What Do You Envision?

Adapted from “Draw the Argument” by Barclay Barrios of Florida Atlantic University.

When I have my class read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” I begin discussion by telling the students to form groups of four and draw the poem together. Often, this is met with a bit of surprise and confusion; but eventually students sit together, read the poem, and draw a picture. Once the groups have finished, I ask one member of each group to re-create the picture on the board. We evaluate the pictures and then return to the poem for further discussion.

While this exercise may seem like a simplistic way to approach the poem, I think it’s a valuable way to bring students into the discussion – and to highlight their ability to actually interpret poetry – because:

1. Drawing the poem encourages students to re-read the poem. So often students read poems quickly and don’t spend time deciphering the imagery and the figurative language. If they don’t get it immediately, they give up. My students tell me that poetry is “too hard” and that they’re not good at “reading between the lines.” This exercise can disabuse students of that notion: While drawing, my students are able to make sense of much of the poem without my intervention.
2. Drawing the poem encourages students to look things up. My experience with this particular poem is that students do not know all of the words that Shelley uses, and that they haven’t looked in the dictionary or at the footnotes. We can use this exercise to reinforce the idea that using outside resources to increase the understanding of the poem is the student’s responsibility. In class, I encourage students to use their smart phones to look up words they don’t know. Once they know, for example, what a visage is, they can draw a fair portion of the picture. Without looking this word up, they’re at a total loss about the traveler’s story.
3. Drawing the poem engages multimodal learning. I think that as people who study and write about literature for a living, we sometimes forget that not everyone focuses on language immediately and comfortably. Having students engage with literature in a variety of ways has the potential to help them gain appreciation for language, even if it’s not something that they’re primarily invested in. Constructivist educators suggest that students learn best when they can build upon what they already know. For the literature classroom, this means that we should try to engage students in modes of thinking that are comfortable for them. Some students think concretely, yet language is inherently abstract. Some students learn visually, others kinesthetically. This exercise allows us to engage all of those ways of thinking and learning.
4. Evaluating the drawings allows the students to determine what they understand about the poem – and to note what they missed. Frequently one or two of the groups will include cacti in the picture. And my students almost always miss the fact that the speaker of the poem (the “I” of the first line) is not the person describing the statue. Both of these errors open up the opportunity to turn back to the poem and to talk about not only the important details (the traveler went to Egypt; the statue is of Ozymandias – more commonly known as Ramses II), but also the implications of those details. For example, we talk about the importance of ancient Egypt for the Romantics and about the narrative layers in the poem.

I’ve brainstormed a list of other commonly taught poems that would work particularly well with this exercise. Here’s a start:

• Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “My Last Duchess”
• Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”
• Emily Dickinson, “I Like to See It Lap the Miles” (any Dickinson, really)
• Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz”
• Rita Dove, “Daystar”

What would you add?