Hawk Roosting · Sat Apr 8, 22:59 by Eleri Straker
I was reading an article the other day about Sylvia Plath and it got me thinking about Ted Hughes and the fact that the women who loved him seemed to die. Or to be more specific, committed suicide. Does it mean that he attracted unstable, vulnerable women or was he just impossible to live with? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know, but thinking about Ted Hughes got me thinking about poetry.
I actually like teaching poetry. I love the intricacies of language and form and the fact that nothing is accidental.
I was reading Ted Hughes’ ‘Hawk Roosting’ to a class and as I read it, I remembered ‘doing’ the same poem when I was at school myself. It was in the days of the O level. And I didn’t understand the poem. I answered questions on it in the exam and did very well. But I didn’t understand it at all. I simply wrote what I was told to write. That’s how poetry was taught then. You weren’t expected to understand, simply to learn quotes and regurgitate the notes that the teacher gave you. So I got the required good grades, but it wasn’t my intelligence or intuition that got me the grades, it was my memory.
This is why, many years later, as I was reading Hughes’ poem to the class, I experienced that wonderful ‘got it’ feeling. I understood the poem. Completely. One reason for this sudden illumination was of course the fact that I was so much older. However, the main reason was because I was discussing it with my students. I was asking them for their opinions. Why did the poet use this or that word? Why is it structured like that? This is the usual way I teach poetry. Ask the students and someone, invariably, comes up with a brilliant bit of insight. That way, both the students and the teacher learn. It works every time. It’s a technique that I find works with all literature, whether it be Ted Hughes or Shakespeare. It doesn’t matter if the comments the students come up with are a bit silly or even plain wrong. It should be fun. The English lesson should be an environment where everyone is entitled to an opinion, no matter how daft. This is how we learn. By listening to others and being listened to ourselves. When literature is being discussed or argued about, it’s a living learning process. Had we been allowed to discuss poetry in class when I was in school, and not been afraid of being made fun of or feeling stupid, it wouldn’t have taken me until now to understand ‘Hawk Roosting’!
So I’m going to carry on listening to my students’ take on literature and as the eponymous hawk in the poem says: “I’m going to keep it like this.”
