really a haiku with an additional two lines tacked on the end. This is, in fact, exactly how the form originated. In Shogun Japan, when a courtier wrote a haiku, for whatever reason, and sent it to another, Japanese courtesy required the recipient to return it with two lines added. There are several examples of tanka written by children in Does It Have to Rhyme? (Brownjohn, 1980).

PEDAGOGICAL LINK

Make sure that whenever you read a poem to or with children, that poem is available for the children to read for themselves at another time. Alternatively, you can put some readings of poems (you don’t just have to use your own voice for these — rope in friends) onto a tape for the children to listen to.

Evaluating and making judgements about poems

Once again, we approach difficult ground because responses to poems, just as to stories, depend on taste. A reader may have a great deal of knowledge about poetic forms and structures and about poetic devices and figurative language that will help to analyse a poem, but in the end an evaluation or a conclusion on its worth is personal. There are criteria that might help in an evaluation, and these are very similar to those for evaluating stories; but readers’ responses to the same poem are likely to be different simply because their life experiences, sensitivity to language and personal taste are different, even if the same criteria are being considered. As with stories, all a teacher can do is apply the criteria honestly and then trust their judgement.

Appropriateness

The questions that should be asked about appropriateness are probably:

✵ Is the theme appropriate to the children in the class?

✵ Is the language used in the poem on the whole within their experience or understanding?

✵ If the poem is to be part of the programme of work for literacy, does it fit reasonably well with current curriculum requirements?

Theme

Considering appropriateness of theme is as tricky for poems as it is for stories, and for much the same reasons. A teacher must try to assess whether the theme of a poem is one that is within the probable grasp of the children in the class, but that judgement is a difficult one to make. Poems can communicate before they are understood and there is no reason to suppose that a class of Year 4 children doing their work on poems based on common themes and using animal poems as a resource would not respond as well to extracts from W. B. Yeats’ Minalouche or Christopher Smart’s My Cat Jeoffrey, which are both clearly written with an assumed adult audience, as they would to Eleanor Farjeon’s Cats Sleep Anywhere or Kit Wright’s Applause, which are more clearly directed at children. They might need a little more help with aspects of the language but certainly any child who has a cat as a pet would recognise the aspects of cat behaviour that are at the heart of all four poems. There can be no hard-and-fast rules here. It is simply a matter of judgement.

Language

Poets are notoriously cavalier in their use of language — as they should be because it is in poetry that language is generally used most innovatively, impressively and entertainingly — and part of the joy of reading a good poem is to feel, if not fully understand, the words working on us. When Walter de la Mare writes in The Listeners,

The silence surged softly backwards

we might be hard pressed to explain exactly what the line means. Some children might well not know the meaning of ’surged’ or pick up on the personification and alliteration in the line or grasp the implications of the metaphor being used. It is probable that the line produces different images even for different adult readers. Is the comparison with waves, for example, or a crowd of people, or maybe animals? However, the inability to specify detail and technicality does not mean that that wonderful line cannot produce a response; it can and it does. It is simply not necessary for children (or adults) to understand the meaning, both literal and figurative, of every word. It is often through poetry that children’s feeling for imaginative use of language can be extended.

Tone

Poems, as we have seen, can be written in many forms and for many purposes. However they are written, though, and for whatever purposes, they must address the reader as an intelligent human being and they must tell the truth. They must not patronise by speaking down and they must not embarrass by pretending to convey feelings or ideas that are obviously false. A good poem does not posture — it reflects a writer’s experiences, thoughts and feelings honestly. It is easy enough to recognise falseness — it can be seen in self-consciously ’poetic’ language, in forced rhymes and rhythms and in cliché-ridden thought and feeling.

Michael Rosen is an immensely popular writer for children who seems to have a hotline into his own childhood. He writes regularly about his long-suffering mother, his rude and irascible father, his conspiratorial brother and his numerous school friends. He draws on personal private experiences, on family experiences and on school experiences. His output is massive and he could well be excused the occasional lapse, but at no time does he ever do anything other than write honestly and directly to his child audience, recalling and recording his experiences in a direct, uncluttered and generally very funny way. This is what makes him such a popular writer. Children recognise themselves in much of what he writes — any experience, no matter how apparently trivial, can be shared, can be written about and can be made important. Some people claim that Rosen’s work is better spoken than read (especially when he speaks it himself) because of the directness and unfigurative nature of the language, but he remains an excellent example of a writer who never patronises or embarrasses his audience by underestimating it.

