XVIII
Oh, when I was in love with you
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well did I behave.And now the fancy passes by
And nothing will remain,
And miles around they’ll say that I
Am quite myself again.– A.E. Housman -from A Shropshire Lad.
Over the last two days, I’ve been trying to focus a little on how different texts can be connected by their shared themes. Poetry is one of the options for students’ presentations during the community meeting every morning, and, to speed things up a little, I’ve been insisting that students have their presentations ready and approved by the facilitator, be it a poem or leading a discussion of one of George Washington’s Rules of Civility, before the meeting starts. Otherwise, I get to choose the poem they present.
So yesterday I chose Shelly’s Ozymandias, and this morning I picked Housman’s Oh, when I was in love with you.
When we do a poem or a rule of civility, the presenter leads a short discussion of the work. For poems this means identifying interesting aspects of the language, but mostly I’ve had them focusing on extracting themes. They’re getting better and better at that with practice, so today I explicitly asked, “What themes do today’s and yesterday’s poems share?”
It took us a while to unpack the two pieces, they had to hear them again, and finally I ended up giving them my opinion.
We need to work on these intertextual comparisons a bit more, but, hopefully, they’ll improve with practice.
I’m considering having them read the lyrics of James Blunt’s You’re Beautiful (the “clean” version) tomorrow, because it fits nicely with the other two poems and a contemporary work might offer them an additional connection to the work. We’ll see.
– Ozymandias – Percy Bysshe Shelly (via poets.org)
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”