Lesson Overview 

Quiz & Reading the Poem Cold

The students have already been quizzed on Shelley - in the last lesson - unless you keep this poem as part of a separate quiz (which I never did).  And it's great to have it out of the way - it allows you the entire period to focus on this poem.  Sometimes - due to lack of time and the fact that the students were working on other things (reading Persuasion or doing the Research Paper) they did this poem cold - I would purposefully tell them not read it when they read the rest of Percy Shelley.

Power Point Presentation

See the notes on the Power Point (or PDF) for much more

I should begin by saying that this Power Point Presentation was the most advanced technologically that I ever created in some 32 years of teaching.  There is audio, background videos, and more. With that said, I have included two versions of that presentation - the huge high tech version - and a smaller, lower tech version as well.  I will admit that none of the dressing (the floating seeds, the moving leaves, the video) are there without a reason.  They are present to help the students with their understanding of Shelley's words.  At the same time, the most important things ARE Shelley's words - and the path that you provide to your students to grasp this poem.  I have copied the notes for the Presentation into both versions (the High & the Low Tech).

Part 1 - Background (slides 1-8)

Before we get to "Ode to the West Wind" it's important to set the scene.  Of course, this goes against so much of what I've said throughout the year about "jumping right into the text."  In this case - it's known - and it's helpful.  Here is a summary of the Ode's background (the first 8 slides):

The presentation opens with a portrait of Shelley and then sets the poem's emotional key with the anonymous medieval lyric "Westron Wynde," one of the oldest ballads in English. A student reads it aloud, and a short exchange gets the class to connect the West with the setting sun and therefore with death, grief, and longing; the same song will return, sung, at the very end of the presentation to close the circle. From there the slides turn to history: the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819, when cavalry charged a crowd of sixty to eighty thousand in Manchester demanding parliamentary reform. Students read the account aloud (a matching paragraph appears on their handout), and a slide on the recent film about the massacre is there for anyone who wants to go further.

The remaining background slides place Shelley and Mary in Italy at the moment of the massacre, and ask students to consider what it meant for a man who believed passionately in the cause to be so far from the fight (he wanted to be there; he felt shut out). The answer the lesson builds toward is that he could not be there, but he could write. A slide from "A Defense of Poetry" gives the famous passage ending "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," with "hierophants" glossed, and the discussion draws out why poets in particular can create change: they see what others cannot and can say it as no one else can. The final background slide adds the private grief beneath the public one: the Shelleys' young son William died in Italy in 1819, the same year the ode was written.

Part 2 - "Ode to the West Wind" (slides 9-26)

The poem is presented a few lines at a time, with each slide pairing Shelley's words with a photograph chosen to match his images, and the notes carry the teacher's questions in bold with the hoped-for student answers in parentheses. (Depending on time, the teacher may read the poem, or have four or five students read it in full before the close reading begins.) Part I establishes the method for the whole lesson: students identify who is being addressed, notice that it is autumn, and catalogue the colors and the dead leaves driven "like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing," then connect all that death and decay to Peterloo and to William's death. The crucial exchange comes at lines 5 through 12, where the wind also carries the "winged seeds," each "like a corpse within its grave," to lie dormant until spring wakes them into color. Students are asked how the seeds differ from the leaves, and that distinction, seeming death that is really a waiting life, is the engine of everything that follows. Part I closes on the paradox students must explain from the poem alone: the wind is both "destroyer and preserver," and the poet's refrain is a plea that it hear him.

Part II lifts the same pattern into the sky: the clouds are leaves shed from the "tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean," and the rain and lightning rise like "bright hair uplifted from the head" of a Maenad. The presentation includes a classroom demonstration here that makes the metaphor unforgettable: a long-haired student comes to the center of the room and, with permission, a friend holds that hair straight up over their head, next to the storm photograph on the screen. Students then work through "dirge," "sepulchre," and the image of the storm as a tomb vaulted over the dying year, with the refrain returning at "black rain, and fire, and hail." Part III carries the wind's power down into the Mediterranean, waking the sleeping sea beside the volcanic pumice isle of Baiae and reaching all the way to the sea floor, where even the "oozy woods" of the ocean tremble at its voice.

Part IV is the turn students need to notice: the poet stops describing the storm and begins to wish himself into it, as a leaf, a cloud, a wave. The lesson connects this to childhood, when outrunning the wind "scarce seem'd a vision," and most students admit to having stood in an open field on a windy day with their arms out, imagining they could fly. The questions then press on "sore need" (Peterloo, his son, his distance from the action), on "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" and on the "heavy weight of hours" that has chained one who was once "tameless, and swift, and proud." Part V resolves the plea: make me your lyre, as the forest is. In both versions of the PowerPoint an Aeolian harp appears behind the words and plays, and students work out that the poet will be the instrument and the wind the inspiration, and that his sadness is not something to be lifted away so much as used to deepen the song's "autumnal tone."

The close of the poem is where the lesson delivers what the teacher's notes call the "goosebump moment." "Drive my dead thoughts over the universe / Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth" sends students back to the seeds of Part I, and line 65 names the means: "the incantation of this verse," the poem they are reading. A photograph of a present-day social-justice protest follows (teachers are urged to substitute one that will speak to their own students), and then the ashes and sparks of lines 66 through 68, with students reasoning out why ashes (the burned-out poet) and what ashes do for growing things. Here both versions of the presentation play a short video about Sanel Mehmedovic, a student at the teacher's school who created a program bringing live plants to children in hospitals and who died the year the video was made, offered as a living embodiment of Shelley's words. The lesson ends on the final couplet, "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?", read as prophecy and as comfort (it landed especially hard when read together at the height of the pandemic), and on a photograph of snowdrops, the first flowers of spring, which ties back to the Carpe Diem lesson.

