By İpek Serengil
MODERNİZM VE EDEBİ METİNLER:
DERS PLANI: Şiir İncelemesi
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Hazırlayan: İpek SERENGİL
Sunum Tarihi: 05. 06. 2002
COVER SHEET
Class : Middle East Technical University
Education Faculty
Department of Foreign Language Education
4th year, Section 2
Number of Students : 20
Ethnic Composition : 12 Turkish, 3 Greek, 2 Indian, 2 Russian and 1 Albanian.
Linguistic Composition : Turkish and English are the mainly used languages
Among the students.
Materials : A copy of the poem
And class notes
Methodology : Lecturing and discussion
Subject : The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Pre- learning activity : 1st World War and its effects in Europe are discussed.
Modernism and modernist approaches are presented and
Later analysed during the last four weeks. Also examples
Of modern art, modern writers and novels, short stories
Are analysed through assignments and presentation
Projects.
Aims : 1. Students will see a very typical example of modern
Poetry.
2. Students will be able to transform the theoretical
knowledge into an understanding of the modern era.
3. Students will generate ideas, and express their own
feelings through the poem.
4. Students will make word , phrase and title based analyses.
5. Students will write a single sentence the about what the poem made them feel. It may be about life, death, religion, poetry, technology, nations, wars, God(s)...
LESSON PLAN
Time : 70 minutes
(This is a skeleton plan, the detailed plan will be given in the following pages.)
1- WARM UP ( 15 minutes )
· A guessing game will be played.
· Some major qualities of modernism will be listed in order to revise students’ knowledge.
2- PRESENTATION ( 10 minutes )
· The title of the poem will be announced.
· Before the students see the poem, they write what they think the theme of the poem is- is it a love poem, a terror poem, a war poem, a religious poem or etc?- They make guesses about who the poet is, when it is written, what connection the title creates in their minds.
· The poem will be read once and individually.
3- PRACTICE & LECTURE ( 30 minutes)
· The lecturer will read the poem aloud once with special emphasis on some words and phrases.
· The students will underline the words and phrases which the teacher emphasises, and each of them choose a word or phrase. The phrase or word that is the most favourite among the students will be written on the board.
· The students analyse the poem line by line with the help of the lecturer.
· The lecturer will give some ideas in order to canalise the students to write their own emotions that come out through the poem.
· The teacher will force the students to guess the central theme and the aims of the poet.
· The teacher will give brief information about the poet, poem, Christianity.
4- PRODUCTION ( 5 minutes )
· The students write a short paragraph about their feelings after reading the poem and they draw a picture depicting the poem- it may be a dot, a line an angle, a tree, a wolf, anything.
5- FEEDBACK ( 10 minutes )
· Students’ performance will be evaluated.
· The teacher will get feedback
· Students will be assigned to write a paper comparing a Renaissance poem with a modern poem.
1- WARM UP
· Attendance and Greetings
· The teacher writes a few names on the board: She hangs a picture above each name. There are five names and five pictures. The poets are: T.S. Eliott, W. B. Yeats, Steve Smith, Wilfred Owen and D.H. Lawrence.
· She asks the students to try to attach 20 poems which are written on separate pieces of paper to these poets. The volunteering students go and arrange the board.
· The instructor does not tell if the matches are proper, she then asks the students to guess which poem they are going to study that day. The students make so many guesses and the teacher asks them to conclude one single poem.
· The guessing is ceased for a time, until the instructor announces the title of the poem in the practice phase of the class.
· A “how much do you remember?” quiz is distributed to revise the students’ knowledge of modernism.
· After the quiz of 10 multiple choice questions is applied, the correct answers are given.
2- PRESENTATION
· The instructor announces the title of the poem and its poet.
· The students are asked to write their feelings about this title. They write what it may mean, and what it may be about. They also write a few words that may occur in the poem. They put their papers away for a while, and the instructor distributes the handouts: the poem.
· The students are asked to read the poem once, silently and thoroughly.
