PRACTISING CLOSE READING IN CLASS
Giving pupils the reading skills to succeed!
Paddy Salmon MA PGCE
Head of English SIS (Sèvres)
1993-2012
paddysalmon.wix.com/english-courses
Holy Sonnets:
Death Be Not Proud
by John Donne
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,
Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee do go,
Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.
Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,
And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well
And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?
One short sleep past, we wake eternally
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
And Death Shall Have No Dominion
by Dylan Thomas
"I shall teach you differences." Kent to Oswald in 'King Lear' (Wittgenstein apparently thought of using this as an epigraph for 'Philosophical Investigations'. Kent clearly means "social" differences, but I like Wittgenstein's "take" on the scene.)
Very often it helps to compare passages of verse or prose and the OIB exam, indeed, requires such comparisons to be made in a formal way. Literature has always involved writers in responding to other writers, so the idea of comparing writing on similar themes, and in different modes as well, is part and parcel of how we read. When we are reading closely the awareness of similarities and, more especially, differences can be very enriching and illuminating.
When organising our responses more formally at a later stage, we might either try to compare the texts simultaneously under various headings, or we might consider the important points of one text and then compare the other text(s) while making comparisons as we do so. Both strategies are equally valid, providing thorough comparisons have been made.
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Here's an exercise to start us off. Death can be a very difficult subject (though a universal one) and my most potentially awkward time was having to teach Emily Dickinson (notorious death addict!) to a group which had a boy, whose father had just committed suicide, and a girl, whose mother had recently died of cancer. Fortunately, they both got a lot, I think, out of studying Dickinson. Here are two other interesting 'death' poems to compare. Note the rubric detailing how the comparison should be made.
Compare the two following poems which are about death, looking particularly at the tone of voice in both poems and the ways in which each poem formulates its ideas. How do you respond to each poem?
Reading these two poems, we may first of all bear in mind that death is something that we all fear. Here, both poems, it seems, try to offer reassurance and consolation, but while the message may be similar – that death is not an ending necessarily - the poems are developed in very different ways and the differences will be most revealing, rather than the apparent similariries.
2 Now let us look at two passages of prose. Unlike poems, extracts of prose will not be so unified. The ending of the extract (and sometimes also the beginning) may be arbitrary. The writing may tend not to seem as well shaped as poetry.
Nevertheless, there is a lot we can say about the quality of the writing, the narrative style, the imagery and symbolism, the syntax, the choice of words, the formation of paragraphs and sentences, the rhythms created by the patterning of words, repetitions of sounds or images, and the relationship between the narrator and the reader or the characters (or both).
Consider these two passages and think about the rubric of the assignment based on them.
A The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston--with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon's stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black head-stocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.
B Flame-lurid his face as he turned among the throng of flame-lit and dark faces upon the platform. In the light of the furnace she caught sight of his drifting countenance, like a piece of floating fire. And the nostalgia, the doom of homecoming went through her veins like a drug. His eternal face, flame-lit now! The pulse and darkness of red fire from the furnace towers in the sky, lighting the desultory, industrial crowd on the wayside station, lit him and went out.
Of course he did not see her. Flame-lit and unseeing! Always the same, with his meeting eyebrows, his common cap, and his red-and-black scarf knotted round his throat. Not even a collar to meet her! The flames had sunk, there was shadow.
She opened the door of her grimy, branch-line carriage, and began to get down her bags. The porter was nowhere, of course, but there was Harry, obscure, on the outer edge of the little crowd, missing her, of course.
'Here! Harry!' she called, waving her umbrella in the twilight. He hurried forward.
'Tha's come, has ter?' he said, in a sort of cheerful welcome. She got down, rather flustered, and gave him a peck of a kiss.
'Two suit-cases!' she said.
Her soul groaned within her, as he clambered into the carriage after her bags. Up shot the fire in the twilight sky, from the great furnace behind the station. She felt the red flame go across her face. She had come back, she had come back for good. And her spirit groaned dismally. She doubted if she could bear it.
7A COMPARING TEXTS
The title of the first is challenging. "Death will not WIN" seems to be its message, which is paradoxical and counter-intuitive, perhaps. The constant repetitions might seem a bit incantatory (if you say it enough – perhaps you may convince yourself!) Is there enough in the poem to justify the repeated assertion?
