YourEnglishClassDotCom

Poem of the week: The Darkling Thrush, by Thomas Hardy

The Keatsian image of the thrush produces one of Hardy’s most lyrical poems

At once a voice arose among/ The bleak twigs overhead/ In a full-hearted evensong/ Of joy illimited ... - Hardy

[[Thomas Hardy]] and his thrush belongs to the Romantic tradition, in which birds express emotion in “songs” that inform human lives. Hardy was close enough to the 19th century to be able to present the bird as a symbol of hope for the new century. Later on in his career, Hardy became more, not less, despairing — expressed in the great poem of 1912 about the sinking of the Titanic, “The Convergence of the Twain.”

In 1899, however. Hardy was more optimistic. His dark pessimism had yet to metastasize. I agree with most commentators who consider the thrush to represent the poet himself since he was frail and bird-like in appearance and filled, at the time of this poem’s composition, with an abundant hope for the future.

Let the poet-thrush’s “happy good night air” sing us into the new year, with all my thanks and good wishes to friends old and new.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

In Search of the World’s Hardest Language

Some languages are more difficult than others.

The Economist’s Christmas Special has a wonderful article about difficult languages. What’s encouraging for English learners is the knowledge that, despite what they might think, “English is a relatively simple language”:

“Verbs hardly conjugate; nouns pluralise easily (just add “s”, mostly) and there are no genders to remember.

“English-speakers appreciate this when they try to learn other languages. A Spanish verb has six present-tense forms, and six each in the preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive and two different past subjunctives, for a total of 48 forms. German has three genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”. (Mädchen is neuter, whereas Steckrübe is feminine.)

“English spelling may be the most idiosyncratic, although French gives it a run for the money with 13 ways to spell the sound “o”: o, ot, ots, os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and ö. “Ghoti,” as wordsmiths have noted, could be pronounced “fish”: gh as in “cough”, o as in “women” and ti as in “motion”. But spelling is ancillary to a language’s real complexity; English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled.

So what is the world’s hardest language? The Economist plumps for Tuyuca, of the eastern Amazon:

It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.

Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.

So next time someone complains that English is difficult, tell them to be thankful they don’t have to learn Tuyuca. The article ends with a sobering thought:

Fewer than 1,000 people speak Tuyuca. Ubykh died in 1992. Half of today’s languages may be gone in a century. Linguists are racing to learn what they can before the forces of modernisation and globalisation quieten the strangest tongues. Full article >>

Walt Whitman & Levi’s Jeans

Can you imagine that? A TV commercial for Levi’s Jeans starring. . . . Walt Whitman!

The voice heard in the commercial is from a 36-second wax cylinder recording of what is thought to be Whitman’s voice reading four lines from the poem America. When I watch this commercial, am I supposed to internalize the poem’s message that I am the mistress of my own fate? I’m just not sure if it’s okay to sell jeans using the voice of a man who spent his entire life eschewing commercialism. Sure, Whitman wore jeans, but he wore them because they were the clothes of the rebellious, not because the beautiful people wore them.

Look, I’m all for contemporary reworkings of public domain texts, images, and audio, but perhaps it would be better if the people who typically use this kind material did so outside the realm of crass commercialism. That way we won’t have to guess at hidden agendas. What’s up next? F. Scott Fitzgerald selling vodka?

For more information on this recording, see Ed Folsom, “The Whitman Recording,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 9 (Spring 1992), 214-16.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Robots attack Montevideo

The short video below, was created by Fede Alvarez in Uruguay. It has become such a big hit on YouTube that the director has signed a deal with Sam Raimi’s Ghost House Pictures to develop and direct an original genre project.

Classroom management isn’t easy

A recent article in the Los Angeles Times about the difficulty of managing a classroom struck me as being spot on.

The article was right in mentioning that among the top reasons teachers fail and eventually leave the profession is their inability to manage their classrooms. In fact, according to the Times findings, the vast majority of California teachers who are fired and contest their termination are often cited for poor classroom management.

What can teachers do to manage their classes better? It’s not all that mysterious. As the article points out,

Teachers must be consistent in their message and consequences, lay a strong foundation of expectations early in the school year, follow through with promised punishments when children misbehave and remain dispassionate and unflappable.

Creativity is a Thing of the Past

Last summer I came across a TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson titled Do Schools Kill Creativity in which Sir Ken makes the case for reintroducing creativity into our lessons. Watching his video lecture made me feel that magic would soon happen in my classroom. Robinson’s argument is simple: the most effective workers of tomorrow will be the innovators, the creators, those who march to the beat of a different drummer.

Sadly aware that my profession does little now to encourage the kind of creativity Sir Ken was talking about, I faced a challenge—and I’ve now spent the better part of the last 6 months trying to find ways to encourage creativity in my own students.

Toward this end I have been a complete failure.

Creativity is a thing of the past, Ken—something from another age, an anachronism, a dinosaur in Central Park.

Teachers are rarely if ever encouraged to be creative: Spend a few months in a public school teacher’s shoes and you’re going to discover a job bereft of creativity. It’s all about the tests now. Nothing else.

Sorry to burst your bubble, Ken.

Amazon Kindle Commercial

I love this commercial especially since I love my Kindle. By the way, the song featured is “Fly Me Away” by Annie Little, who is also the woman in the commercial. You can download the song for free here.

Get the latest Flash Player to see this player.

Twitter in the Class

Twitter is more sophisticated than e-mail, just as immediate as text
messaging, as evolutionary as blogging, forces concise writing, promotes a public and safe social networking environment, and is also a powerful search tool. Yet very few school districts and teachers are using it to supplement classroom learning. Ever ask yourself why? Some districts ban the use of Twitter. What have I missed here? Why deskill kids before they even walk in your classroom?