Poetry in the language

classroom
Susan Ramsaran

The aim of this article is to demonstrate how poetry may be used in

language classes to develop the students’ knowledge of English.
Extracts from various poems are analysed to illustrate different
linguistic features: the extracts are chosen to assist with (1) phono-
logical matters of pronunciation, rhythm, and intonation; (2) vocabu-
lary; (3) grammar; and (4) meaning. For more advanced students there
are examples of poems which contain interesting colloquialisms or
features of style. It is suggested that teachers choosing poems for
classroom study should bear in mind the specific language points that
may be illustrated through each. The article ends with brief demon-
strations of the way in which linguistic exercises may be based on a
nonsense poem and the way in which close linguistic analysis may con-
tribute to the enjoyment of literature.

When a poem is studied in terms of technique, the students’ attention is

focused on a collection of linguistic features. Students will need a sophisti-
cated knowledge of the language in order to interpret a difficult poem. But
before they reach that stage, carefully selected poetry may perhaps be used
to help develop their knowledge of the language. I should like here to
suggest some ways in which a teacher of English might use poetry to this
end.
Linguistic concepts Defined in linguistic terms (taking into account only the technical aspect of
poetry), poetry is deviation from the norms of the language. The types of
deviation which I shall consider here are: (1) phonological (the most
concrete), (2) lexical, (3) syntactic, and (4) semantic (the most abstract type).
Graphological deviation (5) is of minor importance, and stylistic deviation
(6) may affect any of these five levels and often involves register-mixing.
(The term register is used here in the sense of Halliday et al. ( 1964) : style in a
one-to-one relationship with use.)
Phonological deviation commonly takes the form of marked pattern-
ing, the most obvious example being that of rhyme, which is repetition at
regular intervals of stressed syllables containing the same vowel and con-
sonant phonemes in the same sequence. (This definition accounts for the
difference between ‘feminine rhyme’ (e.g. saying and sewing), where the
repeated syllable is unstressed, and ‘pararhyme’ (e.g. round and hand),
where the vowels differ though the consonants are the same.)
Rhymes (and other similar types of patterning) introduce the important
concept of parallelism (partial correspondence between pieces of text) as
seen in
Where-e’er you walk, cool Gales shall fan the Glade,
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a Shade,
Where-e’er you tread, the blushing Flow’rs shall rise,
And all things flourish where you turn your Eyes.
(Alexander Pope, Pastorals II)

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articles welcome
 Nowottny (1962:1l-12) shows how regularity is established by parallelism
before the sequence of subordinate and main clauses is finally reversed.
This reversal is a good example of foregrounding, the drawing of attention to
a particular element of the poem by means of a deviation.
These concepts of deviation, parallelism, and foregrounding are impor-
tant in studying poetic structure and are discussed in detail in Leech (1969).

Examples of teaching Winnie the Pooh’s poetry relies heavily on rhyme to establish a structural
material pattern whilst the line length varies. A class need not be very advanced to
Phonological features enjoy using this sort of verse for intonation practice:
Three cheers for Pooh!
(FOr who?)
For Pooh -
(Why, what did he do?)
I thought you knew;
He saved his friend from a wetting! . . .
Well, Pooh was a Bear of Enormous Brain .
But he managed to float
On a sort of boat
(On a sort of what ? )
Well, a sort of pot-
So now let’s give him three hearty cheers
(So now let’s give him three hearty whiches?) . . .
(from Anxious Pooh Song by A. A. Milne)1
The rhyme forces the reader to put the intonational nuclei on appropriate
words. The nuclear tone can then be varied at will in order to experiment
with the way in which different attitudes are conveyed by various intona-
tion patterns. In the terms of O’Connor and Arnold (1973), a high rise in
the question For ‘who? would be suitable for a casual query; whilst a high
unstressed prehead followed by a low rise -For ,who? could indicate
incredulous amazement that Pooh of all people should deserve three
cheers. (The rhyme also reminds the class of the normal conversational
form who.) Similarly, the two occurrences of well invite the reader to
attempt different intonation patterns: in ‘Well, Pooh was a Bear of
Enormous Brain’ the well is a conversational introductory word, probably
unstressed and low pitched; but in ‘On a sort of what? Well, a sort of pot’,
with an intonational boundary after well, one might read ‘well with a firm
high fall preceding the explanation or “well with an apologetic correcting
fall-rise.

