What should we teach about poetry?

It seems to me we don't currently teach students enough about metre. It’s rare, for example, to see the subject given more than surface attention in revision guides, resources shared via twitter, or English teaching blogs. It's also far from common to see it deeply addressed in lessons outside of A Level (and often, not there either). This is an observation rather than a criticism – there’s clearly much good stuff that is being taught about poetry – plenty of themes, onomatopoeia, alliteration, rhythm etc, and I’m not suggesting that metre is being totally ignored. I’m also fully open to the possibility that I may be completely wrong, and that in fact the teaching of metre is in rude health. I'm not convinced; this post proposes that deeper understanding of metre could and should be given a more central position as part of the core knowledge to which students are entitled in KS3 and 4.

 In my own teaching, I’m certain that, for the first few years at least, nuanced teaching of metre was entirely absent. It’s interesting to reflect on why; I don’t recall being directly taught much about metre at school or university, and I certainly don’t remember it being mentioned on my PGCE. I do, however,  remember getting positive feedback on an early lesson based on the premise that ‘In poetry, there are no rules’... I remember at the time vaguely thinking that I was affording the students an exciting opportunity to  liberate themselves from the manacles of imposed convention; I also remember the disappointment of reading and hearing the very poor quality of writing produced.

As with so many other early teaching assumptions (almost all of them actually), I completely changed my mind. To teach much poetry without specific attention to metre misses so much that is fundamental to the form. It’s like teaching art, but ignoring colour, or music without considering rhythm. This applies equally whether teaching students to write their own poems, or analyse the work of others – both are significantly enhanced when students have a secure understanding of technical elements.

My turning point (volta if you like) came through reading Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled. It’s a wonderful book, explaining a teacher needs to know. It also provides writing tasks which, whilst designed for the individual reader, also work in the classroom. It is brilliant - this blog has a decent stab at summarising it if you are interested.

In one of the most memorable passages, Fry compares writing poetry to creating music, making the point that almost anyone can play the piano and make some sort of vaguely musical noise. However, if we let a group of children loose on a piano with the instruction to ‘just create’, the result would be horrible. To play to any level of skill – and certainly to get to a point where the player can become meaningfully creative – requires learning: of the scales, genre conventions, exercises, mnemonics, chord forms and terminology which collectively make up the base from which both creativity and analysis can emanate. My lesson on ‘poetry has no rules’ was the equivalent of asking a room full of twelve year old beginner pianists to ‘just have a go’, with predictably discordant results.

Recently, I’ve been focused on helping students beginning the GCSE course, which has no requirement for students to actually write poetry. The advantage of teaching metre has come through the improvement it can bring to the quality of their analysis, of Shakespeare and some of the poems. Here are two suggestions for what students might most profitably be taught:

1)   Teach students to know and be able to fluently recognise the basic binary metrical feet: iambs, trochees, spondees and pyrrhics. 

For the uninitiated, a binary foot is a unit of two syllables, with these stress patterns:

-          Weak - strong (iamb, eg ‘above’)

-          Strong- weak (trochee, eg ‘happy’

-          Strong – strong (spondee), eg ‘faithful’)

-          Weak- weak (pyrrhic, eg ‘to a green thought’ – the first two syllables being a pyrrhic)

The technical language here can be initially off-putting for some, but conceptually it’s not so hard, and with a bit of modelling and drilling, kids soon get the hang of it. In fact, a more technical approach can come as a relief from being asked for their ‘response’, or the requirement to explore word choice. In his introduction, Fry recalls ‘...the dread memory of classrooms swollen into resentful silence while the English teacher invites us to ‘respond’ to a poem’ – a scenario surely familiar to many. It evokes an awkwardness attached to learning about poetry - an expectation of a emotionally-aware, spontaneous response to art - which can be avoided by a more technical, tangible approach.

Some have suggested that to focus on technique somehow diminishes and reduces poetry to its bare constituent parts – that it is arid and dull, that student creativity and response should in fact be spontaneous, personal and unmediated by a stultifying focus on jargon. Fry has a comment on this also, claiming that ‘Only an embarrassed adolescent or deranged coward thinks jargon and reserved languages are pretentious and that detail and structure are boring’. It’s a bracing but ultimately persuasive point of view – as with so many other domains, a sound factual  knowledge of the form does seem a pre-requisite for enabling the informed, creative, insightful and original analysis that is our ultimate aim.

So – back to binary feet. Once these fundamentals are understood, students are in a position to begin to furnish their analysis with greater depth, skill and insight. Recently, for example, Year 9  were looking at this time-honoured classic from Lady Macbeth at the opening of Act 2 Scene 2:

That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold.

