Subject Areas |
Literature and Language Arts
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British |
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Poetry |
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Time Required |
| Three to four class periods |
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Skills |
| reading literary texts
critical analysis
understanding
speaking poetry
performance
writing
historical interpretation
drawing inferences and comparisons |
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Additional Data |
| Date Created: 05/23/02 |
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Date Posted |
| 3/21/2002 |
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Listening to Poetry: Sounds of the Sonnet
Introduction
"Pleasure"
is probably not the first word that springs to the mind of a high school student
required to study rhyme schemes, iambic pentameter, enjambment, quatrains,
and epigrammatic couplets. While teaching some of the formal terms
used to describe sonnets will be one of the aims of this lesson, our starting
point and central focus throughout will be learning to appreciate the sounds
of poetry. For it is in sound--and in the subtle interplay of sound and form and
meaning--that much of the pleasure of poetry resides. By focusing on the sounds
of poetry, the exercises below seek to demonstrate that there is always an underlying
sense of form or structure at work in language, whether we happen to know the
names for the formal elements of poetry or not.
At the heart of the lesson
are its seven sound experiments, designed to help students understand how
form, meter, and rhythm all combine to shape our experience of poetry, and the
meanings we derive from it. After some preliminary sound experiments with Lewis
Carroll's nonsense poem, "Jabberwocky,"
we turn to Shakespeare's Sonnet
29, a model of how the sonnet form, with its dense knitting together of sound
and meaning, can suggest an astonishing variety of emotional effects.
In
the capstone activity, sound experiment 7, students choose a sonnet from
the Sonnet Bank, a collection of links
to online sonnets, organized into historical periods from Elizabethan England
to Twentieth Century America, and drawn from a diverse group of well- and lesser-known
writers. The resources of the Sonnet Bank
hint at the remarkable durability and adaptability of the sonnet form, and hint
as well at the extensive online resources for studying poetry.
Learning Objectives
In this lesson, students will have opportunities to
- Experience and enjoy the sounds of poetry
- Perform "sound experiments" with sonnets
- Closely read and analyze a sonnet by Shakespeare
- Learn
terms describing the formal elements of sonnets
- Write
a brief analysis of how sound affects meaning in a sonnet chosen from the Sonnet
Bank
- Produce recordings of a chosen
sonnet and share with other students
Guiding Question: How does sound influence
meaning in poetry?
Lesson Plan
1 Learning
from Nonsense
- Hand out copies
of "Jabberwocky,"
by Lewis Carroll, available from the EDSITEment-reviewed Academy
of American Poets. Give students time to read it silently on their own. Ask
the class to summarize the action of the poem, and make sure everyone has a sense
of the scene that is being described.
- SOUND
EXPERIMENT 1: Have students stand up and assume a bearing appropriate to the
poem—boastful, pompous, as if recounting an exaggerated account of their
own heroism, perhaps waving their imaginary vorpal swords in the air.
Now have
everyone sit down and hunch over the poem. Ask them to read as if they were recounting
a horror story around a campfire. Students should speak in a raspy or creepy voice
and fill their speech with dramatic pauses, gestures, grimaces, and wide-eyed
staring to punctuate their tales of fear and terror.
Discuss the contrasting
effects of these two styles of reading. Did anyone picture the scene being described?
How can we understand and even visualize the events, if most of the words used
to describe those events are nonsensical? How is meaning conveyed, if not by the
literal meanings of words? On the board, try to list the ways that a poem, particularly
a poem read aloud, conveys its meaning. Note that one of the reasons the poem
conveys meaning is that its nonsense words are not, in fact, complete nonsense,
that they convey information because they correspond to recognizable parts of
speech—nouns, verbs, adjectives. Use this to introduce the main point of
this exercise and lesson (see the guiding question, above). (If you want to capitalize
on this moment to review grammar, see Jabberwocky
Nonsense, a WebQuest designed to teach students about the parts of speech;
the link is provided by the Lewis
Carroll Home Page, a link on the EDSITEment-reviewed Academy
of American Poets. For more activities related to the writing of Lewis Carroll,
see the EDSITEment lesson plan, Childhood
Through the Looking Glass.)
Point out that poetic meter is another kind
of underlying form or structure in poetry that affects meaning. Explain that iambic
meter refers to accentual feet of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable.
