As April comes to a close, so does the National Month of Poetry.

And I wish it weren’t so! Poetry is not extracurricular. Poetry is the key that unlocks the mystery of the English language.

Deconstructing poems to shreds of rudimentary grammar and mechanics, rhythm and rhyme scheme, always distracts the reader from the ability of poetry to resonate a wonderful thought provoking idea!

Reading poetry aloud helps us listen for the lovely sounds of language. Reading poetry on the page helps us see the way words work and weave and wander.  All great sentences are poetic. Read about one of my favorite poems HERE. Writing poetry empowers us to harness our ideas, to pick up our pencil and craft splendid, strong, sensible, sentient sentences.

April is coming to a close, and so is our celebration. Now is time to create a tradition of springing from poetry to prose. We are here to help! Pick up one of our units today and keep the poetry stirring in the writing of your students.

 

~Kimberly

Chances are you’ve heard of John Keats. He was a Romantic poet who wrote on the precipice between life and death. Because Keats was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the beginning of his poetic career, a career that ended with his early death at age 25, he wrote with the awareness that every day took him one step closer to an early grave. 

Keats’ poems are some of the most masterful poems I’ve ever read—but also some of the most intimidating to get through. There’s so much going on at once! That’s why, when I get my hands on one of Keat’s poems, I get my cup of coffee and sit down ready to read the poem over and over. Each pass crystalizes the beauty and profundity of the poem a little bit more. It’s like peeling an onion; what first meets the eye is just one layer of many.

Let’s narrow our focus down to one ode in particular: “To Autumn.”

“To Autumn” is a poem of many readthroughs. On the first read, you might only catch the precision of Keats’ word choice, like “to swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells.” Each verb and noun falls from a reader’s lips with such intention. Upon a second read, you might notice the imagery surrounding autumn, the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” when “barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, / And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue.” A third read brings to light the contrasts—but also the similarities—between autumn and spring. And upon a fourth read, you could catch a glimpse of Keats’ commentary on mortality. The beauty of life always culminates in death; winter always succeeds autumn. This poem, however, ends by lingering in autumn. 

Read through “To Autumn” and see if you catch my interpretation—or if you have a completely different one!

 

To Autumn

By John Keats

 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

 

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,

   Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

   Steady thy laden head across a brook;

   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

 

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?

   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

   Among the river sallows, borne aloft

      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

      And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

 

~Claire S.

 

Listen to Elizabeth Bishop reading her poem, “The Fish,” as you read along.

Being raised by grandparents and great-grandparents, I was fortunate to spend summers at Lake Arrowhead. Before we had a boat of our own, we would rent little fishing motor boats. When I first read this poem, I thought to myself, “I’ve encountered this fish. I know its weary victory.” To this day, this poem remains a soulful favorite both for its tale and its technical wonder.

This 76 line poem consists of a 15 beautifully crafted sentences—count the end marks. There are no stanza breaks here. Only imagery that propels along on this journey with a fisherman on a lake. In the first four lines of the poem, the fisherman introduces us to the tremendous fish, first as a weight dangling from a hook in its mouth. Can you see the fish? Do you feel its weight? The word fast here means firmly fixed and is the perfect choice.

Next comes two short sentences—both about relinquishing the urge to fight—to throw us full force into the sight of the this fish who has seen this battle before. And the grunting weight is venerable—deserving respect.

Next comes a colossal simile. The skin of this fish is compared to ancient patterned wallpaper, once lively and lovely, hanging limply on a wall. Amazing. Does this help you see the dull scaly skin of this fish? And here the speaker gives us some texture to feel with the tips of our fingers: barnacles, sea lice, green seaweed.

And then we are peering at the gills, at once struggling for oxygen and presenting a sharp danger.

Next the fisherman (the speaker of the poem) considers the inside of this fish, comparing its flesh to tightly packed feathers, and its swim bladder to a peony. Are you seeing what he sees?

Now the fisherman looks into the large metalic eyes of the fish, and spews forth the most wonderful word in the poem—isinglass. This fish has old and scratched lenses that remind the fisherman of isinglass, a word he would most certainly be familiar with because it is a form of collagen obtained from the dried swim bladder of fish. If you’ve ever seen mica, dried fish bladders look similar. Maybe this is why isinglass can also refer to thin sheets of mica!

Here, with the eyes, we reach the turn of the poem, where the eyes of the fish courageously reach for the light, with a broodiness that causes us to root for it!  And the fisherman is with us, noticing the five hooks embedded in its mouth. This  battle weary fish is suddenly enobled in the eyes of the fisherman, and frankly in the eyes of this reader. Can you feel the tug at the line recalling the “strain and snap” that caused the crip in one of the lines dangling from the hook?

“I stared and stared…” says the fisherman, and the battle is won with a rainbow promise.  

And the fish is set free.

 

The Fish, by Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish

and held him beside the boat

half out of water, with my hook

fast in a corner of his mouth.

He didn’t fight.

He hadn’t fought at all.

He hung a grunting weight,

battered and venerable

and homely. Here and there

his brown skin hung in strips

like ancient wallpaper,

and its pattern of darker brown

was like wallpaper:

shapes like full-blown roses

stained and lost through age.

He was speckled with barnacles,

fine rosettes of lime,

and infested

with tiny white sea-lice,

and underneath two or three

rags of green weed hung down.

While his gills were breathing in

the terrible oxygen

—the frightening gills,

fresh and crisp with blood,

that can cut so badly—

I thought of the coarse white flesh

packed in like feathers,

the big bones and the little bones,

the dramatic reds and blacks

of his shiny entrails,

and the pink swim-bladder

like a big peony.

I looked into his eyes

which were far larger than mine

but shallower, and yellowed,

the irises backed and packed

with tarnished tinfoil

seen through the lenses

of old scratched isinglass.

They shifted a little, but not

to return my stare.

—It was more like the tipping

of an object toward the light.

I admired his sullen face,

the mechanism of his jaw,

and then I saw

that from his lower lip

—if you could call it a lip—

grim, wet, and weaponlike,

hung five old pieces of fish-line,

or four and a wire leader

with the swivel still attached,

with all their five big hooks

grown firmly in his mouth.

A green line, frayed at the end

where he broke it, two heavier lines,

and a fine black thread

still crimped from the strain and snap

when it broke and he got away.

Like medals with their ribbons

frayed and wavering,

a five-haired beard of wisdom

trailing from his aching jaw.

I stared and stared

and victory filled up

the little rented boat,

from the pool of bilge

where oil had spread a rainbow

around the rusted engine

to the bailer rusted orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oarlocks on their strings,

the gunnels—until everything

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

And I let the fish go.

 

~Kimberly