Lexical deviation The lexical innovation whiches in the Milne poem reminds us that lexical
deviation often takes the form of neologism, perhaps by extension of rule
application. For instance, the pattern adverb + past participle implies
repeated activity, as in highly-praised actor, often-quoted words, much-neglected
play, and has been extended to the humorous coinage Henry VIII, OUrmuch-
married king. (Fifth-hand (in 10 below) is another example of lexical innova-
tion by extended rule application.)
z Ilay in an agony of imagination as the wind
Limped up the stairs and puffed on the landings,
Snuffled through floorboards from the foundations,
Tottered, withdrew into flaws, and shook the house.
(from Old House by Peter Redgrove)2
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 This extract illustrates the type of poem which may be used in a very simple
way to assist language learning. Vivid descriptive poetry offers a good
opportunity to enlarge vocabulary. The teacher can explain the difference
between limp and totter, the precise nature of snuffling and the out-of-breath
puffing that foll ows the exertion of limping upstairs. This would be a
refreshing change from learning lists of vocabulary; and as a bonus, the
student may have memorized some English poetry to help him or her
remember the connotations of these verbs in a context.

Syntactic deviation The third extract also contains vivid description. The adjectives bare, gaunt,
and stark suggest the harshness of Evans’s life.
3 Evans? Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
With its wood fire, where crickets sang
Accompaniment to the black kettle’s
Whine, and so into the cold
Dark to smother in the thick tide
Of night that drifted about the walls
Of his stark farm on the hill ridge.
(from Evans by R. S. Thomas))
What linguistic features are responsible for the effect of isolation or vulner-
ability that we feel? Perhaps all the cold and the darkness sweep on over us
because of the single sentence with its run-on lines. The metaphor (tide
drifted) is subdued, suggesting both mist drifting and the relentlessness of
the sea.
This type of analysis is the traditional method of the literary critic. But,
while appreciating the poem in such terms, the more advanced student
might consider whether this could really be speech. The poem appears at
first sight to be written in the English of ordinary conversation: it sounds as
if we have come in in the middle. Again, the student has to decide whether
to read the first word with the high rise nuclear tone of an echo question or
with a more searching fall-rise (“Evans. Is that who you mean? Well. . .).
However, the verb tenses are not those of normal speech. The simple past
conveys an impression of continuity: it was always like this and also on any
one occasion it would be seen like this. The poet avoids choosing either, and
we are left to decide what might replace come, sang, and drifted in non-poetic
language. (Perhaps would come, were singing or used to drift.)

Semantic deviation The essence of metaphor is lexical or semantic deviation as in the ‘moun-
tain stamped its foot’ of the fourth extract. The ‘foot of a mountain’ is a
dead metaphor brought back to life when stamp, which requires an animate
subject, is used to describe the shuddering of the ground in a thunder-
storm.
4 Below, the river scrambled like a goat
Dislodging stones. The mountain stamped its foot,
Shaking, as from a trance. And I was shut
With wads of sound into a sudden quiet.
I thought the thunder had unsettled heaven,
All was so still.
(from God’s Little Mountain by Geoffrey Hill)4

38 Swan Ramsaran

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 Students of language can learn much from identifying the ways in which
such lines differ from the standard norms - the metaphoric deviation here
and the morphological deviation where the adjective quiet is used as a
noun, as is dark for darkness in the third extract - but they can also learn
from the ways in which the verse exemplifies standard use. For instance, the
adverbial use of below is indicated by the comma, which reminds students
that they must use pause and intonation appropriately. They can then
contrast this reading with the sentence ‘Below the river lay a fertile pasture’,
where below functions prepositionally, a fact which must be indicated in
stress and intonation.