To illustrate the sound and effect of iambic meter, read aloud stanzas five and
six of "Jabberwocky";
notice that in one of the lines—"Come to my arms, my beamish boy!"—the
iamb is reversed at the beginning. This reversed iamb is called a trochee. (Here's
a mnemonic: You can remember the difference between iamb and trochee by
saying iamb the way Popeye might say it: "i AMB what i AMB." To remember "trochee,"
say it quickly as if you were clearing your throat: "TRO chee, TRO chee.") Point
out to students that a good poet will always vary the meter, and that these variations
contribute to meaning. How, for example, does the metrical variation in the line,
"Come to my arms…," change the feeling of the line, and therefore contribute to
its meaning? How does it enhance the story being told? - SOUND
EXPERIMENT 2: The purpose of this experiment is to demonstrate how meter is
as much a matter of what we expect to hear as it an intrinsic property of the
words themselves. Meter in English poetry, as we will see, has subjective as well
objective aspects.
Let's start with the subjective aspects of meter. An example
of a sound pattern that exists only in our minds is the tick-tock of clocks.
Objectively, the sound might be a steady tick-tick-tick, but the pattern-loving
human mind will hear tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock. Another example: have you
ever been kept awake by a dripping faucet that seemed to take on rhythmic pattern--drip,
drop, drippety-drippety, drip, drop?
In a sense, the human mind is
wired for poetry. To illustrate the role of pattern in our minds, have the class
reread (everyone at the same time) stanzas four and five while exaggerating the
iambic meter (what Shakespearean actors call a "singsong" reading). The idea here
is to imprint the pattern as strongly as possible in the minds of listeners. Next,
have one person reread the same stanzas with normal emphasis; you might want to
do this, rather than asking a student to read, because it's important this time
to avoid any trace of iambic "singsong." This experiment can have some surprising
effects! Discuss what effect hearing the poem read the second time had on listeners.
Could they still "hear" the strong ta-DA of the iambic beat just below the surface? - In
the next experiment in sound, we will learn how that "surface" constitutes a second
level of pattern: rhythm. As we will see in our experiments with the sounds
of Shakespeare's Sonnet
29, a skilled poet is able to play meter and rhythm against each other in
meaningful ways.
2 The
Shakespearean Sonnet
- Hand
out a copy of Sonnet
29, "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes…," available from the EDSITEment-reviewed
Academy of American Poets. Give students
time to read the poem silently, and to ask questions about any unfamiliar words
or syntax. As a class, discuss the literal meaning of the poem: what is happening?
What is the speaker feeling? Where and why does that feeling change?
- SOUND
EXPERIMENT 3: resembles the first sound experiment
we did with "Jabberwocky."
First, have everyone stand up on their feet, assuming a defiant and boastful stance.
All students should now read Sonnet
29 with as much bombast and triumph as possible. Now have students sit down
and read the entire poem in a whisper. They should not read too quickly, and they
should read as if they were very sad (perhaps punctuating their speech with heavy
sighs).
Neither of these readings, of course, is entirely accurate. Discuss
their different effects. Which one best fits the poem? Where are the places that
do not fit one style of delivery or the other? Are there emotional shifts in the
poem? If so, where are they, and how could a person reading aloud modulate his
or her voice to express those shifts accurately, perhaps by combining aspects
of the two delivery styles we practiced earlier? As you discuss particular lines
or sections, ask your students to mark down the points at which these emotional
shifts occur.
Now step back a bit and look at the text on the paper. What
kinds of punctuation do you see? Where do the pauses fall? Which kind of pause
do students think should be longest: semicolon, dash, or comma? If you look at
the poem as a whole, could you divide pieces of it into stand alone sentences?
Where would you make the division? Finally, look at lines 11 and 12: "Like to
the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate."
Notice that the syntax of the sentence runs over the end of line 11: point out
to students that this is called enjambment. Again, have students note these
features on their copy of the poem.
All the sentence and phrase level features
we have been examining constitute the rhythm of the poem. Ordinary conversational
speech has its own distinct rhythms, as do formal speeches or sports broadcasts
or rap music. Rhythm, like meter, expresses meaning. Compare the notes you made
on the rhythm of the poem to the places where you found emotional shifts. What
kinds of correspondences do you find? SOUND
EXPERIMENT 4: Now redo the exercise described
in sound experiment 2, this time with Sonnet
29. Have the entire class read the sonnet with an exaggerated emphasis on
the iambic meter. (Before you read, this might be a good time to introduce the
term iambic pentameter: demonstrate the meaning of this term by writing
one line of the sonnet on the board, and dividing it into five metrical feet.)