Language

Poems, as we have seen, represent the most compressed form of language use because, in a good poem, every aspect of a word or group of words can contribute to the poem’s total meaning. In evaluating a poem a teacher has to decide whether the cold dictionary definitions of the words are supported by their sounds, their associations, their rhymes and their rhythms. In the best poems there is vigour and imagination in the language use. It is impossible to help in the definition of those abstract nouns — what do we mean by ’vigour’ and ’imagination’ in the use of language? You simply have to feel it. We are driven back to Duke Ellington. ’If you have to ask, you ain’t got it!’ If you didn’t have it before, your reading of this chapter should at least have set you on the way to getting it.

In We Animals Would Like a Word With You (1996) I feel John Agard demonstrating this vigour and imagination over and over again and he allies it to a sly and very witty view of the world of human beings. I particularly like the two poems in which Mr Hippo writes a love letter to his wife and Mrs Hippo responds. Not only are they a joyous celebration of the sounds, associations, rhythms and textures of language in poetry, they are also remarkably tender for such galumphy, tubby stuff. Here is Mr Hippo’s letter poem:

Oh my beautiful fat wife

Larger to me than life

Smile broader than the river Nile

My winsome waddlesome

You do me proud in the shallow of morning

You do me proud in the deep of night

Oh, my bodysome mud-basking companion.

PRACTICAL TASK

Read John Agard’s poem aloud. If you can find a copy of We Animals Would Like a Word With You (Agard, 1996), read Mrs Hippo’s response aloud too. Listen carefully to the sounds of the words. The poems are beautifully plump, muddy and wobbly. Decide for yourself precisely how (and why) John Agard has achieved this effect.

Now use the structure of either of the poems to write an imitation. The Hippo poems are about short and fat animals, so try one about a long thin one — maybe a giraffe. Choose your language with care to get long thin effects.

Imagery

The best poets try to convey experiences, thoughts and emotions as honestly and as clearly as they can. This is not easy — particularly if they are very personal experiences, thoughts and emotions. Consequently, in order to make the unfamiliar more accessible to readers, poets often work through comparisons — through imagery — usually similes and metaphors. Vernacular English is rich in imagery. We often use similes and metaphors in everyday speech without even thinking that that is what we are doing — as cool as a cucumber, as flat as a pancake, as thick as two short planks, blankets of fog, riots of colour and light pouring into the room. These are such familiar comparisons that they have long since lost any effect they may once have had and have become clichés. In order for a comparison to be effective, it needs to be original, innovative, and perhaps even startling or outrageous. When evaluating a poem, one consideration must be where the imagery stands on the scale that stretches from ’weary, stale, flat and unprofitable’ to fresh, energising and helping us to look at the world through new eyes.

In a little and unexpectedly very serious poem called New Members Welcome, Spike Milligan writes:

Pull the blinds on your emotions

Switch off your face.

Put your love into neutral.

This way to the human race.

The poem is simply three startling metaphors, with a final, rather gloomy line that has just a hint of metaphor about it itself. In the poem, human emotions are seen as a curtained house, the human face is seen as an electrically-lit room, human love is seen as a motor car, and the human race is seen as a signposted destination which, because of the build-up of images in the first three lines, is dark, unenergised and lacklustre. The images, though depressing, are fresh and surprising and without them it would not have been possible to convey the same thought and feeling with such economy.

Rhythm

Poems depend on their rhythm. Not only does rhythm help to give poems form and shape, it can also make a contribution to the meaning. Any evaluation of a poem needs to take some account of how well a poet makes their rhythms work.

When Vachel Lindsay tells us in The Daniel Jazz, for example, that:

Daniel was the chief hired man of the land

He stirred up the jazz in the palace band

He whitewashed the cellar. He shovelled in the coal.

And Daniel kept a-praying: - ’Lord save my soul.’

Daniel kept a-praying: - ’Lord save my soul.’

Daniel kept a-praying: - ’Lord save my soul.’

not only is he drawing on the themes, language, rhymes and repetitions of black American spiritual music, he is drawing on its rhythm too and making the poem swing in a way appropriate to the subject matter. Duke Ellington would certainly approve of that!

