It occurred to me the other day to attempt an untrodden method of teaching poetry. The occasion was the teaching of Sylvia Plath’s poem Mirror to second year undergraduates. ‘Why follow the usual way of explicating the poem line by line? The mirror is, after all, a very familiar object of daily use. Let us make the boys compose short poems of their own on the mirror, and see how they relate with Plath’s.’ The plan was to find out how many ‘ideas’ of the poet the students themselves could conceive. Accordingly, I instructed them. The time allotted was fifteen minutes. Important: I ensured that no one looked at Plath’s poem beforehand. The poems could be in English or Tamil. I didn’t want to discourage boys creating in Tamil, as the learner’s creativity was the major objective.
As many as 13 entries came in, out of a class of sixty. English: 10 and Tamil: 3. To cite just one sample:
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you are me
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Clear is the mirror
like the sweet river
hiding nothing from what you see
even reflecting the sea.
A reading of the poems and a discussion followed. To the pleasant surprise of the teacher and the taught, it was found that the students had thought like the poet in at least two points: a) the complete objectivity of the mirror: “Whatever I see I swallow immediately/ Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.” This was to some extent expected. b) Comparing the mirror to the river by one student out of the thirteen, which was unexpected. (Plath, of course, uses the apt word: ‘a lake’, which is a stagnant body of water.) Learners tend, it was further noted, to rank the mirror above human beings in a sense slightly different from Plath’s: while her mirror is an impartial ‘little god,’ ‘not cruel, only truthful’, the learner’s mirror is disinterested and transparent, compared to humans who are selfish and cunning, and thereby superior to them.
Warming up
It is not claimed that this is quite an alternative method to replace the existing ones, whatever the latter be.
For one thing, you cannot expect the students to achieve much within so short a time as fifteen minutes. Even within a longer span of time, it would be unrealistic to think that most students would come up with as good a poem as Plath’s.
This method, namely, of warming up the students to the act of learning poetry by inviting them to create poems of their own, has a distinct advantage: learners get more involved in the poem to be learnt. For the learning process has now been turned into an act of challenge: what has the poet to say about a thing or person, which I couldn’t have thought of, myself? This leads to the next phase of an uncoerced self-comparison of the learner with the poet.
It can now be explained to the learner that what he has only said cryptically about the mirror has been expanded into a metaphor by the poet. The learning of poetry, in effect, becomes an act of pleasure and challenge at once.
The author was Reader in English, Dean of Arts, and Vice-Principal at St Joseph’s College, Trichy. He is the author of the book Postmodernism: An Introduction. asdpillai_16@yahoo.co.in