Colloquial expressions In the fifth extract below, John Betjeman catches the fashionable jargon of
a modern variety of spoken English in a metre which does not deviate from
a perfectly possible conversational rhythm. The concentration of imprecise
expressions gently satirizes the get-ahead, bombastic young executives who
over-use them and (for our purposes) it provides a memorable illustration
of the flavour and features of this type of English.
5 You ask me what it is I do. Well actually, you know,
I’m partly a liaison man and partly P.R.O.
Essentially I integrate the current export drive
And basically I’m viable from ten o’clock till five.
For vital off-the-record work-that’s talking transport-wise -
I’ve a scarlet Aston-Martin - and does she go? She flies!
(from Executive by John Betjemam)s
Modern poets often show an interest in language per se, as is imme-
diately apparent from the title of John Wain’s Poem Without a Main Verb
which begins
6 Watching oneself
being clever, being clever:
keeping the keen equipoise between always and never;6
Foreign learners of English are likely to find much that is of interest in
linguistically self-conscious poems like this; here for instance, they may
widen their knowledge of English phrases. For example to the native
speaker keen equipoise suggests ‘balancing on a knife edge’.

More complicated W. H. Auden’s command of the syntactic subtleties of spoken English in a

syntax stanza like the seventh extract could very well provide the starting point for
a class on a particular grammatical topic, in this case on tenses or modal
verbs. (‘Should you have troubles’ suggests ‘if by chance you have’; ‘we will
hear it’ conveys marked willingness in contrast to the normal spoken future
with going; ‘pets will die’ implies that they persist in doing this.)
7 Should you have troubles (pets will die,
Lovers are always behaving badly)
And confession helps, we will hear it,
Examine and give our counsel :
If to mention them hurts too much,
We shall not be nosey;
(from For Friends Only by W. H. Auden)7
The beginning of Mustée des Beaux Arts (8) demonstrates the way in which

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 English uses syntactic ordering for information focus, here the preposing
of the adjunct ‘about suffering’ for prominence and the anaphoric they
preceding its referent The Old Masters, whom the poet praises
appositionally.
8 About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or
just walking dully along;
(from Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden)8
Students need to have attained a high degree of competence in handling
English syntax before they can appreciate the syntactic ambiguity in (9).
9 And quietly the children wait,
Their eyes shining like knives
Brightening the fading world
Through which I daily walk
My grown uncertain way from life to death.
(from The Children by Clifford Dyment)9
IS grown an adjective (=adult) or the participial residue (=become) of a relative
clause: ‘my adult, uncertain way’ or ‘my way which has become uncertain’?
The latter would involve only deletion (of which has), while the former is
syntactically more complex. Although the overall meaning does not change
with the different linguistic analyses, the effect of the syntactic ambiguity is
one of foregrounding, which attracts the reader’s attention to this phrase.
Walk . . my way is another deviation from the norm: walk here would
normally be intransitive, the transitive alternative being perhaps make my
way. Possibly walk my way conveys a deliberate pacing through life but with
the increasing uncertainty on which these syntactic devices make us focus.
It is not often possible to limit the analysis of ambiguity to a single
linguistic level. For instance, in Canticle for Good Friday10 Geoffrey Hill says
‘The cross staggered him’. This is not an easy play on words for the
foreigner to appreciate immediately: the deviant transitive use of staggered
in the physical sense needs to be pointed out. Then the teacher may explain
‘he was staggered/taken aback/amazed/astounded by [?the weight of] the
cross’ with the different nuances or stylistic uses of each.

