The Teaching of Poetry at the Secondary Level: a Stylistic Approach

Sujith.S,

School Teacher and Research Student,

Pantheerankave High School, Calicut.

‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearance. The mystery of the world is the visible, not invisible.’ -Oscar Wilde.

One of the major criticisms of the conventional way of teaching poetry at the secondary level is that it affords very little scope for the students to do anything but listen in the classroom. In most of the classes where poem is taught, the students remain passive listeners and occasionally they answer the questions aired by the teacher. The usual procedure of teaching poem will be by giving a short account on the poet, the period she lived, the common images she uses, and thus establishing the ‘brand label’ given to her by tons of critics or teachers. This is normally done either at the beginning of the class or at the end of the discussion. Most of the time the learners are baffled, when they start reading a poem by themselves. The main reason is the lack of a workable ‘tool’ that can be used to enter the poem, to analyse it, to understand and to interpret it. Stylistics offers such a viable tool that can be used to analyse a poem objectively.

Given an awareness of literature as discourse, we must examine the potential uses of literary texts together with methodological approaches for their presentation. Stylistics is such an approach. This paper attempts an enquiry into the use of stylistics in the teaching of poem at the secondary level.

What is Stylistics?

Stylistics is a critical approach which uses the methods and findings of the science of linguistics in the analysis of literary texts. By ‘linguistics’ it is meant here the scientific study of language and its structures rather than the learning of individual languages. It might be objected at this point that it is impossible to adopt the stylistic approach in the teaching of poetry since the learners at the secondary level do not study linguistics at all. Then how can we tackle this problem?

We could introduce the concepts of the basic tools that are used by stylisticians to the learners. One need not worry much whether the learner can understand the concepts as most of the devices used by linguists and stylisticians appeal to common sense. It is also noteworthy that the new curriculum revision at the secondary level in Kerala familiarises the learners the basic rudiments of linguistics in the teaching of grammar. Perhaps the easiest way to introduce the stylistic approach to the study of poetry is through the concept of ‘foregrounding’.

Foregrounding:

‘A painting that is representational does not simply reproduce the visual stimuli an observer would receive if he were looking at the scene it depicts: what is artistically interesting is how it deviates from photographic accuracy, from simply being a copy of nature.’ (Geoffrey Leech 1968)

If we assume that poetic language is in some way or some sense different form ordinary language, then we could say ordinary language is the background against which poetic language is foregrounded. For familiarising this concept to the learners we could use popular advertisements in the newspapers. We could sensitise how the companies project their products in the backdrop of other things.

Foregrounding has often been equated with linguistic deviation. Let’s discuss some of the common deviations employed by writers.

Lexical Deviation:

Neologism, or the invention of new ‘words’ is the more obvious ways in which a poet may exceed the normal resources of the language. We can call new words ‘Nonce-Formation’ if they are made up for a single occasion only. The most common processes of word-formation are affixation. In the following phrase from Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland both compounding and affixation are used to similar effect:

the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

The privative use of the prefix un- here in the sense of ‘take off/away from’ can be paralleled in unhorse, unleash etc. the cognitive meaning of the above given line could be ‘The deeps which deprive (wives) of husbands, (children) of fathers, and (parents) of children.’

Grammatical Deviation:

The most obvious example of this is the situation where the poet breaks the rules of the language in order to create new meanings or effects. A good example is the phrase used by Dylan Thomas: a grief ago. This phrase breaks two rules in English.

1. The determiner ‘a’ goes before a countable noun. Here it is used before an uncountable noun, ‘grief’

2. The post modifying adverb ago would normally be able to modify a noun to do with Time. Grief, on the other hand is a word to do with emotion.

The fact that ‘a grief ago’ is linguistically deviant has a very important psychological consequence for a reader, though it violates the deep structure of the language.

Graphological Deviation:

This is the easiest thing we can notice. This includes the deviation of both spelling and punctuation. Let’s take a short poem of Cummings.

seeker of truth

follow no path

all paths lead where

truth is here

Here an ambiguity arises from a clash between the unit of sense indicated by lineation (line arrangement) and by syntax. According to lineation, the poem ends with a statement ‘truth is here’; but according to syntax, ‘truth is’ must belong to the clause begun in the previous line, and so ‘here’ is left on its own as exclamatory conclusion. The whole significance of the poem lies in this ambiguity, which of course could not have arisen if the poet had used conventional capitalization and punctuation.

