Plath poems??

nicmc

Hi all,

Looking for a little advice if possible. I have just started looking at the poetry of Plath with my Higher Level group and cannot decide which poems to focus on. Another teacher advised me to cover the ordinary level ones incase a student drops down later on and now I can't choose which ones to do.

I would normally study six poems and just can't decide which Plath poems to concentrate on. What poems do students normally respond well to??

Thanks in advance:)

siulach

I generally try to pick out the poems by theme to enable students to create links between them in their answers. I group the poems into three or four themes, for instance
Motherhood/ Plath's attitude to her role as a mother: 'Morning Song'; 'Child'
Femininity/ Self-perception: 'Mirror'
Plath's attitude to poetry/ her presentation of herself as poet/ nature:
'The Arrival of the Bee Box'; 'Black Rook in Rainy Weather'

I normally start with 'Morning Song' as I feel it gives a good insight into some of the complexities of Plath's character; I then look at 'Black Rook' and link it to 'Bee Box', as both poems can be read as explorations of the creative process, and in both cases images from the natural world are used as a means by which Plath explores her own creativity, and I think they tell us a lot about Plath's viewpoint on life. Next, I go on to 'Mirror'. Here, I generally focus on the form of the poem - how stanza one mirrors stanza two, and I love exploring the malevolence of the persona Plath adopts here. I think this is a great poem in helping to connect Plath's poetry to the real world, to our obsession with appearances. I pick out one other poem depending on the classes own interest, I gauge which poems they seem to have responded best to and go with that. Then finally, I finish off with 'Child'. I think it links back well to 'Morning Song', but is so much darker, and I ask the students to think about what the root cause of the darkness in the poem may be, referring back to the other poems we have read. (I ask them not to read the biography until the very end of our study of Plath, as I like to let her poems speak for themselves)

As for covering the pass course, I generally gauge that based on how many potential pass students I have in front of me. I'd try to cover at least one pass poem per poet in any case.

I guess though, English being the subject that it is, a lot of it has to come from the type of class you're dealing with.

Hope this helps!

implausible

siulach wrote: »

I generally try to pick out the poems by theme to enable students to create links between them in their answers.

+1, great advice here. You should include the pass poems in this. What are your colleagues doing? It's written into our Dept policy that OL material is covered to allow students to move between levels.