Molly Peacock Sample Poetry Circle

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A SAMPLE POETRY LESSON FOR A POETRY CIRCLE IN A HIGH SCHOOL CLASSROOM

I am in the midst of building a new part of this website devoted to creating Poetry Circles in High School Classrooms. A step-by-step guide to incorporating the Poetry Circle into any high school classroom will be available, as well as step by step lesson plans.

In the meantime, I offer you a poem that you and your students can wonder and conjecture about. It is the coolest poem in English that I know, and it is ten centuries old, at least. It is the first known poem in English by a woman. This poem, with the unlikely title of "Wulf and Edwacer," has a story that makes students drop everything and listen.

After the poem is an essay I wrote about it. The essay is chapter four of my book How To Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle (New York: Riverhead Books/Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999).

Instructions for the Poetry Circle

A Time Flexible Plan

This Poetry Circle is designed in three fifteen-minute segments for a total of 45 minutes. It can be broken down and used separately in two or three different classes, or used as a whole. It works any way you have time to try it.

Segment One (15 minutes) Introducing the Poem in a Poetry Circle

1. Actually arrange the chairs in the classroom in a circle, or the desks in a square, so that students have to look at one another. The teacher can stand and walk around the classroom, or sit with the students, depending on how you like to manage the class.

2. Tell the students that the chairs are arranged in a circle for which there is no preparation necessary on their parts. It's a Poetry Circle, but it's not the usual way to talk about poetry.

3. If you have time to prepare it, pass around a fortune cookie size paper to each student. The tiny piece of paper should give the first three lines of the poem. If worse comes to worse, and you can't prepare, write the three lines on the board. The fortune cookie papers work a lot better, though. Here's what it should say:

"The men of my tribe would treat him as game:
if he comes to the camp they will kill him outright.
Our fate is forked."

4. Tell them these lines were discovered written at least ten centuries ago, anonymously. If they had a chance to write three anonymous lines, what would they write? Say they don't have to tell you, they just have to think the lines. They should be something really important, some truth they really would want other people to know.

5. Now turn to the three opening lines. Here are some questions to help you:
a. What does it mean to be "treated as game"?
b. Have you ever been treated as game? (Every high school girl has been treated as game, so this is a fascinating discussion to have.)
c. If you treat other people as game, what does that make you? A hunter? And under what circumstances would you treat someone as game?
d. Do you think they really would kill someone who came to their camp? Why, do you imagine, this could happen?

6. The aim of these questions is for you to guide the discussion, but not too much, because all students have responses to these questions. Let the talk unfold a little, then reign it back in towards the words of the first three lines.

7. Tell them that these are the first three lines of an ancient poem. Use the essay below as a resource for yourself in giving them information. Ask them who they think might be writing the poem? What does "Our fate is forked" suggest?

8. What is "forking" anyway? A path forks, a fork has prongs . . . . If fate is forked, what does that feel like? Have you ever felt fated to be with someone? How does that feel? Have you ever felt attracted to someone but known the circumstances were impossible for you to be together? How does that feel?

9. Now go back to who wrote the poem. What is the gender of the poet? After a bit of discussion you can tell them that scholars think the poet is a woman because of the pronouns in the Old English text.

These questions are fun because scholars regularly argue over their meanings and implications. The students can really engage with the mystery of what’s going on - because none of us really knows. We only have this text to guide us.

10. Fifteen minutes will probably have passed by now. You may have to turn to other things in the class. That’s fine. Keep the rest of the poem for another time. It will keep, it really will.

Segment Two (15- 20 minutes) The Poetry Circle Chats About the Poem

1. Before the class: It's time for you to read the essay below. It's short, and it will tell you what you need to know about the poem to talk about it in the class.

2. Now's the time to pass out copies of the whole poem.

3. Ask at least 2 people to read it aloud.

4. Continue the gender discussion by asking them who they think the "I" is. What kind of woman? What rank? What status? Scholars conjecture that she was the wife of a chieftain or king. What kind of personality do they think she had? Where in the poem might point to her personality? She's lonely. "Wulf is on one island, I on another." She’s stuck. "“Mine is a fastness. The fens girdle it." She's the kind of person who obeys the rules to survive, but she also obeys the adage "if you can't be with the one you love, then love the one you're with." That helps her survive, too. "It was rainy weather, and I wept by the hearth, / thinking of my Wulf's far wanderings;/ one of the captains caught me in his arms. /It gladdened me then, but it grieved me, too."

