PRACTISING CLOSE READING IN CLASS

 

While I am a dyed-in-the-wool atheist (or humanist if you prefer), I was brought up on the Bible (Authorised) - in a strongly Methodist school - and believe that it is of fundamental importance in understanding and appreciating English literature.

 

This is true also, one could argue, of the 'Iliad' and the 'Odyssey' and a case could also be made for 'The Pilgrim's Progress', the 'Morte d'Arthur' and many other similarly influential texts through the ages, where they can be seen to have had an impact on English letters (the poetry of Vergil and Horace, for example).

 

Considerable sensitivity must be shown if we do intend to use the Bible in our teaching, but it is so important culturally, that it would be nothing less than criminal for literature students NOT to be exposed to some of the content and style of the Bible, not as a religious text as such, but as the source of so much literary inspiration. For example, we are always hearing these days about "apocalyptic" scenarios. "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy is a novel which pupils could be encouraged to read (and there's a film out too they might have seen). Like "Z for Zachariah", before it, it is grounded in post-apocalyptic (nuclear, possibly) visions of a world, which is still recognisably ours.

 

To make more sense of this word and concepts like Armageddon, I suggest lifting some extracts from Revelations (Chapter 6) dealing with the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" and presenting them as poetic visions (which is, I think how they should be read, whether one is religious or not).

 

Edwin Muir's poem "The Horses" is a good post-apocalyptic poem for 14/15 year olds to work on and do some creative writing about afterwards,  but it needs some back-up knowledge of the Book of Revelations and Genesis to make sense of some of the allusions. Genesis and the Garden of Eden are also necessary to make sense, say, of Blake's "The Poison Tree" or Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market", not to mention, of course, 'Paradise Lost'.

 

 

 

The Horses

 

Barely a twelvemonth after

The seven days war that put the world to sleep,

Late in the evening the strange horses came.

By then we had made our covenant with silence,

But in the first few days it was so still

We listened to our breathing and were afraid.

On the second day

The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.

On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,

Dead bodies piled on the deck.

On the sixth day

A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter

Nothing. The radios dumb;

And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,

And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms

All over the world.

But now if they should speak,

If on a sudden they should speak again,

If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,

We would not listen, we would not let it bring

That old bad world that swallowed its children quick

At one great gulp. We would not have it again.

Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,

Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,

And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.

The tractors lie about our fields; at evening

They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.

We leave them where they are and let them rust:

'They'll molder away and be like other loam.'

We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,

Long laid aside. We have gone back

Far past our fathers' land.

And then, that evening

Late in the summer the strange horses came.

We heard a distant tapping on the road,

A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again

And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.

We saw the heads

Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.

We had sold our horses in our fathers' time

To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us

As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.

Or illustrations in a book of knights.

We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,

Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent

By an old command to find our whereabouts

And that long-lost archaic companionship.

In the first moment we had never a thought

That they were creatures to be owned and used.

Among them were some half a dozen colts

Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,

Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.

Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads

But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.

Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

 

Edwin Muir

 

 

 

Here - then - why "seven days war"? (Have the pupils even heard of the Six Day War between Israel and the Arab states and Egypt in the sixties?)

Where does the word "covenant" occur? (Noah and the rainbow...?)

How has this world gone back "Far past our fathers' land"?

How does the word "wilderness" work here? What connections are there with biblical "wildernesses"?

What are the connections with Eden? 

Is this a poem with a "message"? What might it be?

 

Creative writing. I sometimes ask pupils in pairs or individually to take one or two lines and use them as a springboard for a story (or extract of story), diary entry, play, radio broadcast, history textbook (later on) - etc. 

 

 

Similarly, we should also perhaps be preparing students to be able to refer to the great biblical stories in Genesis of Cain and Abel, Noah and Joseph (with the multi-coloured coat); Moses and the Exodus; David and Jonathan; Jesus' parables (in particular The Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan) and the list could go on.

 

Of course, if we go down this path, we would also want senior pupils to have some idea of Freud's writings; the great religious debates of the Nineteenth Century, which fuel the writings of Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins; the Romantics and the cult of the "picturesque"; Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites, Wilde and the fin-de-siècle Decadents….

 

All right, the list is endless, but the aim will always be to extend the consciousness of our students usefully and appropriately about the cultural and historical background of the texts they are studying. We are not working to a "programme" as such; rather we are encouraging pupils to extend their taste and knowledge as far as all writing is concerned, even, let us say, down to James Bond and Superman comics.

 

Having pupils do background research which they present with "tasters" (short extracts) and then explain why they selected these passages, would be a useful way to tackle the matter and free your hands as a teacher, to oversee and comment at your leisure…. I shall not add more here. I think it is an important area to consider as a teacher ( and for an English department to consider); the Bible should be presented as one more cultural reference point to be mastered by "literary detectives" and, indeed, by anyone who wishes to be fully "educated" and in touch with the most important reference points of our culture.

 

Indeed, as somebody who had "nature walks" as a regular part of the curriculum at the age of eleven, I am still startled by the levels of ignorance pupils display about birds (and bees!), flowers, trees, marine life, art history and so on. Never pass up opportunities to bore your pupils with your superior knowledge (but try to make it fun, too!).

 

 

"The Long Legged Fly" by WB Yeats could usefully here be looked at with older pupils, as it is a poem which concerns itself particularly with such cultural reference points . I consider it in section 6 DIFFICULTY AND COMPLEXITY.