Tell students to force the iambic ta DA, ta DA, even if it doesn't seem quite
right for the line they are reading.
For it turns out that it difficult
to read Sonnet 29
in this way, despite the fact that it's iambic pentameter. Did your students find
that there were places where it was hard to maintain the iambic meter? Was this
harder or easier than reading Carroll's poem in an iambic "singsong"? What might
account for the difference?
Point out to students that the places where
they may have stumbled, where they felt that they were forcing the iambic meter
upon the words, probably indicate metrical variation. Such variation is
employed for expressive purposes--and Shakespeare's meter is constantly varied
(in fact, it is sometimes difficult to find lines of unvaried iambic pentameter).
As a class, try to locate the places of metrical variation in this poem, the places
where you stumbled in your singsong reading. Now, look again at your notes on
the rhythm of the poem and its emotional shifts. Is there any correspondence?
Does metrical variation contribute to meaning in this poem? (Don't worry if you
can't assign a meaning to every single variation-just have students keep these
places in mind as they complete the next two experiments in sound.) SOUND
EXPERIMENT 5: Now ask students to read the poem silently to themselves. Ask
them to try to imagine a voice not their own. It could be a deep male voice, or
a woman's voice. They could even try to imagine Shakespeare's voice. The point
is to imagine the sound of a voice and to try to really "hear" it in their minds.
After everyone has had a chance to read through the sonnet in this way, discuss
any discoveries they made about the sonnet. Could they hear the pauses, the rhythm,
as well as the expressive variations in meter? Could they feel the places in the
poem where an emotional shift occurred? Now
may be a good time to introduce some of the formal terms that are used to describe
the structure of a sonnet—what makes the sonnet a sonnet and not something
else? You might think of these as a third level of form, the foundation "beneath"
the levels of meter and rhythm. Introduce the distinction between a Shakespearean
or English sonnet, which divides its 14 lines into three quatrains and a couplet,
with the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg; and a Petrarchan sonnet (the Italian
original from which the English imitation was derived), which divides its 14 lines
into an eight-line octave and a six-line sestet, with the rhyme scheme abbaabba
cdecde. An example of a Petrarchan sonnet, translated into English but retaining
the Petrarchan rhyme scheme, is Thomas Wyatt's "The
long love that in my heart doth harbor (see the Sonnet
Bank below for more details).
Petrarch's
model had established the custom of presenting a problem, situation, or incident
in the octave, followed by a resolution in the sestet. But English poets eventually
developed a more flexible sonnet form which could be divided not only into octave
and sestet, in the manner of Petrarch, but also into three quatrain-length variations
on a theme followed by an epigrammatic couplet. Shakespeare uses this form, quatrains
followed by couplet, to embody the nuances of shifting emotion and thought. On
their copies of the poem, have students write letters corresponding to different
line endings. Note how these groups of rhyme create quatrains. Draw lines indicating
the divisions into quatrains and a final couplet. How does this form correspond
to the shifts of rhythm, meter, and emotion that you detected earlier? How do
sound and formal structure (the three quatrains followed by epigrammatic couplet)
work together to produce an emotional effect on the reader? SOUND
EXPERIMENT 6 (Optional): This exercise involves watching an online video,
available from the Favorite
Poem Project, a link from the EDSITEment resource Internet
Public Library. To view it, you will need to have "Real Player," which can
be downloaded from the site; before sharing this with your students, make sure
your school's computer has sufficient connection speed to play the video.
On
the video,
Daniel McCall, an 81-year-old retired anthropologist, speaks about how a poem
he memorized when he was in seventh grade, Shakespeare's Sonnet 29, has stayed
with him all his life. Sometimes there is a strange and wonderful alchemy between
the performer of a poem and the poem itself. The poem takes on something of the
personality of the speaker, and the personality of the speaker is revealed in
the words of the poem. After speaking briefly about his life, Daniel McCall recites
Sonnet 29, conveying to us a sense of words imbued with a lifetime of experience
and feeling. (Just possibly, his example might inspire some students to memorize
a sonnet themselves!)
3 Student
Project
SOUND EXPERIMENT
7: The final experiment in sound is a student activity for individuals or
groups. To complete it, your students will need to have access, either inside
or outside of class, to the online links provided in the Sonnet
Bank. Conceivably, you might download a selection of sonnets for your
students, but this is unadvisable, unless you have a great deal of time on your
hands! Alternatively, you could provide students with a printout of the list only,
and make the task of locating and copying their chosen sonnet part of the assignment
(although this may be difficult with some of the lesser-known writers).