Stylistic deviation A poem may be chosen for study specifically because it is mixed stylistic-
ally, as are extracts (10) and (11). (10) exemplifies the language of casual
conversation sandwiched between the informal narrative use of impersonal
you and the formality of the resounding conclusion with its heightened
language as rhyme replaces pararhyme.
10 Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph :
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.
(from Poetry of Departures by Philip Larkin)11

40 Susan Ramsaran

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 Interaction of 11 my sweet old etcetera
linguistic levels aunt lucy during the recent
war could and what
is more did tell you just
what everybody was fighting
for,
my sister
isabel created hundreds
(and
hundreds) of socks not to
mention shirts fleaproof earwarmers
etcetera wristers etcetera, my
mother hoped that
i would die etcetera
bravely of course my father used
to become hoarse talking about how it was
a privilege and if only he
could meanwhile my
self etcetera lay quietly
in the deep mud et
cetera
(dreaming,
et
cetera, of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera)
(by e e cummings)12
E. E. Cummings is, of course, famed for his graphological, and especi-
ally for his syntactic, deviance. Here in (11), in addition, he uses etcetera
(which would once have been considered an unpoetic word) with serious
intent. The use of etcetera here constitutes lexical deviation, as it is used as
understatement to avoid the emotional cliches that Aunt Lucy etc. use -
until the end, when it is capitalized to refer to all that is most private and
precious.
This poem offers a good exercise in advanced syntactic analysis. The lack
of punctuation forces the reader to deduce which clauses are parenthetic,
for instance and what is more did. If the main clauses can be read alone, it
will be found that the basic structure is very simple: ‘My sweet old Aunt
Lucy could tell you . . . My sister created hundreds of socks . . , My mother
hoped that I would die bravely. . .’ Then, does of course belong with bravely
or with the following clause ? Rhyme offers the answer to this:for alone
comprises a line rhyming with earlier war (and, incidentally, this reminds
the English learner to use the strong form /fo:/ if it occurs at the end of a
clause), and so one is prepared for the internal rhyming of course and hoarse.
Hence the intonational boundary comes after course; so of course refers to
bravely. The arrangement of the lines enables the reader to disentangle
apparent syntactic ambiguities such as ‘if only he could . . .’ If only he
could what? But we soon realize that this question arises from a misunder-
standing because the line-final position of he invites the reader to put con-
trastive stress on he: I should die bravely and ‘if only ‘he could’.

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 Conclusion I hope that this brief survey. has begun to suggest ways in which selected
poetry may be used in teaching English at different levels. Where a poem
reflects conversational spoken English, it might be used for rhythm and
intonation practice. Where it deviates in any respect from everyday English,
the deviation may be used as a point of departure for discussion or drill
concerned with any chosen grammatical structure. It may be used for
expanding vocabulary at the simplest level or for distinguishing between
near synonyms which differ stylistically.
Finally, perhaps we can use a synthesis of all these linguistic observa-
tions in two separate ways.

Contribution to Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem Jabberwocky13 ingeniously obeys the

linguistic understanding linguistic rules of English.
I2 ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogroves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
A serious attempt to interpret the poem could provide the advanced
learner of English with a sophisticated linguistic exercise. Simply reading it
aloud would test whether the student knows the rules that relate spelling
and pronunciation. Outgrabe must be /greib/ not /graeb/ or /gra:be/, for
instance; and why do I spontaneously read gyre with a /ds/ but gimble with
a /g/? A syntactic analysis tells us that slithy is an adjective qualifying toves, a
plural noun. We can produce numerous grammatical sentences using the
unknown vocabulary : ‘How slithy were the toves?’ ‘The toves are rather
slithy today!’ ‘Seen any good toves recently ?’ ‘There was one gimbling with
a ram’ Morphologically, several of these words show features which pre-
dispose us to assign them to particular grammatical categories, especially
the adjectives ending in -y. It is interesting that the -le which historically is a
mark of frequentative verbs (such as wriggle) leads us to feel that gimble is a
rapidly repeated action. (Hesitate would be an unlikely synonym, whereas
wallow or flutter might be possible.) This leads to semantic speculation and
so the student can draw on his knowledge of all aspects of the language.

