Mr. Heise
"Little week, big learning"
We had a short week of school truncated by fall break and a middle-of-the-week field trip. This is a good breather before jumping into the hands-on math and immersive Latin projects that will define the rest of the semester. But we still managed to conduct some good work in this short week.
I got to take over Mr. Gant's high school humanities class for field trip day and we did some carpentry and cut 2x4's to get coathangers on the wall of the portable. We also had a nice capsule class on how to read a poem. If you're new to reading classic literature, it works like this. First you do "scansion", scanning the poem for patterns of stressed syllables (marked with '), and unstressed syllables (marked with a breve ˘). These patterns constitute 'feet' of the poem such as iambs (unstressed then stressed... ˘da-'DUM), trochees ('DUM-˘da), anapests (˘da-˘da-'DUM), or dactyls ('DUM-˘da-˘da). The syllables in a poem will always group into some kind of foot and any given line will contain a certain number of feet, for instance tetrameter has four feet and pentameter has five feet. We read Emily Dickinson's poem Morning, which opens in iambic tetrameter (˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´ ˘ ´) or 4 feet x 2 syllables per foot with the stress on the second. Rhyming is its own ball game and poets may rhyme or not, or invent new complex rhyme schemes like Dante in his proprietary interlocking terza rima where he embeds each new rhyme sound into the middle of the three lines before (e.g. the famous opening of the Divina comedia rhyming vita oscura smarrita dura forte paura morte trovai scorte):
"Midway through the journey of our life (vita)
I found myself within a forest dark, (oscura)
Where I had lost the straightforward pathway... (smarrita) etc. etc.
—Dante, Inferno 1-3.
This is Dante making a clever aural joke as old couplets contain seeds of the new, just as Dante's poem itself grows from the seeds planted in Vergil's Aeneid... a parentage so burdensome that Dante feels he must repeat the joke ~14,000 times. Rhyming is usually ancillary to poetic interpretation but meter strictly governs poetic meaning, tone and music—at least until it is broken—and if you cheekily break the meter, you've got to throw in some good lines about how this is not a failure but actually proof of your unique style and genius! So we have Chaucer in the Knight's Prologue: "Myn is the ruyne of the hye halles / The falling of the towers and of the walls". And Hart Crane: "Their tongues engrave / Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score / Of broken intervals..." W.H. Auden: "Time breaks the threaded dances..."
So that's English 101 classical style and now you can play the name-that-poetic-meter game with your students at home. (Pro tip: just Google the answer and make your scholar do the legwork of counting syllables!)