Students
will also need to have access to a tape recorder. In case access to tape recording
activity is limited, the exercise below describes both individual and small group
options. - Start by sharing with your
students some details about the history of the sonnet form. Provide students with
a little bit of historical context. Perhaps the central fact in the history of
the sonnet in English is that it has always been an old form, an inherited form.
As we have seen, when Wyatt and Surrey began writing sonnets for the first time
in the sixteenth century, they were adapting a well-established Italian model
that had been around for more than a century. The ironic intent of Shakespeare's
My mistress' eyes are
nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130), for example, presupposes a knowledge of
how the beloved is traditionally praised in sonnet sequences. Yet sonnet writers
from the sixteenth to the twentieth century have continued to find ways of making
this old form new, stretching and tweaking and morphing its features to suit new
circumstances, new tastes, new purposes. When Romantic poets John Keats and William
Wordsworth revived the sonnet form in the early nineteenth century, they were
rescuing and reinventing a poetic form that had been out of fashion for over a
century.
- Now that they know a little
about the various stages of sonnet development, students are ready to look through
the contents of the Sonnet Bank and
choose an interesting sonnet from any historical period. You could have students
choose sonnets individually, or, to ensure coverage of all four historical periods,
ask students to count off by fours and having those in group 1 look at Elizabethan,
group 2 at Romantics, and so on.
- Their
assignment will be to 1) read and understand the sonnet thoroughly, looking up
any terms that need defining; 2) learn about the sonnet's author (in the case
of some the more obscure writers, this may be a challenge; in other instances,
they may find the amount of information a bit overwhelming); 3) write a few paragraphs
answering the question "how does sound influence meaning in your chosen sonnet?";
and 4) produce a tape recorded performance of the poem. The recordings could be
produced individually, in pairs, or in groups; if in groups, it might be feasible
to produce the recordings as a class activity. In any case, encourage students
to try some of the sound experiments discussed above on their own; students may
wish to make a number of recordings before they settle on one that seems the best.
-
Have students present their recordings to other students as a class; alternatively,
you might have students share the recordings they made in small groups, then have
each group choose a favorite. Before playing a selection from their tape, students
should say a few words about the writer they chose and the period in which he
or she wrote. Students should also talk about the kinds of sound experiments they
performed, as well as how they finally settled on one particular performance as
the best. In the course of listening to a wide variety of sonnets, you should
also have opportunities to discuss some of the similarities and differences between
sonnets of different time periods.
The Sonnet Bank
1.
Elizabethan and 17th Century Sonnets
- Sonnets
by Shakespeare, from the EDSITEment-reviewed Academy
of American Poets:
"From
you have I been absent in the spring..." (Sonnet 98)
"My mistress' eyes are
nothing like the sun" (Sonnet 130) "Not
marble nor the guilded monuments" (Sonnet 55) "Shall
I compare thee to a summer's day?" (Sonnet 18) "That
time of year thou mayst in me behold" (Sonnet 73) "When
to the sessions of sweet silent thought" (Sonnet 30) "When
in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes" (Sonnet 29).
A
facsimile edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. (A copy of the 1609 Quarto, in
the Huntington Library. Available through a link on Mr.
Shakespeare and the Internet, which has additional background materials for
the study of Shakespeare's sonnets.)
"Like
as the waves make toward the pebbl'd shore" (Sonnet 60). (From the University
of Toronto English Library, a link on Mr.
Shakespeare and the Internet.)
"Let
me not to the marriage of true minds" (Sonnet 116). (From the Atlantic
Poetry Pages, a link on Academy of
American Poets; if your computer supports RealAudio, you can also listen to
clips of Sonnet 116 read by four contemporary poets.)
- Thomas
Wyatt, "The long love
that in my heart doth harbor." (From Luminarium,
a link from the EDSITEment-reviewed Mr.
Shakespeare and the Internet. Note: This sonnet is an English translation
of Petrarch's Sonnet 109.)
- John Milton,
"Methought
I saw my late espoused saint." (From the University
of Toronto English Library, a link on Mr.
Shakespeare and the Internet; annotated version.)
- John
Donne, "Death Be Not
Proud" (Holy Sonnet 10). (From Academy
of American Poets.)