Contribution to literary The second approach might be to analyse a more serious poem, perhaps
appreciation something like Browning’s Summum Bonum:14
13 All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:
All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem:
In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea:
Breath and bloom, shade and shine, - wonder, wealth, and - how
far above them -
Truth that’s brighter than gem,
Trust that’s purer than pearl, -
Brightest truth, purest trust in the universe - all was for me
In the kiss of one girl.
The first two lines illustrate parallelism, both syntactic and phonological,
whilst the reversed order of the structures in the third line exemplifies fore-
grounding. (The absence of a verb is, of course, syntactic deviation.) Thus
the patterning builds up the reader’s expectations, causing him to ask what
this is leading up to. There is a change in rhythm as we move from the
wonders of the natural world towards the climax. Then follows a further

Susan Ramsaran

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 shift from comparative to superlative adjectives (brighter/brightest,
purer/purest), a shift which again is foregrounded by the preceding
parallelism. Because the poet has established the complex patterning so
firmly, the reader awaits with anticipation the rhyme on the final word, girl.
In this way it should be possible for a student to use his or her develop-
ing linguistic knowledge to interpret and appreciate literature. •
Received December 1981

Notes
1 Anxious Pooh Song pp.145-6 in A. A. Milne The 13 Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll; p. 127 in The New
World of Pooh, Methuen Children’s Books 1958 Oxford BOOkof Light Verse.
(Winnie the Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner in one 14 Summum Bonum from Asolando by Robert
volume). Browning; p.667 in The Poetical Works of Robert
2 Old House by Peter Redgrove; p.214 in The New Browning, Oxford University Press 1940.
Poetry edited by A. Alvarez, Penguin, revised
edition 1966. References
3 Evans by R. S. Thomas; p.80 in The New Poetry. Halliday, M. A. K., A. McIntosh, P. Strevens (eds.).
4 God’s Little Mountain by Geoffrey Hill; p.200 in The 1964. The Linguistic Sciences and Language Teaching.
New Poetry. London: Longman.
5 Executive by John Betjeman; pp.255-6 in The New Leech, G. N. 1969. A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry.
Oxford Book of Light Verse compiled by Kingsley London: Longman.
Amis, Oxford University Press 1978. Nowottny, Winifred. 1962. The Language Poets Use.
6 Poem Without a Main Verb by John Wain; p.126 in London: The Athlone Press.
The New Poetry. O’Connor, J. D. and G. F. Arnold. 1977. Intonation of
7 For Friends Only by W. H. Auden: Part 9 of Thanks- Colloquial English (2nd ed.). London: Longman.
giving for a Habitat; pp.134-6 in W. H. Auden
Selected Poems, Faber & Faber 1968. The author
8 Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden in Selected Susan Ramsaran is a lecturer in phonetics at Univer-
Poems. sity College London. After graduating in English
9 The Children by Clifford Dyment; p.228 in The Language and Literature from King’s College
Chatto Book of Modern Poetry 1915-1955 edited by C. London, she taught as a temporary lecturer in India at
Day Lewis and John Lehman, Chatto & Windus Isabella Thoburn College, Lucknow. With an MA in
1959. Modern English Language and a PhD in Phonetics,
10 Canticle for Good Friday by Geoffrey Hill; p.204 in she has varied research interests, particularly in
The New Poetry. stylistics and intonation. She has taught on a number
II Poetry of Departures by Philip Larkin; p.99 in The of residential courses for foreign teachers of English
New Poetry. run by the University of London and the British
12 my sweet old etcetera p.32 in 100 selected poems by Council. She is pronunciation editor of the Oxford
e.e.cummings, Grove Press 1959. Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English.

Poetry in the language classroom 43

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