5. Now ask them who they think Wulf is. Tell them it was very unusual for an Anglo Saxon man to be named after an animal. This should really inspire talk in the class, because no one really knows who Wulf is. Is he her lover? Or is he her son? What does it mean that he is a whelp? (Read the essay below for conjectures about Wulf.) Remember to remind them that all we have is the poem to link our ideas to. They have to keep coming back to the poem for their evidence. What kind of emotion drives her to repeat his name? "Wulf, my Wulf, it was wanting you." Have they ever been made sick by their feelings? What has made her "hollow" at heart?

6. Now, who on earth is Edwacer? Ask them who they think Edwacer is. (This is also spelled Eadwacer, and it’s pronounced Ed-Whack-Er.) Her husband? Her chieftain? Both? Her lover? (Read the essay below for other conjectures.) Why does she demand that he hear her, and call him by name?

7. How about that line "What was never bound is broken easily"? Could that mean that the relationship is illegitimate, that a child is illegitimate? What was "never bound"? The song. What does two people singing the same song suggest? Remind them that these translated words are all we have. We must keep going back to the words to begin to have a clue about what’s going on.

8. Ask them what they notice about the consonant sounds of the beginnings of words, especially the "c" sounds of come, camp, and kill, and the "f" sounds of fate and forked, fastness, fens, defended, fiercest. Then ask them what they notice about the vowels at the beginnings of words, like is, island, and I. Tell them to keep the sounds in mind as they talk about the poem. If they're interested, tell them that this is alliteration, and the poets who spoke their poems in Old English used alliteration more than rhyme. They emphasized the beginnings of words and created a rhythm to match.

9. Tell them that poet in Old English is scop (pronounced shope), and that scop means maker. Not singer, not teller, but maker. The poets thought of their poems as made objects, like pots, tools, or things. Ask them if this poem would be better if it were all mushed together in to prose, or better in lines.

10. Depending on how much more time you want to spend on the poem, you can ask them whether they hear a pause in the middles of the lines. (See the essay below, and the commentary about caesuras.) Depending on how the discussion is going, you have either gotten to fifteen minutes, or you are well into the next period.

Segment Three: (10-15 minutes) Explaining the writing assignments.

A. The Expository Assignment:
Writing about a poem is not like writing about a novel or a short story. You don't have to have a thesis and supporting evidence. Instead, you have to notice things about the language and the emotions and the narrative, and show that what you’ve noticed could be right because of actual words in the poem you can quote. Write about a page or so, (about three to five short paragraphs), giving your opinion about these three questions that came up in the Poetry Circle.
1. Who wrote the poem, in your opinion? Which lines helped you decide?
2. Who is Wulf? And who is Edwacer? Which lines helped you decide?
3. Why would the poet repeat "Our fate is forked"? Is there any benefit from repeating?
4. How do you feel about "What was never bound is broken easily, our song together"? What kind of song is it? What helped you decide?
5. Did you have a strong reaction to the poem? What line or lines produced that strong reaction?

B. The Creative Assignment:
Write a poem with a refrain like Our Fate Is Forked. Look how there are a few longer lines, and then the refrain. Yours doesn't have to be Our Fate is Forked, it can be very different, but it needs to have two important words that sound the same, or alliterate. Make it short, no more than twenty lines. Your repeat line can be something like Our Life is Lonely, or Our Fate is Famous, or This Boy is Brilliant, or My Dog is Dead. Anything can make the poem, but you have to have that alliteration, and repeat it at least once, and tell a bit of a story in the poem. But, leave what happened a little mysterious.

A QUEEN SENDS AN S.O.S.
(chapter four of Molly Peacock, How To Read a Poem and Start a Poetry Circle, New York: Riverhead Books/Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999)

WULF AND EDWACER

translated by Michael Alexander

The men of my tribe would treat him as game:
if he comes to the camp they will kill him outright.

Our fate is forked.

Wulf is on one island, I on another.
Mine is a fastness: the fens girdle it
and it is defended by the fiercest men.
If he comes to the camp they will kill him for sure.

Our fate is forked.

It was rainy weather, and I wept by the hearth,
thinking of my Wulf's far wanderings;
one of the captains caught me in his arms.
It gladdened me then; but it grieved me, too.

Wulf, my Wulf, it was wanting you
that made me sick, your seldom coming,
the hollowness at heart; not the hunger I spoke of.

Do you hear, Edwacer? Our whelp
Wulf shall take to the wood.
What was never bound is broken easily,
our song together.

