For our final exam text, we are finishing off our study of poetry, focusing on war and nature poems. Of course, since poetry is poetry, it’s also all about love and death. What else would you write a poem about? Or, in the parlance of today’s teens…. “Because, poetry.”
Since several students missed our study of Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” (a war poem about how horrible it is for the young men sent to fight and die in World War 1), we began our lesson today with the students who were in class teaching those who had missed out. It was pretty impressive to hear the students use the jargon of poetry analysis, throwing “metaphor” and “juxtaposition” around like literary bosses. Based on today, we won’t have any doomed youth in this class when it comes to the exams!