By Katerina Taxiaropoulou,
Right after breakfast at 08.00 o’ clock in the morning, Monday to Sunday, English classes. 17-year-old boys and girls, bored to death. My C1 group at the sports and language camp was not buying the whole “English practice-cultural exchange” deal. The booklet was old and dull, they all knew it. Students were slipping through my fingers. I had to do something drastic, something that would spark their interest, fire their imagination. Poetry seemed like the only answer to me, though I know that anyone reading this would now laugh.
Having recently come out of adolescence myself, I felt quite close to what my students were experiencing. Emotional ups and downs, high expectations, hope and excitement, disappointment, anger, grief. I noticed that romantic love was a topic that occupied their minds. Many adults dismiss teenage love as inconsequential and depthless, unable to stand the test of time. However, according to therapist Elizabeth Erban, “romantic connections between teenagers can be formative, instructive, fulfilling, and valuable whether or not they last over the long term” (betterhelp). Bearing this in mind, I chose a beautiful, evergreen love poem by American poet E.E. Cummings called: “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond” (1931).
Warm up
Like I did with The Nightingale and The Rose by Oscar Wilde, I first gave the students some information about the writer and the text. Unlike my previous class, however, I did not play a trivia game with them, as I did not expect them to know anything about E.E. Cummings and his work. So first, I talked to them a little bit about the poet’s life, his occupation with other forms of creative expression like painting, playwriting and essay writing. As these students were somewhat older, all of them at the age of seventeen, I informed them that E.E. Cummings represents the movement of modernism, mainly because of his “literary experimentation” (Britannica).
To make this last description more comprehensible, I presented my students with some examples of Cummings’s experimental language. First, I directed their attention to the way his name was written on the paper. They were quick to notice that the initial letters of his name were not capitalized. Next, I showed them photos of some of his most experimental poems. Again, they were quick to notice how the lines were spaced irregularly and how many words were randomly put into parentheses. They also saw that some words were capitalized non-traditionally. To this comment I gave them the encyclopedic information, according to which “distinct typography mimicked the energy or tone of his subject matter” (Britannica). Finally, we talked about some basic literary terms like motif, metaphor, simile, and imagery. I asked the students to give me examples of these themselves.
Reading
After having explained some basic concepts, I had the students take turns reading the whole poem out loud. Next, we broke the reading session into the different stanzas, whereby each student would first read the lines and then try to make some comments on them. In order to guide them through the analysis, I was asking key questions and giving hints:
Stanza Ⅰ
“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near”
Taking the first two lines of the poem, I asked students to underline the words “somewhere”, “travelled”, “experience” and “eyes”. Next, I asked them whether the speaker is talking about a literal journey or a metaphorical one. In their response, students seemed to agree with critics that these lines express “not an actual place but more of a state of being”, that of being in love (Johwey Redington). The phrase “your frail gesture” is a clue that the speaker is talking about a delicate woman.
Stanza Ⅱ
“your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose”
For the second stanza, I directed my students’ attention towards the motif of closing and opening and asked them what they thought it meant. A few of them mentioned the idea of being introverted, “closed up” in order to guard oneself from love and its opposite openness to the experience of intense emotions. Then, I asked from my students to find a literary means through which this idea is expressed, underlying that the word “as” is key. With the help of this information, quite a few of them understood that we are talking about a simile: the poet “compares himself to a rose and she to nature. Just as a rose bud blooms in the spring, so does the woman have the power to open him up and breathe life into his soul” (Johwey Redington).
Stanza Ⅴ
“(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands”
By the end of the poem, students had understood how Cummings uses the parenthesis, not to omit secondary information, but rather to indicate the concurrency or, one might say, the cause-effect relationship of his inner thoughts and running speech. In his mind, the speaker realizes that the woman’s touch on him runs so deep that it touches the very core of his soul, his stigma in flower terms. Hence, in speech, he compares her small hands to raindrops, which go through the soil, get to the seeds and enable them to grow. According to Courage Lowrance, rain and hands are “recurrent metaphors” in Cummings’s work, but in this poem, they are “stretched out” to achieve final “oddity and obscurity” (Poetical Fragments). My students tried and could not interpret the last line. Yet they all agreed it was beautiful.
Creative Writing
After having read and discussed the poem, I asked from my students to write a love poem of their own. I reassured them that it did not have to be about romantic love, but also about the love one bears for a friend, family or even a pet animal. I chose not to give them many instructions, because I wanted them to get creative. Only as a guideline, I suggested that they start by describing the object of their love and then play around with language. Also, I told them they could write a narrative poem, that tells a story in verse. I let them use online dictionaries, as English was not their first language. Some students tried to write a poem, they even tried to imitate Cummings’s style. Many however resorted to drawing, like the boy who did the sketch in the above photo.
References
- E.E. Cummings. Britannica. Available here
- ‘SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED GLADLY BEYOND’ BY E.E. CUMMINGS (1931). Poeticalfragments. Available here
- Somewhere I Have Never Travelled. Johwey. Available here
- Is Teen Love Real And Can It Last?. Betterhelp. Available here