Anonymous
(10th century)
(from The Earliest English Poems, translated by Michael Alexander, 3rd ed., Penguin, 1991)

In some moments of desperation we are thrilled by hope, spurred by a lunatic urge to build a signal fire from our lonely island, lured by the thought of someone, anyone, who might read our message. More than a thousand years ago, the wife of a tribal chieftain, a now anonymous queen, was driven to send an S.O.S. in verse form. It is the Old English poem we now call "Wulf and Edwacer" (pronounced Ed-wacker). And it is due to only one man that we hear her passionate voice, the first evidence in English of a poem composed by a woman. Composed is hardly the word for it - she belts out her poem, then she keens. Hers is a thrilling cry - it makes you want to respond to the emergency immediately, even though you’d be centuries late.

If central casting sent us someone to staff the medieval 911 lines, of course we’d be sent a monk. And a monk, also anonymous, is exactly who saved the queen - or at least saved her poem. This monk was a copyist. One day he sat down to copy out his favorite poems - his talismans - making his personal anthology, and among his chosen was what became known as "Wulf and Edwacer." We call him the Exeter scribe because what he wrote eventually became a gift to Exeter Cathedral from its first bishop, Leofric, who died in 1072. Scholars date the manuscript to 60 or 70 years before Leofric became bishop. If that anonymous scribe had not followed his own affinities, we would not have this poet’s voice. Only one person saved her. Nowhere else, not in one single other book, or box, or pamphlet is this poem recorded. If we believe that acts of charity only become great acts when they are anonymous, then the anonymous rescuing of this rich, clear, anguished voice surely qualifies.

As a university sophomore I was consumed by the Middle Ages, enamored of their spiritual glamour and physical depredation. There love and death were viscerally intertwined, as I distinctly felt sex and the soul were. Sex was rampant among the barbarians who were gnawing chunks of greasy fowl roasted over the fire in the Great Hall, washing it down with mead in one hand and a wench in the other, just as monks in the monastery next door were furiously preserving wisdom with their calligraphy, restored by their herbal remedies after they'd exhausted themselves with Gregorian chants. In Medieval Lit class I was caught in the sexy rasp of the voice of this queen who was rescued by a monk. (Scholars presume from the grammar that she is a woman, though occasionally someone argues otherwise.) The "I" of her voice gave the chasm of time an instant glow of passion - unabashed adultery and motherhood and loss. She cried out the unvarnished truth of her life in a form of English so old that I had to depend on a translator to read it.

Ambiguity, if you can live with it, is like a delicious web of clues. The anonymous "Wulf & Edwacer" poet may not have been a queen; in fact, she may have been the wife of a tribal chieftain, but scholars let us know for sure that she understood the rules of poetry in her day well enough to break them, even as she knew the social rules - savage in her savage time - well enough to break those, disastrously, too.

Medievalist Jane Toswell, Professor of English at the University of Western Ontario, informs me that "Wulf" was probably in existence well before the Exeter Book, in an earlier, more oral era. And she reminds me of all the many translations of the poem. Scholars have passed the manuscript along like a love note, and in the traveling through so many hands the sense of some of the original vocabulary has been blurred. For instance, there are words we don’t know because they are mentioned only once, and the context is unclear. Translation of our own language is like tracing our family tree, a wonder of discovery and frustration.

We barely recognize written Anglo Saxon (the root of English) as resembling our language, so we cannot read this vigorous and romantic poem without help. Yet in a translation the translator’s voice - and soul - twines about the writer's. It is like a doubling of that aspect of the poem that makes us its talisman even as we make it ours. A translation takes our own souls, as readers, and intertwines them with the poet. The degree of depth and suddenness of our connection depends on the ease of the translator's ventriloquism.

I have read many other, perhaps more accurate, translations of "Wulf," but Michael Alexander's is my favorite because it gives the flavor of how poems were constructed in Old English while standing on its own as his creation. He seems to climb inside that ancient voice with his very first line, The men of my tribe would treat him as game. Immediately he sweeps us into her tribal world of chieftains, before the Christian conversion, the world of hunt and game - and the hunted. We know there is a one - a man - who is against the many, hopelessly so: if he comes to the camp, they will kill him outright. Plunged into a world of wandering and makeshift camps, where little is stable, and certainly not location, we hear this voice telling us of the rules, the laws that make things cohere, and if those laws are broken, the sharpest penalty will be extracted. These first lines always seem cold and damp to me as I try to imagine the weather, the humidity of blood sport, and try to imagine the absence of a roof over my head, and what, in the absence of the couch I sit on and the curtains at my window and the books snug in their cases, I would cling to. What, in the world of objects, would she attach to? A few beads? A patch of cloth? A rough enameled pendant like the ones rescued and displayed in the British Museum?

