Poetry by Heart and Heartfelt
It is Spring, and a person’s fancy turns to –Poetry! The very nature I the burgeoning spring seems to cry out for peotic rhapsody: Ah, the floweres! The colors! The warmth of the sun! Before I get carried away, and try to compose some lyric of my own, I will instead reflect on the part I have experienced poetry playing in Waldorf education.
If your timing is just right you can move from classroom to classroom in the morning at any Waldorf School and hear poetry in every one. The kindergarten children are gathering for their circle of nursery rhymes and seasonal verses. The rhymes and verses bring them into an active world of archetypal professions and gestures. Language is a medium for movement and the children live and grow in it, learning it through imitation, the mode of the youngest children.
In all classes the children learn poems of nature that help them understand even the subtle seasonal changes that mark San Francisco’s yearly rhythms. The first grade is moving like the wind with Christina Rosetti; the second may be creeping like Carl Sandburg’s fog. Later, William Blake introduces spring and Robert Louis Stevenson helps them understand the change in daylight hours. In many classes, the children share teacher-written verses, composed as birthday gifts and reverently memorized and repeated in front of the class once a week.
Poetry is learned along with every new block of study: farming in the third grade brings I Will Go With My Father A-Ploughing; animal study in the fourth: The Tyger; ancient history in the fifth:The Destruction of Sennacherib; Roman Empire in sixth: Horatius at the Bridge. The Romantics may appear in seventh grade as the phase of puberty leads the students into a new relationship to their own emotions; from Shakespeare to 20th-century Americans in eighth grade as they study revolutions through history.
The classes learn choral speaking with the same seriousness they give to their music, and teachers conduct their classes as they would an orchestra. At every monthly assembly, some classes offer glimpses into their work with poetry. Reciting poetry by heart is a holistic endeavor, involving clear thinking in the image-language of the poem, heartfelt love of the sounds and rhythms, and physical perfection in articulation and projection.
It is not long after the first joyful recitations that the children begin to try their own hands at composition. Many address their first efforts to their teachers, and present them as gifts. Whole classes enjoy discovering the essence of an animal, for instance, and distilling it into a poetic image. Or writing odes to the Greek gods and goddesses to be presented at the annual Olympic Games. In whichever class, the children inspire each other, and compose poetry full of charming imagery and surprising depth.
Many classes practice poetry writing in daily journals as part of the 7th grade creative writing block, during which everyone begins to explore the self-expression possible through poetry. Young adolescents, awakening to their thinking capacities, are in a uniquely open and receptive position for the appreciation and creation of poetry. They enjoy sharing their work with each other and discovering themselves through this prsonal art form. Where otherwise they would feel too shy, too vulnerable, in a poetry class they have “permission” to enter into self-exploration and self-expression; they can write their feelings because it is part of class, and then they are free to say it would never be their choice.
The same is true, maybe even truer, in the 10th grade Poetics course, which is scheduled at a time when the students are feeling more at home in the high school, if not yet quite in themselves. They are beginning to look into the world as an ever-changing, complex place, and this course, which explores the history and development of the art of poetry, meets their inner search for undertansing the prosesses at play that make things the way they are in life. Of course, there is also the process of writing, one that can be as complex as each individual students needs it to be for him or herself. I particularly love to teach this block, as it brings the students to a new, deeper appreciation of poetry as an art form and a means of communication. We look at the changing styles of (mostly) English-language poetry through the ages, became familiar with the elements of poetry, such as meter and rhyme, and work with various poetic forms: haiku, sonnet, terza rima, sestina, villanelle, and others. The students learn to recognize poetic language—diction, imagery, theme, voice, tone—and understand poetic meaning—metaphor, simile, personification, synecdoche, metonymy, symbol, onomatopoeia. They also try their hands at writing about a poem in a close reading. Most important, though, they read and write poems. Altogether the block reveals a new depth in their developing thinking as well as sheer joy in language.
Anyone who has language has the possibility of poetry. And poetry can then open up all sorts of possibilities for understanding and being in the world. It can re-awaken us to the delight in nature we had as very small children; it can lead us on the endless and awesome path inward to our deepest feelings. It can bring the joy forever of a well-crafted “thing of beauty;” it can catch us up with a new image, an I-never-thought-of-that freshness. It can put us in touch with our history or culture, our humanity, as interpreted by the word-artists whose visions add to our own, expanding what limits we may have had. And it starts with the morning verses, with the simple, true images of the kindergarten, the love for language that hearing it lovingly spoken engenders, and the learning by heart of beautifully written poems.
~Joan
Joan Caldarera Ed.D. 