Today’s guest blogger is Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on poetry, pedagogy, and popular culture. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from UCLA, and is the author of What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Cornell UP, 1998) and the co-editor of several books, including Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections (UPNE / Brandeis, 2000) and Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (National Poetry Foundation, 2008); his essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, notably Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He has written lesson plans and pedagogical materials for Poetry Out Loud, the Poetry Foundation, and WGBH-Boston, and has been awarded five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to lead summer seminars and school-year workshops on “teaching the pleasures of poetry.”
Years ago at my grandmother’s house, I stumbled on a little Victorian quatrain titled “Constancy Rewarded,” by Coventry Patmore. It’s a tiny piece of Patmore’s book The Angel in the House, which was something of a bestseller back in the days when books of poetry could actually be bestsellers. I loved the quatrain at sight, and teach it often.
We hear of Patmore’s volume now mostly thanks to Virginia Woolf, who noted as late as 1931 that “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” The book itself, however, is long, self-divided, and much more interesting than the caricature that Woolf killed off. The quatrain from Canto XI Book II isn’t stuffy, repressive, or patriarchal. Quite the contrary; it’s positively frisky, if you read it right.
Here’s the poem:
I vow’d unvarying faith, and she,
To whom in full I pay that vow,
Rewards me with variety
Which men who change can never know.
Four lines, one sentence: how do you bring it to life?
One way is to teach the poem through dictation, using a model that Baron Wormser and David Cappella talk about in A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day. As I read out each line, I make sure to note the punctuation throughout and the elision in line one, not least in order to get students in the habit of noticing such things themselves. As Wormser and Cappella write, “they aren’t used to paying minute attention” to a text. Bringing that fact to students’ attention, gently but repeatedly, is one thing that makes dictating poems worthwhile.
To spark discussion, you can take the poem line by line, asking open-ended questions about each before you go on. For example, you may ask: is there anything that puzzles you about this line or anything we need to look up? (The elision in “vow’d” might come up here.) What’s the most interesting word? Is it connected to other words, by sound or meaning? What do you think the next line will do, or be about?
Then move on and add questions about the relationships between the lines to the mix. (Comparison and contrast are your friends and they’re tools your students have used for many years.)
Another approach is to get the whole poem dictated and then ask students about the central contrast of the poem, which is the one between “unvarying faith” and “variety.” This is a fun topic to discuss at the level of idea—the paradoxes of love and sex always catch my students’ attention—but there’s plenty of play between sameness and change in the language of the poem as well, and students enjoy learning to spot what stays “unvarying” here and where the “variety” lives, whether in part of speech (“vow’d” to “vow”), word-length (monosyllable vs. polysyllable), or in meaning and connotation (“pay” vs. “reward”).
The point here is to slow students down, and by the time they’re done, what seems like a dull piece of Victorian piety turns out to be lively, subtle, and memorable.