AS Level Poetry

Lesson 1: Introduction to Poetry 1 – revision

Main aim: To revise the basics of poetry and Resources needed:

their effects and to enjoy the poetic experience
Worksheet 1 (Stimulus text: The choric song
Key concepts: Language, form, structure, from The Lotos-Eaters by Tennyson),
genres, context, style, interpretation Presentation 1, written classwork and homework
research tasks

Slide projector

Students will need coloured markers

Skills: Reading and discrimination, scansion, Relationship to coursebook:

poetic language
Poetry: AS Units 1, 2, 3 and 4
AOs covered: AO1: Poetry response with
understanding and appreciation of relevant
contexts AO2: Language, form and structure;
AO3: Informed, independent opinions and
interpretations; AO4: Communicate a relevant,
structured, supported response

Preparation
Reread Units 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the coursebook.

Method
1 Tell the class that they are going to revise ‘What is a poem?’ and have some fun doing so.

2 Put up the first slide. Run through each verse in turn, judging its effectiveness as poetry. You
could say that verses 1 and 2 are trite, with simple rhymes; even the birthday wish sounds
superficial.

3 Ask for contributions. Rhyme, metre, alliteration, assonance, diction, tone and overall
effectiveness should be considered.

4 Allow students to work in pairs to formulate the answer to whether each of the verses
illustrated can be described as poetry, with their justifications.

5 Choose students to read out their answers, discussing as a class, and adding contributions
from the whole class.

6 Put up the next two slides. Slide 4 has three short poems (two others are in Unit 1 of the
coursebook, but the Tennyson will be new to them).

7 Ask the pairs of students to say what they feel about the effectiveness of these poems.
Encourage comparison with the previous ones. Switch slides again as necessary.

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 For verse 3, you could say that the Mothers’ Day sentiments may be heartfelt, but the rhythms
are very awkward with too many syllables for the basic regular metre in lines 3, 5 and 6.
For verse 4, you could say that line 2 has too many syllables, and the final line has the
notorious grammar error using ‘I’ instead of ‘me’. (That is the question for you; that is the
question for me; so when you add them together it should be that is the question for you
and me.)

8 Written work: Classwork

Write a paragraph in which you try to define the elements that should be in a poem,
however short.

9 Homework: Research
i Ask the students to find some short poems that they think are effective and copy them
out to share with the class next time.
ii Write out the lyrics of a favourite song and decide whether it can be described as a
poem if you remove the musical elements from it.

10 Additional homework task: Imaginative response

Remind yourself of the essential elements of the haiku and write three of your own. (Show
Slide 4 to the students.)

11 Follow-up activities
Read some of the imaginative responses of the class and post these up in the classroom.
Ask students to share the poems they have found and choose one to be ‘Poem of the Week’.
Towards the end of the course, you might like to ask students to enter their own poems for
‘Poem of the Week’. Have a full discussion of song lyrics. Perhaps raise the issue of Bon
Dylan being given the Nobel prize for Literature!
You may find some other verses in greetings cards, song lyrics or similar to share with the
class. A useful area for encouraging discussion is that of sincerity of feeling. Some of the
greetings cards have unquestionably sincere, and even heartfelt, feelings behind them but
are nonetheless expressed in trite and clichéd words. Does this matter? If you get a soppy
verse on Valentine’s Day, do you think ‘but this isn’t good poetry’?
Haiku is defined with examples in Unit 4 of the coursebook and on Slide 4. This would make
a good class communal contribution/discussion and is very good for practice in counting
syllables.

12 Further reading
Songs of Ourselves 1 and 2, Cambridge University Press
Anthologies of poems; for example, The Rattle Bag, edited by Seamus Heaney and
Ted Hughes.
Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley

13 Useful websites
The Poetry Archive is a site on which poets read their own work; this is relevant to all the
poetry lessons in this teacher’s resource.
Haiku is a useful interactive site.

Differentiation
This may be a first lesson and it will take time to become clearer who needs more assistance and
who is confident, by the end of the lesson.

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 Supporting students
 Read all examples aloud with particular emphasis on metre to assist appreciation.
 Group less confident students with more confident students for pairwork.
 Give extra attention to the concept of ‘atmosphere’ with examples from the class.

Challenging more confident students

 Let confident students read poems out loud.
 Create pairs using a confident student as lead.
 Give opportunities for research on appropriate short poems.

Worksheet 1 answers

1 Read the poem for the students emphasising the repeated sounds.

2 i alliteration: sweet, softer; waters, walls; granite; gleaming, and so on.

ii assonance: blown, roses; tir’d eyelids; sweet sleep; stream, weep.
iii onomatopoeia (words whose sound echoes their meaning): shadowy, cool, craggy.
Deciding whether the sound of words echoes their meaning is a matter of preference,
but always worth a discussion because it forces students to articulate the words to make
their point.

3 ababcccdddd. The gradual building up of the rhyme has an incremental effect until you
reach the last four lines, all rhymed. It is difficult to think of a better example of the effects of
rhyme.

4 The last four lines gradually increase in length and all rhyme, using a long ‘ee’ sound, which
has a slow and sleepy effect. Even the words inside the line, ‘stream’ and ‘leaved’, although
spelt differently, have the same sound, and build up to the final important word ‘sleep’. The
Lotos Eaters have given magic fruit to the sailors so that all they want to do is rest and stop
all their usual activity.

5 Hypnotic, slow, sleepy, soporific, relaxing, and so on.

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