What hath quenched them hath given me fire.

Without any reference  to metre, it’s possible to make a few passably interesting points here. A student might suggest, for example, that use of the word ‘bold’ is interesting, as it shows how Lady Macbeth subverts gender expectations of the time. ‘Fire’ might be draw comment – the imagery supporting a sense of destructive, uncontrollable and all-consuming ambition. Other than that though, students may begin to struggle. Might we say something about ‘quenched’? The repetition of ‘hath’? Many will run out of analytical steam, leaving two options: move on and worry that they aren’t following the teacher’s advice to ‘find more to say’ and ‘write a lot about a little’, or else begin to make spurious comments along the lines  of ‘use of the word ‘drunk’ shows that she thinks that the men are weak’, or ‘the alliteration of ‘made me’ emphasises her point’. Many teachers will recognise the uncomfortable scenario of the well-intentioned student who, attempting to ‘analyse in depth’, grasps for something, anything, to say, thereby ashamedly offering up low-value comments which rob them of any genuine sense of accomplishment or quality.

This is where specific metrical analysis can be so helpful. One student, for example, suggested that the first line (arguably excepting the first foot) displays a regular iambic rhythm, thereby reinforcing the strength and confidence carried by the meaning. However, the metre of the second line subverts this – it begins with a trochee, has a spondee in the second foot, followed by an iamb, a pyrrhic and finally another trochee (if we assume that ‘fire’ is two syllables). It’s all over the place, metrically speaking, and the student was able to make a more sophisticated point along the lines of ‘Whilst on the exterior, Lady Macbeth’s words seem to  create a sense of strength and power, this is subverted by the erratic and unpredictable metre of the second line. This undercuts the power she displays and implies inner turmoil, subtly preparing us for her mental disintegration to come.’. Not perfect, but definitely interesting, and an example of how turning attention to metre in a technically-informed way can open up analytical opportunities and avenues for students to explore.

2)  Teach students to recognise trochaic substitutions, particularly in the first foot of a line

If seeking one metrical trick which crops up regularly, and which students tend to be able to understand and notice, this is the one to go for. It’s fairly common for the first foot of a line to be  inverted – using a trochee rather than an iamb – which often serves to bring greater focus to a particular word or idea. Examples include:

From Macbeth again:

Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? 

There’s lots to say here already about the imagery, but students can then go on to comment on the trochaic substitution in ‘Clean from’ intensifies Macbeth’s anguish. It encourages us to slow down, to give slightly greater attention to the idea of cleanliness, of redemption, and can then be linked to the notions of guilt which pervade the rest of the play.

From Ozymandias

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; 

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! 

Similarly, there’s a sense here of the regularity of the first line building in power and intensity, with the substituted ‘Look on’ again causing the reader to slow down and dwell. This, a student could argue, serves to enhance the hubristic and dominant tone as the King demands that our attention be turned to the splendour of his ‘Works’.

Once students are trained to scan lines in this way when responding to poems or analysing quotations, the quality of comments can be startling. It encourages them to think deeply about the lines, avoiding generic comments about enjambement or language techniques, and consider this essential question: how is the metre supporting, contradicting or subverting meaning at this specific moment?

Of course there may well be good reasons not to give metre more attention – either because schools typically already do (in which case ignore all of the above and apologies for wasting your time), or because students might be better served if we directed our teaching elsewhere. It would be foolish (particularly given the content of the anthologies for GCSE) not to also teach students about free verse, and other forms of poetry in which metre plays a much less significant role. They need to know when it’s helpful to consider metre, and where it just isn’t. There’s also the fact that metre is not directly addressed in GCSE mark schemes: displaying the characteristic ambiguity and vagueness for which the genre is famed, the word ‘metre’ isn’t used at all in this markscheme, but presumably is subsumed in the notion of ‘writer’s methods’.  I’d therefore be more nervous if teaching year 11 about students providing detailed analysis of form whilst neglecting meaning, language etc, and the impact that this might have on their grade. This might particularly worry if they got a marker who didn't know their anaepests from their elbows.

To wrap all this up though, the main reason why I think metre deserves more attention is that it’s so fundamentally interesting, partly because it efficiently pushes student thinking about poetry to a higher level. There’s something about considering the interplay between meaning and form, between ideas and structure, that gets to the heart of what poetry is all about. Taking into account the amount of time it takes to teach versus the increase in quality of thinking, writing and analysis that can result, it’s well worth the effort.