My True Love

Each day I begin my class with a writing prompt taken from a book I have. The day after I turned down that interview possibility, the writing prompt I selected made reference to Alexander Pope's "Rape of the Lock" and invited students to write a description of their morning routine using melodramatic language. Clearly the authors of my book weren't too familiar with the poem because they said it was about the loss of a locket rather than a lock of hair. As I tried to give my students a bit more background on the poem to help them with their response, I realized that teaching literature is what I most miss about teaching college.

So why not bring a bit of that stuff into my own classroom, I wondered. In a few days, I would be starting an abbreviated poetry unit with my eighth graders, something intended to fill up the last weeks of school. They were going to pick an American painting in their social studies class and would write a short report about the background of the painting. For my class, they would use the same painting and write a poem. Since I'm no great poet myself, I figured it would mostly be an exercise in creativity and word choice. We only had a week to work on the poems in class, but I figured we should spend at least one day talking about the traits of effective poetry.

With "The Rape of the Lock" on my mind, I started thinking of some of my favorite poems from college. I didn't think my students would be up for The Faerie Queen, but I thought I'd expose them to "Spring" by Edna St. Vincent Millay and "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams. Flipping through my American literature anthology I found a few more favorites and I even decided to through in an excerpt of "The Rape of the Lock." On Friday afternoon, I squeezed the poems together on the front and back of one sheet of paper, made enough copies for my class, and then headed home for the weekend.

Just before I turned out the lights in my classroom and locked the door, I started to have second thoughts. I must be crazy to ask these students who rarely give me their full attention to read college-level poems. And what if a parent sees "The Rape of the Lock," misunderstands the title, and I get an angry phone call? So just before I left, I grabbed a classroom textbook and decided to look for some age appropriate poems over the weekend.

On Monday I gave them copies of the age-appropriate poems and my original collection of poetry. I told them to pick a few poems that they liked and to list the good things about that poem. Many students liked the fact that the poems were short, but others also noticed how they had descriptive words and often told a story.

Then I asked them what they thought of the poems. Almost immediately one student asked how "The Red Wheelbarrow" could be considered a poem, arguing that it seemed pointless. I asked the class what they thought, and was amazed when several students defended it as a poem. We talked about the picture it creates and possible interpretations of the poem. Of course there were some who were never convinced that it should qualify as a poem, but I was just ecstatic that of all the poems, that's the one they chose to engage. And it was one of our better class discussions. For a few days at least, I no longer felt bad about not being able to teach college-level literature all the time.