Part 3 - Epilogue (slides 27-32)

The presentation closes with biographical material that the teacher reads aloud from the notes, letting the images carry the slides. Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia in the summer of 1822 when his schooner, the Ariel, was caught in a storm on the way back from visiting Byron and Leigh Hunt at Livorno. His body washed ashore days later and was cremated on the beach at Viareggio with Byron present; a volume of Sophocles and a copy of Keats's poems were found in his pocket, the Keats doubled back as if put away in a hurry. According to legend his heart would not burn, and it passed from Hunt to Mary Shelley. His ashes sat for months in the British Consul's wine cellar in Rome before burial in the Protestant Cemetery there.

The final turn belongs to Mary. When she died in 1851, Shelley's heart was found among her belongings, wrapped in a page of Adonais, his elegy for Keats, and a slide gives that poem's line "No more let life divide what death can join together." Then the "Western Wind" ballad from the second slide returns, this time sung by Steeleye Span, so that the lesson ends where it began, with grief and longing on the west wind. The last slide simply repeats "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" over a photograph from the day the presentation was given.

The Poems & an old epigraph

I have included below, both a PDF of my notes for discussion, written directly on the student poem handout, and a Power Point (also in pdf form) with the notes  embedded on the Power Point – my take is in italics, the questions are in bold face, and possible (good) answers are in parenthesis.  

As always – for all of the poems – you can either have a student read the entire poem (asking for volunteers) or if you are short on time – just the lines that are up on the screen (if you're doing the Power Point). If a student reads the entire poem first, then the teacher can read these poems when they ask the questions.  What follows is just a short sentence or two on each of the poems covered.

The Epigraph from John Gardner's Grendel.

The first slide after the biographical material has the epigraph from the first novel we covered in this course, John Gardner's Grendel. "And if the Babe is born a Boy / He's given to a Woman old, / Who nails him down upon a rock, / Catches his shrieks in cups of gold."  See the linked lesson for more on how we originally covered it.  For this lesson, it's important and illuminating:  They have just read about John Keats's tragic short life - and the epigraph suggests that the reason he was able to create such "gold" (beautiful verse) has something to do with the tragedy he lived through.

"When I Have Fears that I May Cease to Be"

This naturally follows the epigraph.  Again - see my notes below (in the Power Point and separate) for details on the poem - but suffice it to say that Keats relates his fears that he will die before he experiences either having written greatly (fame) and/or romance.

"La Belle Dame Sans Merci" - Acting out a tale of love and deception

Unless you are teaching remotely (see below) you will want your students to "act out" this poem.  You won't have a lot of time, but the stanzas that the students are acting out are very short - so the students won't need a lot of time to get ready.

Putting Students in Acting Groups

           Quickly - I usually did this by pointing or by rows and it took under a minute - divide the class into Six Groups.  Group 1 gets stanzas 1 & 2;  Group 2 gets stanzas 3 & 4;  Group 3 gets stanzas 5 & 6;  Group 4 gets stanzas 7 & 8;  Group 5 gets stanzas 9 & 10;  Group 6 gets stanzas 11 & 12.

Preparing their Acting out the Poem

           Next, tell the students that they will have 5-8 minutes to prepare their two stanzas for presentation.  Remind them they should all be involved - they can one narrator if they wish and the rest act - but OVER THE TOP is always good.  They want to make their short scene come alive.  They should also touch base with the group that comes after them so that there is a smooth transition.  Because this is close to the end of the year - they will have done this kind of acting out of poems (the first was "The Seafarer" all the way back in the Anglo-Saxon era) many times.  

           Announce when 2 minutes is left to make sure they've planned an interaction with the Group after them.

Acting it Out

           Remind them that they are now (except for those performing) an audience - and all planning and talking is over.  Get the first Group up in the front of the room - and announce that the Group that follows the one performing should be up and ready to go on - it will all go quite fast.  Also tell them to hold their applause until the end and all Groups have performed.

When its Done

           You won't have a lot of time to discuss the performance - but make sure you ask:

• What happens in this poem (Literal before Figurative)

• What happens to the knight - ultimately?

• How can you link it to the previous poem, "When I Have Fears" and to Keats;s life?

"Ode to a Nightingale"

Whole Class Reading & Discussion

   This is how we covered this poem the last few years of my career.  Two years remote - and one year in person.  It is such a beautiful, dark, poem - that given what was happening during the Pandemic, it made sense to make sure that I, the teacher was a part of the discussion - gauging and helping guide the students as we read the poem aloud in class.  It also helped that the periods were longer - we were able to do 1) The Biographical Material   2) The first two poems (when we came back to in person, I switched back to having the students act out "La Belle Dame sans Merci" (see above)  3) Reading aloud - and discussing, as we went, "Ode to a Nightingale".

For the discussion you can use the Power Point (below) for focus - having a student (just go down the rows) read what is up on the screen and then talking about what was just read.  I have included my notes (questions, answers, comments) for each of the "Ode to a Nightingale" slides - and I have also included below my handwritten notes (there's a lot more there) that I wrote directly on the poem.

Group Work

     This is an alternative to doing "Nightingale" as a class read & discussion.  It is one of my best Group Works - but in the end I still believe that I prefer the Discussion outlined above.  This is a different kind of Group Work - it is designed to be used with a "cold reading" of both "When I Have Fears" and "Ode to a Nightingale".  Much like when they worked in small groups for reading aloud parts of Macbeth and Twelfth Night - the students will, within their groups, take turns reading aloud the poem -then stop and answers the questions related to those respective lines.

There are also two extra-credit assignments.  The first is to consider the poem "Bright Star" by John Keats and relate to "When I Have Fears" and "Ode to a Nightingale".  The second is to watch the film "Bright Star" about the life of John Keats and answer a question.