A Poetry Teacher's Toolkit

Book 2: Rhymes, Rhythms and Rattles

Collette Drifte, Mike Jubb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138176850
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134140091
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Professional poets spend many hours crafting a finished piece of work, yet we expect children in school to sit down and write when they are told to, whether they feel inspired or not. This series of four books is a toolkit to help you build a positive framework for children to read, write, understand and enjoy poetry - to bring a creative spark to the poetry classroom. A combination of featured poems, creative ideas, structured lesson plans and differentiated photocopiable activity sheets gives the series a uniquely flexible approach - which means you can use the materials in any classroom context.

If you're wary of poetry, if you think it's boring, or if you're nervous about teaching poetry, then you've chosen the right book.

Key themes covered in BOOK 2: Rhymes, Rhythms and Rattles are rhythm and rhyme in poetry, sounds, alliteration, words to create effects, onomatopoeia, and metaphor and simile.

Other books in the series are: BOOK 1: Words andWordplay; BOOK 3: Style, Shape and Structure; and BOOK 4:Language and Performance.

1

I Got Rhythm

Featured poems

The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late by J. R. R. Tolkien

From a Railway Carriage by R. L. Stevenson

Extracts from The Song of Hiawatha by H. W. Longfellow

The Pancake by Christina Rossetti

Cool Cat by Mike Jubb

White Knuckle Ride by Jane Clarke

The Last Mermaid by Liss Norton

Daffodils by William Wordsworth

‘Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.’ (John Wain)

Rhythm is basic – it’s programmed into us. As individuals, we were enveloped by the rhythms within our mother’s body (her heartbeat was iambic, as a matter of interest). And we are still surrounded by rhythm, and its cousin … pattern.

We Got Rhythm

Rhythm in your breathing, rhythm in your heartbeat,

Rhythm in your clapping and the tapping of your feet;

Rhythm when you swim, rhythm when you run;

Rhythm in the rising and the setting of the Sun;

Rhythm in the rain, and the chattering of teeth,

Rhythm in a caterpillar measuring a leaf;

Rhythm in a clock, and a telephone ringing;

Rhythm in a waterfall, and songbirds singing;

Rhythm in the wavelets lapping on a beach,

Rhythm in writing, rhythm in speech.

A rhythm may be noisy, or it may not make a sound,

Like the Rhythm of the Stars as they slowly dance around. M.J.

This chapter aims to build on the rhythm work started in A Poetry Teacher’s Toolkit Book 1, ‘Words and Wordplay’: in the ‘Syllables’ section of Chapter 2 and in the ‘Onomatopoeia’ section of Chapter 3.

‘Rhythm’ isn’t synonymous with ‘meter’, of course. Meter is rhythm with rules; it establishes a pattern. But poetry was spoken yonks before any rules were written down. So I don’t think we need to bother Key Stage 2 children with meter in the technical sense: iambs and youambs and pentathingies (especially as I’m not too hot on that stuff myself!). Anyway, it would stifle youngsters, which hopefully is why the National Literacy Strategy doesn’t even mention the word ‘meter’.

John Clare’s Pleasant Sounds (p. 103) is a good example of a non-rhyming poem that revels in the natural rhythm of words, but has no formal meter. However, if kids absorb a ‘feel’ for meter along the way (which of course they do) then all well and good. Absorption is the best way of learning. The more they hear and perform poetry, the more the children will absorb. The more they absorb, the better writers they will be (see A Poetry Teacher’s Toolkit Book 4, Ch. 4).

Here is an example of a ‘found’ poem:

Education, Education, Education

It looks as if my ‘old’ school has fallen

into the Blunkett Pit.

The new Head has,

as I expected,

removed all hope

of a humanitarian, joyous

creative, loving

caring, reflective

experimental, peaceful environment,

in favour of

a point-scoring, rigid,

false, regimented …,

Oh how I could go on.

I got out in time,

and so have half the staff,

but the children can’t.

Those words were written to me by a friend, before the 2001 General Election, as part of an e-mail. All I have done is to set them out so that they look like a poem, and I’ve added the title. When I first read the passage, it ‘called’ to me to be a poem. And I believe that it does work as a poem, partly because it came from the heart, but also because ordinary everyday English has a natural rhythm.

It’s this natural rhythm, and not meter or rhyme, that is the essence of all English poetry (see A Poetry Teacher’s Toolkit Book 3, Ch. 2 for more information about ‘found’ poetry and ‘free’ verse).

But, of course, meter and rhyme do join forces to create the sound patterns in many thousands of poems.

J. R. R. Tolkien was a master of rhythm and rhyme. This is the start of a poem called Errantry from his collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (see Further Reading):

There was a merry passenger,

a messenger, a mariner:

he built a gilded gondola

to wander in, and had in her

a load of yellow oranges

and porridge for his provender;

he perfumed her with marjoram

and cardamon and lavender.

To me, that is exquisite. Without any full rhymes, it contains so much that I’m trying to encourage throughout this series, and to achieve as a writer myself. Apart from its perfectly flowing rhythm, it has near-rhymes, half-rhymes, assonance, alliteration, enjambment (a line running into the next, see below) and a mid-line caesura (the pause after ‘wander in’, see below).

But listing the separate devices doesn’t tell the half of it, does it? Notice how the word ‘gilded’ has both assonance, echoing the earlier ‘built’, and alliteration with ‘gondola’. This is craftsmanship of the highest order. We haven’t reproduced the whole of this poem in our anthology, but we have included Tolkien’s The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late (p. 35).

Before I talk about that poem, however, I want to mention two important terms: enjambment and caesura. If you’re not familiar with the words, please don’t be put off by the sound of them – they’re dead easy, and they can make all the difference to the writing, the appreciation, and the performance of poetry.

Enjambment and caesura

Enjambment is the continuation of a sentence, without pause, beyond the end of a line; in the fragment from Errantry above, for example, ‘he built a gilded gondola/to wander in’. Caesura means a pause or break; it is often highlighted by punctuation, b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• The Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• A ‘Must Read’ Chapter!
• 1. I Got Rhythm
• 2. Is Rhyme a Misdemeanour?
• 3. Sounds Good
• 4. It’s Like This ...
• Further Reading
• Glossary
• Index