Page 9 - 1916 February - To Dragma

88 TO PRAGMA OF ALPHA 0MICRON PI

THE TEACHING OF T H E LYRIC

H E L E N C. WORSTER, r ' 12 School,

Head of Department of English, Caribou High
Caribou, Maine

I think, whereas we all acknowledge the double aim of teaching
English, as the immediate giving of an ability to speak and write
fluently and correctly, and the ultimate stimulation of thought, culti-
vation of ideas, and development of the emotional nature, we do
not always recognize that different material must be utilized in at-
taining the different ends. The latter aim, making a high school
pupil grow intellectually and morally as his body grows, finds es-
pecially good means in the lyric poem. With an awakening of the
emotions of life, love, fear, hate, friendship, jealousy, as a goal, we
find absolutely no more valuable teaching material than lyric poetry,
because of its very nature. A lyric is primarily a crystallization of
a mood, an expression of some emotion, stirred in the human heart
under a certain stress of circumstances. Surely a most vital means
of building up a thought and emotional world in a young mind is
an introduction which poetry affords to the emotional world of
others.

The real problem is how to utilize the lyric and bring to the
child the delicate thought of the poem without destroying it in the
process. We know the child lacks the knowledge of language and
grammar to read the poem intelligently, the emotional knowledge
to understand the feeling, and the art knowledge to appreciate the
beauty of it. Yet on the other hand we know that nothing deadens
a lyric, deprives it of power to impress and stir, as a detailed and
painful study. The poem becomes useless when it is torn apart.
A pupil cannot appreciate the thought when his mind is burdened
with new grammatical forms and meanings, with allusions, and
with figures of speech, during the period alloted to the reading of
the poem. Too much analysis, a term which might be called too
mach teaching, is like breaking a piece of statuary into bits to see
why it is beautiful, and then trying to disregard the seams made in
putting it together again. Seams, rather than whole bits, have a
fatal fascination for a growing mind. Must we then, to avoid the
evils of an analysis, allow him to read without understanding and
appreciation? Surely not; because he will get nothing from the
poem except the hatred which anything "too hard" inevitably pro-
duces.

From this it is easy to see that a lyric must be neither under-
taught or over-taught. The pupil needs to be helped but helped in