Ars Poetica: "Nuns Fret Not"

[primeideal]

I first encountered this poem during an Advanced Placement English class in high school. The interesting thing about the experience was that it wasn't really a class assignment for discussing or analyzing; we just got it as part of a sample test to practice reading and answering questions about poems. But it was a lot more entertaining to me than most of the stuff we were assigned! A lot of the practice test format (requiring us to answer multiple-choice questions about specific concepts like alliteration or rhyme) felt far from the close reading skills we had to learn in class, and looking back now it feels like the classes themselves taught me little useful for the tests (as compared with something like calculus or European history, where you had to learn a lot of new content within the class itself).

What has your in-school poetic experience been like? Do you enjoy discovering new poetry alongside classmates, or do you read more on your own?

Nuns Fret Not At Their Convent's Narrow Room


Also, if Wordsworth thinks students are contented, he's clearly never been to my college. :p

Comments

[bookblather]

That is a lovely poem, and fairly succinctly expresses my own reasons for writing sonnets. Sometimes it's nice to have boundaries.

That said, my in-school experience with poetry was pretty wretched. We had, IIRC, four steps to follow in "interpreting" the poem, where I preferred to just let it wash over me and convey my immediate impressions. The four-step thing could be useful in some contexts, particularly with poems where I read them and went immediately "wtf," but the ones I liked, the ones that really stuck with me, I never liked having to analyze them the way that we did in class.

In college my experience was a little better, largely because of the amazing Paul Zarzyski, who actually came to our class to read aloud and discuss his poetry with us. It was a lot more free-form and a lot more welcoming of nonstructured interpretation.

[raze]

I think one of my favorite poetry-oriented projects was in college as part of an adolescent ed fieldwork course. We all wrote poetry prompts on pieces of paper, placed them in a basket, and drew. We delivered the poems we wrote the next day to whoever wrote the prompt suggestion. I'm always impressed by what comes out of prompts; the thoughts conjured by a single word or phrase can vary so much from person to person.