3- PRACTICE AND LECTURE
· The instructor reads the poem once aloud and she pays special attention to her intonation. She emphasises the following words: falcon, falconer, anarchy, blood-dimmed tide, innocence, intensity, Spiritus Mundi, desert, darkness, stony sleep. She then asks the students what kind of an atmosphere the poet tried to create in the poem. (Of course it is a dim, chaotic and hopeless poem they would say.) They list the words or phrases that make them think so: falcon, blood, tide, worst, the center can not hold, pitiless, desert, shadows, nightmare, etc.
· The students will then choose the power word or phrase of the poem, they may say: innocence, the second coming, anarchy, shadow and cradle. Each of the students explain their reasons for their choices.
For example: falcon, because it symbolises power. It has great eye sight, it sees what is beneath just like God! But not all the time just like God! We may pray for hours in our desperate moments, however, God may not see our suffering and or but may not help us.
The center can not hold: it is an earthquake, the earth which we trust and believe that it will always support us breaks apart. A disaster is coming out or vice versa. May be something that we have been yearning for, ever since we destroyed, is turning back. Beloved one, innocent cradle, full passionate intensity, falcon, lion body, finally JESUS!
The analysis of the poem in my fashion would take a few complete hours, each of the words even prepositions can be interpreted in countless ways! For this reason I will skip to the line by line analysis that is imagined to take place in the class.
· In this section direct teacher- student talk will be given for the sake of economy.
I: What does the title mean to you? Do you know anything about resurrection- the rebirth of Christ?
S1: Christians believe that Jesus will come back one day to protect and enliven his followers.
I: That is right! May this poem give a message about his coming back? What does Yeats aim at reminding us of Christ’s coming?
S2: I think he wants people think that he sees us, the immense crime we have been committing made him come and warn us. Or perhaps ...er...
I: That is a nice idea. Why not? Or can we say that He is believed to come back when the human race is really at a very bad end. He is believed to create an orderly world again. He may come to help his people who really suffer deeply of their own hatred and wrongs, and lechery, or may be gluttony, or we can count all the seven deadly sins. Do you remember their parade in Doctor Faustus? How they appeared and how they actually reflected our insight.
S3: So Jesus is coming back as human race seems at the edge of all the sins, ‘cause there is no more sin to commit.
I: Wow! Exactly! Ok now let’s go on with the rest of the poem. The circle turns and turns and gets ready for a great event. We decided that the falcon may be Christ, and the falconer depicts the Christians. Things fall apart may mean the decay of all moral values. The earth moves under our feet, threatening us with anarchy. Yes, anarchy comes out, just like an erupting volcano. It is loosed upon, it covers the sky. Do you understand? Can you follow me, or is there anything that you could not perceive?
Ss: No, we are ok.
I: Then, we will go on. The blood dimmed tide may mean the 1st World War, so many people died, so much blood washed the earth (or fed the earth). There is no innocence left, even the babies are born as sinners- because of the original sin. Good people are indecisive, they are frightened, but the bad have nothing to fear. They are full of passion to violate the order more and more.
Now look at 9th line: life seems terrible but still there is a hope: the second coming of Jesus Christ. Now Spiritus Mundi means the spirit of the universe with which all individual souls are connected through the “Great Memory”, which Yeats held to be a universal subconscious in which the human race preserves its past memories. It is thus a source of symbolic images for the poet. Yeats believes that our memories and actually our lives are stored somewhere in the atmosphere. Every single thing is recorded, for this reason past and present are so much combined. Nothing is lost, it is kept, it is still alive.
I: What do you say about this? “Spiritus Mundi troubles my sight”. Any comment?
S5: May it be our past follows us everywhere?
I: Well, why not?
S6: Once a person may like to create a new life for himself, but his past may be bad, though he tries to be good, he may get stuck in his past life.
S7: Just like drugs or Mafia. If you once have a little contact with these, you can never get rid of them.
S7: So immorality is a common sin, it belongs to the whole human race?