The poem clearly enjoys "language" and "words". It plays with language. For example "man in the moon" and "west wind" are inverted – for no apparent reason, and later, "pushing up the daisies" is given a new turn with "heads of the characters (personalities? letters?) - hammer through daisies". We notice throughout a love of paradox ("though they go mad they shall be sane", "though they sink through the sea, they shall rise again" ) and a very strong rhythm, which we can return to.
In terms of ideas, it is difficult to disentangle them. The first stanza seems to suggest that love will outlast death. The lovers seem to die and become stars or constellations, perhaps. Do the ideas develop as ideas? Are they coherent?
There are three lines beginning with "Though…" which have a rhythmical balance and which lead to a climax on the last line which repeats the first. Is the word "shall" more emphatic than "will"? We note that there is a lot of assertion – no "perhaps" or "may". This is what WILL happen. Wishful fantasising?
The second stanza seems to be focusing on people (saints?) being tortured for their "faith". "Unicorn evils" is a strange (and paradoxical phrase, as unicorns are supposed to be gentle and connected to love). "Split all ends up they shan't crack" seems to reiterate the paradoxical idea that "they" (lovers, saints?) cannot be overcome by death. And the third stanza again refers to the sea and, presumably, death by drowning again. Are we getting anywhere in terms of ideas?
It is a wonderful poem to read out loud (in a Welsh voice?) and it is worth playing a recording of Thomas himself doing just that. But the question I would ask my pupils is "Is it all convincing?" Is it more than just incantatory froth and bluster, using alliteration, rhythm, poetical images etc.? "If you think it is, then you are going to have to prove it to me!"
Also, why all those "And…"s? Biblical? Incantatory? Lulling…? What do they serve?
Turning to the Donne poem, which has an almost identical message, we notice an immediate difference in tone of voice, first of all. The poet addresses Death as a person and there follows a coolly laid out argument as to why Death will not actually WIN, leading up to the climactic paradox thet "Death, thou shalt die."!
We note that it is written in a very disciplined form – the sonnet. This sonnet hinges on the dramatic assertion at the end of the first quatrain, which has been mocking Death, that Death cannot kill the poet – something which seems totally impossible. There follows a series of propositions which cumulatively build up as each argument seems to prove that Death has no real power. Some of them are even funny: the idea that Death is at the mercy of "fate, chance, kings and desperate men" is somehow very comically paradoxical, particularly when Death, personified, is being reprimanded for consorting with the lowest of society!
Of course, the Christian paradox, of eternal life with God, therefore comes through with greater force, the more so for the ironic humour that is at work inside the poem. It's like a joke with the deferred punchline acquiring even more force. The idea of resurrection is present a lot in the first poem. How different or similar are the two approaches in terms of death NOT being necessarily an ending?
The John Donne "voice", perhaps, is the same as the one that tells off the sun, in another poem, "Busy old fool, unruly Sun why dost thou thus…". Pupils should be urged to read this poem as well, to catch more of this humorously ironic "voice".
Here, unlike the first poem, rhythm is being used to develop lines of seemingly tight argumentation. The stark conclusion to the argument is both funny, in its daring use of paradox, but also triumphant. The "lawyer" has proved his case!
What, finally are our reactions? Do we enjoy the "sound and fury" of the first – the rhythms and lovely sounds, which seem to defy death with the sheer bombastic power of words; or do we prefer the coolly humorous defiance (both poems are defiant) of the measured arguments of the earlier poet?
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike,
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
Compare the openings of these two short stories by D.H. Lawrence, paying particular attention to how the setting of industrialization is used in both.
ie. Aim to do a practical criticism on both openings – paying attention to how the writing is structured, how the narrative voice, the tone, the choice of words, the rhythm, imagery, sounds, ideas and feelings are controlled etc. – but pay attention at the same time to the industrial setting and how certain effects are created.)
When reading the first passage, what we might notice is how nature is threatened by the train, although the "colt" outpaces it. The train is personified – it is "stumbling", which is clumsy. If this is industry threatening nature, it is a clumsy and not entirely successful threat. Man, perhaps, with his unnatural creation (industrialization) cannot quite overcome nature – or can it?
It is worth asking pupils, who may not notice, "Why is this woman walking along the railway line?" Surely this is dangerous? Well, yes, but it also suggests that she is very familiar with this world. Perhaps it is the shortest way to the shops. We notice, however, how, symbolically, humans are being squeezed between nature (the hedge) and industrialization (the train). There is a terrific rhythm in the sentence describing the wagons clanking past. Read it out aloud so pupils will gather the slow thumping rhythm of "The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement…".
