Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips, and Cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods and Becks, and wreathed Smiles
Such as hang on Hebe’s cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek;
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides. …
Go on: just read it to them. They won’t know who Hebe was, but you can tell them later. The metre is taking hold of them (in my experience the metre of “L’Allegro” can be relied upon to grip children) and anyway they can see “Laughter holding both his sides”: they recognise it as if they saw the picture. Go on steadily:
Come, and trip it as ye go,
On the light fantastick toe;
And in thy right hand lead with thee
The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty;
And, if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew—
Do not pause and explain what a Nymph is, or why Liberty is the “Mountain Nymph”! Go on reading: the Prince has always to break through briers to kiss the Sleeping Beauty awake. Go on with the incantation, calling him, persuading him, that he is the Prince and she is worth it. Go on reading—
Mirth, admit me of thy crew,
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreprovèd pleasures free;
To hear the lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-towre in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise.
At this point—still as you read without stopping to explain, the child certainly feels that he is being led to something. He knows the lark: but the lark’s “watch-towre”—he had never thought of that: and “the dappled dawn”—yes that’s just it, now he comes to think:
Then to come, in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good-morrow,
Through the sweetbriar or the vine
Or the twisted eglantine;
While the cock with lively din
Scatters the rear of Darkness thin;
And to the stack, or the barn door,
Stoutly struts his dames before:
Oft listening how the hounds and horn
Cheerily rouse the slumbering Morn,
From the side of some hoar hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill:
Sometime walking, not unseen,
By hedgerow elms on hillocks green,
Right against the eastern gate,
Where the great sun begins his state,
Robed in flames and amber light,
The clouds in thousand liveries dight;
While the ploughman, near at hand,
Whistles o’er the furrow’d land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his sithe,
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.
Don’t stop (I say) to explain that Hebe was (for once) the legitimate daughter of Zeus and, as such, had the privilege to draw wine for the gods. Don’t even stop, just yet, to explain who the gods were. Don’t discourse on amber, otherwise ambergris; don’t explain that “gris” in this connection doesn’t mean “grease”; don’t trace it through the Arabic into Noah’s Ark; don’t prove its electrical properties by tearing up paper into little bits and attracting them with the mouthpiece of your pipe rubbed on your sleeve. Don’t insist philologically that when every shepherd “tells his tale” he is not relating an anecdote but simply keeping tally of his flock.
Just go on reading, as well as you can; and be sure that when the children get the thrill of it, for which you wait, they will be asking more questions, and pertinent ones, than you are able to answer.
IX
This advice, to be sure, presupposes of the teacher himself some capacity of reading aloud, and reading aloud is not taught in our schools. In our elementary schools, in which few of the pupils contemplate being called to Holy Orders or to the Bar, it is practised, indeed, but seldom taught as an art. In our secondary and public schools it is neither taught nor practised: as I know to my cost—and you, to yours, Gentlemen, on whom I have had to practise.
But let the teacher take courage. First let him read a passage “at the long breath”—as the French say—aloud, and persuasively as he can. Now and then he may pause to indicate some particular beauty, repeating the line before he proceeds. But he should be sparing of these interruptions. When Laughter, for example, is already “holding both his sides” it cannot be less than officious, a work of supererogation, to stop and hold them for him; and he who obeys the counsel of perfection will read straight to the end and then recur to particular beauties. Next let him put up a child to continue with the tale, and another and another, just as in a construing class. While the boy is reading, the teacher should never interrupt: he should wait, and return afterwards upon a line that has been slurred or wrongly emphasised. When the children have done reading he should invite questions on any point they have found puzzling: it is with the operation of poetry on their minds that his main business lies. Lastly, he may run back over significant points they have missed.
“And is that all the method?”—Yes, that is all the method. “So simple as that?”—Yes, even so simple as that, and (I claim) even so wise, seeing that it just lets the author—Chaucer or Shakespeare or Milton or Coleridge—have his own way with the young plant—just lets them drop “like the gentle rain from heaven,” and soak in.
The moving Moon went up the sky,
And nowhere did abide:
Softly she was going up,
And a star or two beside.
Do you really want to chat about that? Cannot you trust it?
The stars were dim, and thick the night,
The steersman’s face by his lamp gleamed white;
From the sails the dew did drip—
Till clomb above the eastern bar
The hornèd Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.
Must you tell