I: Ooh, yes, I guess all of you have great ideas. In my opinion it may mean that “Yes we pray to bring Christ back, but the Universal Memory reminds us of our own crime. The spirit comes and tells that “When he loved you with true love, you killed him” This may be what Yeats dreads. He does not want to remember the horrible past. Do we like to talk about good things happened to us or vice versa?
S9: That is logical, but I do not understand the Universal Memory, is it a creature, does it have a shape, that the poet can see it?
I: Well. It probably does not have a shape, but look again at the poem. May the shadow be the appearance of Spiritus Mundi to the poet? Ok. How is the shadow, how does the poet define it?
S10: It has a lion body.
S11: It has the head of a man, so intelligent.
S10: The lion body, I do not know, may symbolise wilderness.
I: Yes, you are going to be great critics some day! What else?
S12: It has a gaze blank, and it is pitiless.
S13: You can forget the past, but you can not erase it. It will remind you of the most unpleasant memories. You may bury your sins in your subconscious, but they are recorded in the Universal Memory.
I: Wow! You are great folks. Ok. Let’s look at the 16th line. A slowly moving lion body with man head, surrounded by real shadows of desert birds. Something slowly moving, is not it horrible, think of it now, you see a thing with real shadows around it. Real shadow, real trouble. It is heavy, it has slow thighs. Desert birds, can you imagine desert birds?
S14: May that mean ravens?
I: What does ravens remind you of?
S14: Death!
S15: They are scary birds, they are first to appear when somebody dies.
I: Spiritus Mundi goes away, and darkness comes back again. People do not realize the darkness, because they are always asleep, they do not have sun, thus they do not know that they are in an eternal night.
S16: It is a spiritual darkness. The sun shines every morning, but it does not heat their souls.
I: Rheumatism, brrrrr. The illness of the century, ha? Stony sleep?
S17: Nothing wakes the people up, they are like dead people in their graves.
I: Very good, so the earth became a total cemetery. Everyone is dead. How?
Ss: Spiritually!
I: The rocking cradle means what?
S18: It is Christ. We are in a nightmare, and since we are stonified we can not get out of this nightmare. So can we call this nightmares as another gyre?
I: If you like of course, we can add this to the list. I will talk about this to Yeats as soon as possible.
Ss: ( laugters, in class conversations)
I: So what happens in the end?
S19: Time comes, or time has come.
S20: The second coming, İt is the time for Jesus Christ’s rebirth.
I: Well, we can talk about the poem for another sixty minutes, but we have some other activities which you will like, I hope.
Ss: Should we form groups?
I: No not necessarily, I would like to see your individual performance.
4- PRODUCTION
* The instructor distributes paper. And asks the students not to write their names, then close their eyes. The teacher once again reads the poem in low tones. After a short period of silence eyes shut, the instructor asks the students to write only one sentence or phrase about what they feel.
· The students finish their writing, only a few seconds are given in order to assure spontaneous performance. The instructor then asks the students to draw a picture on their paper. (It may be anything: a tree, a dog, a flower, a building, etc)
· The papers are then collected, and the teacher, picks a few papers at random. She reads the idea, and shows the picture, they make a few comments on the drawings.
6- FEEDBACK
· The instructor evaluates the class’s performance for that particular day. She pays special attention to give feedback to all of them through eye contact.
· Then she asks the class if they enjoyed the lesson, and what else they would like to do for the following classes.
· Their assignment is given: the students are going to write a contrastive analysis to see the differences between Renaissance poetry, and Modern poetry. They are free to choose their materials, they may include only a short piece of a poem if it is too long, the papers are to be between 5-10 pages.
· The class is dismissed with good deeds.
NOTE 1: This plan may be applied with a break during the lecturing period. However, it is the best not to stop the lesson and move from the subject.
NOTE 2: In the production period if the students do not understand what to do, the instructor may illustrate it, and explain her own feelings.
NOTE 3: As this class is imaginary I can not include the products, only the poem will be enclosed.
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