We are also aware of the negative effects of the smoke and pollution on the countryside ("dreary, "forsaken", "stagnant". Not only is the train personified ("stumbling"), but the ("clumsy") winding mechanism of the "winding stocks" raps out its "little spasms" as if it is ill. Notice the verb in the passive in the final sentence – the miners (in other words, human beings) are not active, they are passively being drawn to the surface.
Digging further, we will notice that we are being given a landscape, as our entry into a story, by a third person narrator. If the woman is going to figure in the story, we might imagine that this perceived threat by industrialization might develop in a more sinister way as far as she is concerned. At all events, as a backdrop, industrialisation is not so much a big menace so much as a dreary brake on life.
The second opening is, in many ways, very different. Although the story is reported in the third person, we notice how closely the narrative follows the young woman, starting at, "Of course he did not see her!" This identification with the woman gathers force as we go on, mixed with more objective reporting: "She got down, rather flustered, and gave him a peck of a kiss."
What we will also notice is the heavy emphasis on that first word "Flame-lurid". "Lurid" has a rather negative connotation – something too bright "criard" in French. The word is given extra force by being inverted syntactically. We would normally say "His face was flame-lurid…". All through the passage the "flames" are referred to with a mixture of words that are part negative (fire is dangerous after all) but also living and exciting as well ("pulse and darkness of red fire" – note the oxymoron).
This mixture of excitement and threat prepares us for that strange phrase "the doom of homecoming". Here again is an oxymoron, which merges opposites. Homecoming should be pleasurable. Here, however, the word "doom" causes us to pause. Is this "hell"? All the "flames" form a backdrop, which the man seems perfectly at ease with, but for the woman they seem to represent a hellish atmosphere. We do notice, however, that word "pulse". It links us to the first story where industrialization, too, has a living though malignant force.
There is more, perhaps, to disentangle in the way the story sides with the woman and her evident prejudice against the man. He has a "common" cap (such a damning word in English!) and has not even put on "a collar to meet her". Some explanation about clothing requirements in the early 20th century will be needed perhaps. Detachable collars are rare now! He speaks in dialect, while she speaks in ordinary English. And yet, the story seems to be telling us that Harry and his world are very familiar, too familiar. Why then is she returning, if she can't stand the man? That tension may well be something, which the story will develop.
What we are interested in, here, however, is the way both stories rely on an ambiguous setting created by industrialization. It is seen as powerfully entwined with human existence, but instead of slave, it seems to be becoming master. It has life, but is also a sinister, perhaps a deadly force.
We are now in a position to structure our responses to these passages.
3 Now we shall consider two poems about wells. Here, we can guess straightaway that the symbolism of wells is going to be developed in the poems. Just thinking about wells before reading, we might think of wells as dark, dangerous places, though they are also places where we can draw water, which is one of the primal needs we have as human beings. Water as a source of life. The image has negative as well as positive features.
Here are the poems:
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What I find interesting first, when considering these poems, is that both writers are aware of their “oddity”. Frost starts by saying that “Others taunt” him, and Heaney is aware, too, that staring into wells is “beneath all adult dignity". We could start, then, by pondering what each poet is doing as he stares into the well and what discoveries are made by the poems.
Frost’s poem is constructed very loosely (chattily even) around a framework of blank verse, even though hardly any of the lines conform to a regular iambic pentameter. It doesn’t rhyme and the poet uses enjambement to build up an informal monologue or memoir, where we feel the poet is talking quite naturally to us, the reader. This is within the Wordsworthian tradition (see METRICATION AND PETTERNINGS) of nature and autobiographical poetry. Look at extracts of The Prelude for similar childhood memoirs. In construction, also, it seems to suggest a sonnet, while deliberately refusing 14 lines for 15 instead, with a 6-4-5 structure.
Both poems are fascinated by self-viewing, though the darkness of the wells is a bit frightening. Heaney talks lovingly of the smells, the dank vegetation, the "rich crash" – but also there is a moment's horror, with the rat. Frost sees less in the way of fear, than of uncertainty. The reflection of himself as "godlike" doesn't reveal the whole picture, as he sees it. The "white" at the bottom is left uncertain, ("Truth? A pebble of quartz?..."). The conclusion is left ambiguous, though the poem claims this ambiguity as "something" – "for once, then, something" – as if the ambiguities, themselves, of well activities and symbolism, create grounds for optimism not found elsewhere. His reproach of himself is in not having seen "deeper". Yet looking deeper doesn't in itself seem to resolve things further.
