Classroom Metaphysics

Most literature for children assumes a quality of perception in its audience that literature for adults must create: what T. S. Eliot, in speaking of the metaphysical poets, called "the direct sensuous apprehension of thought." Most non-children have lost this capacity, in part at least as a result of the enforced segregation of responses that modern education has deemed basic to its process. Perhaps, though, this is changing. In the theatre these days the audience is being asked to become part of the play. In the classroom a similar process is taking place: students are demanding a more complete experience from their subjects—the real meaning of that unfortunate word "relevance"—that is, they want classes to become part of their lives.

With this in mind, the following activities are designed to provoke a more unified and immediate response to literature. Unorthodox as they may seem, all have been tried on classes of varying size and make-up and found to be surprisingly successful. After all, the study of this literature, especially, need not be such a deadly earnest thing. A sense of fun adds new dimensions of understanding. Readers can participate in a way that could not be done—or could it?—with the works of say, Henry James or Norman Mailer. And, just as the fusion of the Man and the Intellect suggests the metaphysicals, so also does the relationship between humor and high seriousness in learning. Yet another poet on the metaphysicals, Robert Brooke, in his essay on Donne, speaks of the way in which Donne's "lack of solemnity" serves to "heighten the sharpness of the seriousness."

Fables

1. 1. Try writing your own, based on your own experiences.

2. 2. Have the class do spontaneous doodles expressing what they take to be the essence of particular fables—to help develop awareness of the levels on which fables work.

3. 3. Develop and build luminous paper mobiles of the fable creatures. During lecture on the subject have them set in motion, illuminated with black light, in darkened classroom. The effect is disturbing and comic at the same time (like good fables)—a fluid series of chance encounters among characters, which helps release imaginations crimped by rigid abstractions and, like animated prehistoric cave paintings, offers a sort of hallucinatory "trip" into the primitive regions of the imagination. The student is helped to do the kind of active visual imagining that younger children (and great visionary adults) do and therefore enjoys a more complete response to the magic of fable.

4. 4. Do charades of the fables.

5. 5. Write some fables to indicate changes in moral values since Aesop or to "up-date" the morals.

Rhymes

1. 1. Athletes and exercisers skip. To feel the rhythms of poetry and prose as one feels music or dance, try skipping the Mother Goose rhymes, Lear's limericks, your own rhymes, skip-rope rhymes.

2. 2. Write your own rhymes.

3. 3. Write a limerick.

4. 4. Search out the bits of Mother Goose rhyme in current popular music.

5. 5. Track the themes of protest, loneliness, and love from Mother Goose rhymes into current music.

6. 6. Do a choral reading of Lear's "Akond of Swat," with the leader reading the stanzas and the group shouting the two-word question in each stanza.

7. 7. Do an extemporaneous pantomime of Thomas Campbell's "Lord Ullin's Daughter." (Almost every word of this poem lends itself to pantomime, and should be played in an exaggerated way, with nineteenth-century Delsartean gestures.) Choose a "Chieftain," a "bonnie bride," a "lover," "horsemen," and a "boatman." For props use blankets as costumes for the men, an old curtain for the bride, a piece of heavy tinfoil to make thunder, a tin tub as a boat, a broom as an oar. Two volunteers can create the thunder and also swing a sheet to represent waves.

8. 8. Chant Kipling's "Road-Song of the Bandar-Log," "The Law of the jungle," and "Hunting-Song of the Seeonee Pack." The group should beat out the rhythms by tapping their fingers on table tops or desks and should shout the choruses.

9. 9. Play the traditional play-party games which "sprang from pagan...