He would probably have approved too when Jack Ousbey’s grandma answers the question of whether she can rap or not enthusiastically in the rhythmical affirmative:

I’m the best rapping Gran this world’s ever seen

I’m a —

tip-top, slip-slap,

nip-nap, yip-yap,

hip-hop, trip-trap,

touch yer cap

 take a nap,

 happy, happy, happy, happy,

 rap — rap — queen.

PRACTICAL TASK

Any poetry work with children depends on a teacher’s knowledge of texts. This does not just mean knowing about the forms, language and technical aspects of poems, it means knowing who are the good writers most likely to stimulate your class. That, in turn, means reading a lot of poems for children. This task is a long-term one. It is to read at least one poetry book for children every month for the rest of your training and teaching career. This is a minimum requirement. It would be far better to read more poems more often, but other matters sometimes press!

Breaking the rules

Poems are ideal vehicles for teaching the kinds of technicalities for word/sentence level matters which are required by the Primary Framework for Literacy and which have been considered in this chapter. There is a danger, though, if teachers do too much of that sort of thing with poems or, even worse, only that then their power to free the imagination and to give delight will be lost. So by all means with your class discuss the rhymes betimes and think up new lines, clap out rhythms, articulate the antics of alliteration and bang on about onomatopoeia. Seek out the similes like one panning for gold and put as many metaphorical eggs as you think appropriate into the basket of poetry. But remember that good poems are a lot more than just a heap of tricks with words and that poets are concerned with stretching language and do not always stick to the conventional rules. In According to My Mood, Benjamin Zephaniah (1995) delights in the freedom from linguistic and grammatical constraints that a poet has when he has passed the test for his poetic licence. Remember it when you are thinking about using a poem to teach some matters of grammar or technical English.

image

A SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

image Poetry for children exists in many forms — some of them are more crafted than others.

image Poetry contributes to children’s emotional, cultural and spiritual development as well as to their linguistic and literacy development.

image There is no agreement about what actually constitutes poetry. It has meant different things at different times — and still does.

image In poems, words are made to work harder than they do in prose and poets use a number of different linguistic and structural devices to squeeze as much labour from them as they can.

image Knowledge of these devices can help in the analysis of poetry but should not be overused.

image Poems can be written in many different forms and children should experience a wide range.

image Evaluating poems is difficult because much depends on personal taste. However, there are some approaches that can help. These include such aspects as appropriateness, tone, language, imagery, rhythm and the extent of teacher interest.

image Poets do not always stick to conventional linguistic, grammatical and structural rules.

M-LEVEL EXTENSION

As you undertake the poetry reading challenge detailed in the final practical task of this chapter, start to develop your own anthology of poetry that you want to use with children over your career. Divide it into the various forms described in the chapter, and record for each poem particular devices used and examples of appropriate use of rhythm, tone, language and imagery. Note which age groups you feel that each poem is suitable for and which topics/themes they could support.

FURTHER READING

Balaam, J. and Merrick, B. (1987) Exploring Poetry 5—8. Exeter: NATE. This book is very practical in its concern with imaginative ways of getting Key Stage 1 children to respond to poems. In putting forward stimulating classroom ideas it also clarifies the importance of poetry in a range of forms to young children and conveys notions of the particular nature of those forms.

Brownjohn, S. (1990) To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme? London: Hodder & Stoughton. The book is largely about the imaginative responses to poetry required by the NC but the more technical aspects of the PFL are certainly not ignored. Indeed the book will both help you to understand better some of these matters and also help to equip you to teach them to children.

Carter, D. (1998) Teaching Poetry in the Primary School. London: David Fulton. This inspirational book explores ways of linking poetry with other expressive media (like art, music, dance and drama) and, though it does give guidance on the technicalities, it helps the reader to understand the special qualities of poetry which lie beyond them.

DfE (2013) Teachers’ Standards. London: DfE. (www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/208682/Teachers__Standards_2013.pdf)

Merrick, B. (1991) Exploring Poetry 8—13. Exeter: NATE. This is a companion book to Exploring Poetry 5—8, aimed at Key Stage 2, and it has similar qualities. The choice of high quality poems is impressive and the classroom ideas are both practical and appropriate. Reading this book will help you to better understand the things that make poetry poetry and equip you to help children reach a similar understanding.

Opie, P. and Opie, I. (2001) (new edn) The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. New York: NYRB Classics.