In the Heaney poem, sounds are referred to from as early as the title (which plays on the idea of a helicon, which is a brass wind instrument, as well as referring to a part of Greece). The poem builds on all the senses, but leaves us with an important idea – that poetry for him "set(s) the darkness echoing". The act of writing poetry is therefore linked here to self-reflection (in both senses of the word "reflection") and creating music out of, or inspired by "darkness", with presumably all of the negative connotations associated with that. As with many Heaney poems, digging down into the wet earth is seen as similar to digging into memory, collective or personal, and bringing to the surface things which need to be observed and discussed.
Heaney's poem similarly balances discipline and order with freedom and spontaneity. There are 5 stanzas of four lines, but a lot of enjambement within each stanza. The discipline of "rhyming" – referred to in the poem itself – is brought out in the carefully rhyming lines, accentuating sounds further. "Echoing" is referred to elsewhere and a lot of the alliterations help to underline these echoes. Of course, wells are full of echoes, which makes the idea richly appropriate. Yet there is an irony when he calls himself a "Narcissus". Narcissus killed himself through his vanity (looking at his reflection in the water) and Echo was helplessly in love with him, but only able to echo his words. Poetry can be very solipsistic and "selfish", in that it stems from personal responses, and there could be a danger in too much introspection, yet to create a music available to others, the poem suggests, the poet must take such a risk, perhaps, as well as the risk of the "rat" slapping "across" his "reflection". "Slapping" suggests "rebuke" – and his final comment undermines to some extent, the seriousness of his task as an artist. He is in part laughing at himself, when he says it is "beneath all adult dignity" to stare at himself like Narcissus.
In the last resort, poets make music with words and music tries to defeat the annihilation suggested by the penultimate word "darkness": poetry works by echoes, not just rhymes and alliterations, but poets echoing other poets and resonating off other sounds and music.
4 Before doing the following comparison, I suggest setting the creative assignment in APPENDIX 4, which would give pupils some insight into The Send-Off, first, before they consider it in relation to another poem.
Compare and contrast the ways these two poets write about the departure of soldiers to the First World War.
For Once, Then, Something
by Robert Frost
Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent,
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.
Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.
The Send-off
by Wilfred Owen
"Good-morning, good-morning!" the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the Line,
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
* * * * *
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
THE GENERAL
by Siegried Sassoon
Looking at the construction on the page of both poems, we notice distortion or interruption. Owen's poem distorts what might have been rhymed stanzas of five lines. The lines vary in length with a feeling of abruptness and incompletion with the shortened second and fifth lines. Sassoon's poem interrupts the jocular tone of the first six lines, with their rhythmical anapaestic beat, and very markedly adds a darkly ironic last line, which turns the poem upside down, though this had been prepared for by the disclosure that most of the soldiers he addressed are now dead. The irony is that the blame is not laid at the enemy's door, but at the general's, who should have protected them.
Irony, in fact, plays a large part in both poems. Owen's poem plays on a major irony, which is that a "send-off" is generally understood to be a party to say farewell. Here there is no party. In fact, the soldiers are treated "like wrongs hushed-up". The oxymoron of "grimly gay" first shows us the ambiguity of the occasion. There is strong irony, too, in the flowers that were given to the departing soldiers by their loved ones. They are seen more as flowers to be put on graves. The final irony is in their return. Not in triumph, but to villages which they barely recognise. The image of "still village wells" is a haunting one. Water is a symbol of life and also here of community. One can also detect a lot of irony in the way the soldiers are sent off by machinery rather than by human beings. Here the machines are personified ("signals nodded and a lamp Winked to a guard"). That "wink" seems almost callous.
Irony in the second poem is shown by the friendly geniality of the general, and the fact that by meeting the soldiers it is clear that he is travelling in the opposite direction: towards safety. Here, the characters are named - they are real people. The extra rhyme ("plan of attack") reinforces the point being made. The general as good as murdered them through his incompetence. The "do for somebody" is slang and doesn't automatically mean "to kill". The ambiguity makes our realisation of what the general did all the more understated and darkly ironic.
Both poets, we notice are present in the poems and both poets are evidently involved with the events they describe. This has the effect of making us judge the scenes with their eyes very much. We feel we can trust the personas and that they know what they are talking about.
Both poems denounce the conduct of the war. Explicitly in Sassoon's poem, more implicitly, perhaps, in Owen's. Both use black humour, if one can call it that, or more simply, dark irony, to make their points.