To the speakers of our language in its ancient roots, the sounds of the beginnings of words are the most important. To hear those "f's" of Our fate is forked is to hear with their ears and to be mesmerized by alliteration, the repetition of these beginning sounds. The front sounds are the teeth and lips of English, the mouth of English, beginning its growl, its moan, its low song. Old English poetry is shaped from word beginnings. We heard the "c" sounds of come, camp, andkill, but it is in the half line (which Alexander indents) that the "f's" of fate and forked come to pierce us, for now we know the extremity of the poet's situation: someone to whom this speaker attaches great importance will be killed if he comes to her. To want what is denied to you is the underpinning of most lyric poetry, and the foundation in English of the lyric lament.

This poem in typeface does not look the way it does in the Exeter book. The scribe wrote it in paragraph form, squashing it between his margins. Here the translator gives the sounds room - hoping to emulate how the poet spoke it. A spoken poem shows us how the tongue makes words - and it’s nice to remind ourselves here that "poet," or scop, which is pronounced "shope" in Old English, means maker. The translator tries to show us how sophisticated medieval alliteration works in the next line, Wulf is on one island, I on another. We learn just how separated Wulf and the speaker are by words that begin with vowels. Vowels are the emotional parts of the alphabet that come closest to moans and cries. (Alliteration of vowels is called assonance. When consonants create patterns from their like sounds, this is called, not surprisingly, consonance.) Her voice is so urgent as it comes through the translation that you almost don't notice Alexander’s "i's" and "o's," but they are very much there, and so are the "f's" in the next two lines: Mine is a fastness: the fens girdle it / and it is defended by the fiercest men.

Most poems we read hug the left margin of a page. A medieval poem acts as if the lines were centered on a page, with an empty trough going down the middle, something like this:
---------------------     --------------------
-----------------------------      ------------------------------
-----------       -----------------
      ------------------------      --------------

There is a stop much deeper than an ordinary pause in the middle of every Old English line, and that deep deep pause is called a caesura. The alliteration of a line always relates to that deep pause. The two loudest syllables (the stressed syllables) on the first part of the line begin with the same letter, and one of the two loudest syllables after the caesura pause also alliterates. Alexander makes it easy when he explains that every Anglo Saxon line has this pattern:
Bang Bang Bang Crack
Here is the bang, bang // bang, crack sound in the next line:
If he comes to the camp (Deep pause) they will kill him for sure.

Then the poet adds her own design, the repeated half-line, Our fate is forked. This repetition, found nowhere else in the poetry of her time, makes her lyric the first lament in English. Professor Toswell tells me that the quirky and refreshing use of repetition is one of the reasons that scholars understand this poem to be whole and not a fragment.

To be literally camped on two islands makes the problem of Wulf and the speaker even worse. Hers is a fastness; her camp is there to stay, and she is locked into its customs. The fens (marshy bogs) wrap it tight as a belly is wrapped in a girdle, which makes you wonder about the connection between fen and defense - or fence. Some scholars feel it is Wulf who is imprisoned, that it is his island which is girdled. Perhaps they are both imprisoned, each on their own island. She tells us excitedly how deep the defense of this island is, and how surely Wulf will die if he approaches, and their fate will wrench them apart. To evoke what is not present is one of the jobs of the maker, the scop, and this poet wields her repetition wand. Repeated sound, because it insists on its presence, can bring the disparate together, even envision the disappeared, creating a union in spirit.

By now we are sure that Wulf must be a lover, torn from the speaker as lovers often are. After all, the poet says, splicing together for all time the connection between inner and outer weather: It was rainy weather, and I wept by the hearth,/ thinking of my Wulf's far wanderings. Miserable, she opts for substitution : one of the captains caught me in his arms. More than a thousand years after she composed her poem, we still seek the advice, the model, of the woman who knows what she needs and seeks to have it, even though, as we all learn from our own experiences, the substitute never really replaces the lost love. As she admits: It gladdened me then; but it grieved me, too. Her life force bursts from the poem, a living female who inverts the juicy Hollywood stereotype of the barbarian and his wench. This wench has her purposes, and acts on them. This wench has her barbarian - and she can admit her grief. Scholars don't dispute this part of the poem; the language is stunningly clear.

