Eight years ago I was doing a teaching demo for a high school class in San Beda. I taught Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare the to a summer's day") to a group of summer school slackers.
That was a trip.
The tricky part was explaining what iambic pentameter was, and its significance to English literature. I *think* I was able to get the point across, but that event has always been stuck with me so every literature class I teach HAS to have a session on meter. Besides, dropping "dactylic hexameter" in conversations just guarantees weird stares. As in:
Friend: I just saw "Troy" starring Brad Pitt
You: I like reading the Iliad better in the original dactylic hexameter, preferably the Hobbes translation.
Friend: You need to get out more.
If there's anything geekier than a computer nerd, it's a literary nerd.
Anyhoo, prosody is an important part of poetry, concerning itself with how the final product sounds. Most poetry is meant to be read aloud, and care must be taken to make sure it sounds good (or bad, as in the case of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130). This is why we studied schemes like alliteration / assonance and anadiplosis.
In Hardy's "The Man He Killed," rhythm plays a key role, too. Upon reading aloud one automatically switches to a martial beat, like a marching drum. Which is perfect for the peoms' theme: that of war and the general weirdness of the situation for enlisted men.
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2 comments:
Were you able to successfully teach prosody? As a student before, this was one of the hardest things to learn in school. It can be difficult sometimes to see it, let alone know how it is relevant to reading a poem.
Syempre I start with metered poems. Once they get a feel for it, then we look at the rhythm in free verse stuff.
Although they seemed to get the basic rhythm of " A Dream Deferred" by Langston Hughes.
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