Other Techniques:

Parallelism: Foregrounding is not only promoted by breaking linguistic rules. The other possibility is that of parallelism, where some linguistic feature vary, while others are held constant. The well known example of parallelism will be from Othello:

‘I kissed thee ere I killed thee’

The line consists of two clauses linked by ‘ere’. The two clauses have the same structure, SVO – SVO. Even the conjunction ‘ere’ is a spelling palindrome.

Repetition: Language allows for a great abundance of types of lexical and grammatical repetition. The ‘farewell’ speech of Othello contains verbal repetition.

Farewell the tranquil mind!

farewell content!

Farewell the plumed troop and the big wars

that make ambition virtue!

O, farewell!

Interpretations of Parallelism and Repetition:

‘Linguistic parallelism is very often connected with rhetorical emphasis and memorability. In nursery rhymes and ballads, it affords an art-less kind of pleasure in itself, and probably needs no further justification.’ (Geoffrey Leech, 1968)

People generally feel that if a parallelism or repetition occurs in a poem, some deeper motive or justification for it should be sought.

How does stylistics differ from close reading?

Stylistic analysis attempts an objective study based on concrete quantifiable data and applied in a systematic way. The standard close reading is often seemed to be impressionistic and intuitive in nature.

‘Learner’s intuitions about the language maybe be different from those of native speakers’ because of different linguistic, cultural and literary backgrounds (Lazar 1993)

Close reading tends to isolate the literary text and see it a purely aesthetic art object. Stylistic by contrast emphasises the connections between literary language and everyday language. The aim of stylistics in a broader sense is ‘demystification’ of both literature and criticism.

‘Stylistic analysis shows how what is said is said and how

meanings are made’ (Brumfit and Carter 1986)

The linguistic organisation of the text cannot be ignored for it creates a firm basis from which students can proceed to make sense of the text and construct its meaning.

What does stylistics focus?

When we do a stylistic analysis of a piece of literature, we tend to look at certain things closely. The main focus will be to the ‘linguistic choices’ a writer makes. The choices could be between one word and another, one structure and another. Examination of the choices that the writer makes can help us understand the meaning she is trying to state. When the choice she makes is from outside the established language system, the choice become deviant and thus produces foregrounding. Over regularity of a particular choice within the system (parallelism, repetition) also produces foregrounding. Close examination of how deviation and parallelism works can help us understand meaning.

Process of applying stylistic analysis in classrooms:

Now the question could be how to incorporate these ‘tools’ in the classrooms. Let’s look at a poem discussed by Widdowson in his book ‘Stylistics and Teaching of Literature’ He has taken a small poem by Robert Frost titled ‘Dust of Snow’

DUST OF SNOW

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

-Robert Frost

This poem consists of a single sentence. There is no apparent deviation in the poem. But the poem is foregrounded as it is complete in one sentence. The lexical items do take a unique value in association with each other. The choice of the lexical items has to be focused.

The predominant words in the first stanza are ‘crow’, ‘dust’, ‘snow’, and ‘hemlock tree’. The crow that feeds on corpses and garbage is considered as bad omen. The hemlock tree, a kind of North American pine is considered as poisonous. The words dust and snow brings to our mind lifelessness. The value of the item dust now becomes clear as the one which it has in the phrase in the burial service.

Genesis: ‘For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.’

All these features are associated with death. The association of these lexical items in this context has the effect of activating those semantic features in their signification which have a common point of reference.

Once this basic association is made, one can go on to impose a more specific interpretation on the poem. We could say that the crow is a black-frocked priest scattering dust on a coffin. The thought of unexpected death and the transience of life make us enjoy the ‘rued life’.

How could we get the learners recognise the association between crow, dust, snow and hemlock tree?

• The learners could be asked to note down as many details about the meanings of these words as possible. They could use a dictionary, if necessary.
• They could also be encouraged to write down the connotative and denotative details.

The learners’ finding could be some thing like the following sort:

Crow: bird organic ugly

animate noisy

winged bird of ill omen

black feeds on dead and decomposing flesh

Dust: inorganic dirty

inanimate particles of matter

dry remains of the dead

Snow: inorganic winter

inanimate frozen vapor

Hemlock tree: tree organic

inanimate poisonous

• Let the learners find out the words which have more or less the same details.
• Let them associate the action in the first stanza with the same in the second stanza.
• The learners could, I hope, be now able to associate the words and interpret the poem.

References

Brumfit, C. J. and Carter, R. A. (1986), Literature and Language Teaching, Oxford: O.U.P.

Lazar, Gillian. (1993), Literature and Language Teaching, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leech, Geoffrey N. (1968), A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, London: Longman.

Short, Michael (1983), 'Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature'

Widdowson, H. G. (1975), Stylistics and the Teaching of Literature, London: Longman.