When grief enters the poem, the sickness of the need unmet, she calls out to Wulf, reminding us that poetry itself has been called "the art of naming." Until now she has been speaking to us, telling us her story. But when she recognizes her pain she calls directly to him. Wulf, my Wulf, it was wanting you / that made me sick, your seldom coming,/ the hollowness at heart. We take it without question that Wulf must be a lover, one who seldom comes to receive the passion that this clearly passionate woman can bestow. And it is that "hollowness at heart" that has made her sick, not the hunger I spoke of she says in Alexander’s phrasing. But what is this hunger? Is it the gift/game hunger for actual food (treat him as game) she speaks of earlier in the poem? Is the hunger not directly in the poem but only a reference to private conversation with Wulf? What does she mean?

Now we, as readers, helplessly overhear another address, for she turns to speak to another man, Edwacer. Reading these last two stanzas is like overhearing emotional tumult through the wall of the next apartment. Huge figures thunder at one another, beseeching and imploring, but the wall muffles everything they say. Besides, they’re not neighbors we know. We may never even have seen them in the hall. Who are they? What is their context? How do we locate them and their feelings? Context is what the scribe of the Exeter Book did not supply us. Do you hear, Edwacer? the poet says, as if to a husband (for it is often husband types who fail to hear). Our whelp / Wulf shall take to the wood. What? Wulf is a whelp? A pup? A child? Isn't he a lover? Do we have the situation wrong? But maybe whelp can be a term for a young pup, a weaned wolf . . . . Surely the original Old English will tell us. Quick, e-mail Jane Toswell.

The word whelp, the professor replied, has confused scholars as much as it confuses us. Some say Edwacer is the poet's husband, a chieftain who has expelled her lover Wulf from the camp. Others hold that Wulf is the poet's son. A student of hers is sure that Edwacer is the forbidden lover, and Wulf the bastard child the poet bore him. The student takes as her proof the phrase of the next line, What was never bound. We all turn the story of Wulf toward our own lives and fantasies, listening, overhearing, through the plaster of centuries. Trying to hear the original voice through a translation makes that wall even denser. Alexander takes a great liberty with the first line of the poem, The men of my tribe would treat him as game. The Old English words quite literally mean "The men would welcome him as a gift." What kind of a gift? The ironic kind? Scholars have associated the word “gift” with food, and Alexander makes what for me is an appropriate leap.

When scholars struggle over seemingly insignificant details, they are acting as our Exeter scribes, preserving, explaining, re-constructing. Translators of ancient texts are like restorers of paintings, aiming to reveal the original vibrancy of the colors of language. We cannot know the intention of the poet, but we can explore the palette of words she had at her disposal. But nothing in that palette gives a clue about whelp.

Could the use of whelp mean that motherhood has been the passion that drives the poem? Has what we have interpreted as romance been the adoration of a mother for her son? And who are we to assume that romantic love exists in a culture such as this? One thing we can be certain of is the poet’s desperation. The vibrance, the virulence of her distress, comes to us in the calling of those names Wulf and Edwacer. Wulf is an unusual name in Old English, Jane Toswell says, where people were typically called the names of human characteristics, like "Redbeard," not the names of animals. So this man Wulf is a mysterious stranger merely by the fact of his name. But no matter what an individual name signifies, we know for sure that the imploring of a person by name is a distress call. This is an emergency - a tragedy, even.

We hear the tragedy spoken out loud, with an intensity that has never been clouded with question, no matter how many questions we may have had about the circumstances. Now we as readers get to experience the clarity of her full, final acknowledgment: What was never bound is broken easily, / our song together. But what has not been broken is the poet's attachment to us, the readers of her lament. Through the fine hand of the Exeter scribe, we have her song, we are bound to her song, if not to her story or her circumstance. Her cry upsets us, even over the chasm of time. This is the force of poetry, even in translation - especially in translation, for Alexander is our Exeter scribe, preserving her emergency in the words of his S.O.S.

Translators are heroes because they try to find ways out of the bind - the fen - of the term equivalence: should they be true to the literal words, or to the truth they feel lies within them? We are lucky to know the past through the grace of these caretakers, scholars and translators. Here is a soft final thought, a kind and fleecy thought. Perhaps our own times, and perhaps even our voices, will be re-invoked by the cybermonks of the third and fourth millennia. Who knows? They may even find clear meanings for Anglo Saxon words that escape us now. But we hope our feelings will surge through any words they can't decipher. The communicative energy of poetry, even without all its vocabulary, is what the anonymous poet demonstrates so regally - the power of our fiercest desires.

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