- Lady Mary
Wroth, "Come
darkest Night, becomming sorrow best," "Flye
hence, O Joy, no longer heere abide," as well as a number of other sonnets
by Wroth. (From the website One
Phoenix: Four Seventeenth-Century Women Poets, a link on the EDSITEment-reviewed
Internet Public Library.)
2.
Romantic Poets
- Lord Byron,
"On the Castle of Chillon." (From Bartleby.com,
a link through the Internet Public Library.)
-
John Keats, "Bright
Star," "On First
Looking Into Chapman's Homer." (From Academy
of American Poets.)
"When
I have Fears that I may Cease to be." (From Bartleby.com,
a link through the Internet Public Library.)
- Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias".
(From the EDSITEment-reviewed Romantic
Circles High School; hypertext with links to additional materials.)
- Horace
Smith, "On a Stupendous
Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the
Inscription Inserted Below." (Romantic
Circles High School; hypertext with links to additional materials and to Shelley's
famous poem on same subject.)
- Mary
Tighe, "Sonnet Addressed to My
Mother"; dedicatory poem for her longer allegorical work, Psyche.
(Electronic edition prepared by Harriet Kramer Linkin, Melissa Davis, and Jerry
Parks (July, 1997); re-formatted and corrected by Harriet Kramer Linkin (September,
2001); a link on Internet Public Library.)
- Helen
Maria Williams, "Sonnet
to Hope," "Sonnet
to Twilight," and numerous other sonnets. (From British
Women Romantic Poets, a link on the EDSITEment-reviewed Romantic
Circles.)
- William Wordsworth,
"Composed Upon Westminster
Bridge, September 3, 1802" and "The
World Is Too Much With Us, Late and Soon." (From Academy
of American Poets.)
3. British
Victorian and 19th Century American Poets
- Louisa
Sarah Bevington, "I
Thought I was quite happy yesterday" and several other sonnets. (From the
EDSITEment-reviewed Victorian
Women Writers Project.)
- Elisabeth
Barrett Browning, "How
Do I Love Thee?" and "My
Letters! all dead paper. . ." (Sonnet XXVIII). (From Academy
of American Poets.)
"If
Thou Must Love Me," "When our
two souls stand up erect and strong," and several other selections from Browning's
collection, Sonnets from the Portuguese. (From Bartleby.com,
a link on Internet Public Library.)
- Christina
Rossetti, "REMEMBER me when I am
gone away" and "Aloof."
(From Bartleby.com, a link on Internet
Public Library.)
- Edward Arlington
Robinson, "Oh
for a poet for a beacon bright." (From the EDSITEment-reviewed American
Verse Project.)
- Emma Lazarus,
"STILL
northward is the central mount of Maine" and "The
New Colossus." (From the EDSITEment-reviewed American
Verse Project.)
- Dante Rossetti,
"A Sonnet is a moment's monument"; item number 163 in an extensive selection of
Rosetti's sonnets from Ballads
and Sonnets (1881). (From The
Rossetti Archive, a link on the EDSITEment-reviewed Victorian
Web.)
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
"O
River of Yesterday, with current swift," and other sonnets in Another Rosary
of Sonnets (1878). (From American Memory
Collection.)
- Edgar Allen Poe,
"Sonnet
to Zante" and "Sonnet
to Science." (From the EDSITEment-reviewed American
Verse Project.)
4. 20th Century
Americans
- Branch, Anna Hempstead
(1875-1937) ,
"A Sonnet for the Earth" and a number of other sonnets from Branch's Shoes
that Danced and Other Poems. (From the American
Verse Project.)
- Louise Bogan,
"Sonnet."
(From the EDSITEment-reviewed Modern
American Poetry.)
- Gwendolyn Brooks,
"The Sonnet-Ballad."
(From Academy of American Poets.)
- Edna
St. Vincent Millay, "What
lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why." (From Academy
of American Poets. There is also a selection of six
sonnets by Millay, originally published in the volume Renascence; available
online at the Women's
Studies Database Reading Room, a link from Academy
of American Poets.)
- Robert Frost,
"Oven Bird." (From Bartley.com,
a link on Internet Public Library.)
- Countee
Cullen, "Yet
Do I Marvel" and "From
the Dark Tower." (From Modern American Poetry.)
Related
Lessons
"You
Kiss By the Book": Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (grades 9-12)
Writing Poetry Like the Pros (grades 3-5)
Selected EDSITEment Websites
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