I have been meaning to do this since Margaret asked about it last week.

We have continued to have our poetry colloquies (formal conversations) and I think they are a success. Poetry is a great subject for a colloquy because the more you read and discuss a poem the more it comes alive. Poetry is also a subject where too much rationalism dampens the joy. From what I understand of colloquies, they should not be teacher driven. The teacher should let the participants be the discoverers and poetry is uniquely suited to this sort of discovery. I challenge you to pick any poem and read it 5 times. You will most definitely understand more details on the 5th reading than you did on the first.

I have set up our colloquies by reading the poem and telling the children (ages 5-16) a little about the meter. Or I let them tell me what they notice about the patterns and meter. Right now we are working our way through The Classic Hundred Poems.

Chronologically we have just finished Shakespeare and are moving on to Donne.

We had lively conversations around Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to his Love and Raleigh’s answer The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.

Sir Patrick Spens is also a great poem for discussion.

Often I will throw out an obscure line and ask what they think it means. So far all the children have participated and Alex (5) pays close attention so that he can add something to the conversation. Even his comments are usually lucid.

I will try and work through an example of what we talk about with Shakespeare’s That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold.

That Time Of Year Thou Mayst In Me Behold
William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

This is a wonderful poem for bridging the understanding from rational to poetic knowledge. Poetry, in order to truly reach our hearts, must start with the concrete and move to the intuitive. In these 14 lines Shakespeare takes us from what we know: the dying day, the dying year, autumn, leaves etc and makes the intuitive leap to the dying life thus wedding beauty to truth. The form of the poem is Shakespeare’s own pentameter which almost seems to be some sort of physical bio-rhythm, most certainly God-given. The rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. I just love that gg. My younger children have a harder time grasping all the abab stuff. It isn’t that difficult but the younger the brain the more abstract it seems. I don’t waste too much time trying to beat it in. They will get it someday.

This poem is relatively easy to catch the general meaning. The real joy is the beauty of the words. I asked the children about the line, “Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.”

We all enjoy letting the little guys give us their opinions first. Sometimes they are dead on and sometimes we all get a good laugh. I threw out lots of questions in order to get to the point that our intuition is born of our observation. I am a firm believer in trusting that intuition is usually based on something. Which brings us also to the point that we need to well grounded in scripture because there is a way that seems right to man but the end there of is the way of death. It is important to learn to trust and distrust intuition.

And that is what we got out of reading Shakespeare. We became more familiar with a sonnet and we began to understand the glories and limits of intuition.

My main goal is for the children to begin to OWN the poems and enjoy them. The first time you read any poem it almost comes across as gobbedly-gook. It is hard to love something you can’t understand. As you read and discuss a poem it slowly begins to make sense. As your brain begins to find meaning in the words the beauty mysteriously appears as if in a hologram. Often I am overwhelmed when a poem begins to take on meaning and beauty. It becomes emotional.

  Leave a Comment »