On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High
In his poem, "On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High", the author, David Chapman Berry, has relied on metaphors and similes to carry out his view of a typical literature class and a teacher's view of teaching.
The setting of the poem is in a senior literature class, at South High School. The speaker in this poem is a teacher, who tells the reader about his or her students and about the course of his or her literature class. The teacher discusses poetry with his class, but at the same time compares the students and the classroom order to fish in an aquarium.
The poem consists of seven stanzas. The first stanza states how the teacher enters the classroom and finds his or her students,
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What really happens here is that the teacher simply follows his or her regular teaching procedures in a monotone way until he or she suddenly notices that these students are interested in what he or she has to say. Thus, the water, which fills the room, is nothing else than the student's unexpected attention to the poetry. In the third stanza the speaker uses a metaphor, an overstatement, and a simile, to describe the change of mood and situation. At this point, the mood has changed completely. The teacher says her or she can hear the sound of fish in an aquarium. This metaphor means, that he or she not only has the student's attention, but that they are also willing to discuss the poem with the teacher. The speaker is surprised, for he or she had tried to drown them with words. This is an overstatement, which really holds that the teacher was simply lecturing to his class, and not expecting to receive this kind of reaction. He or she states that the students opened up like gills. This simile describes the student's thirst for knowledge. The students were interested in what he had to teach and they were willing to learn. The fourth stanza completes the idea of the classroom as an aquarium, using a simile and an overstatement. The speaker visualizes how he or she and the students, as fish, swim together throwing words through the room with their tails. With this simile, the speaker is trying to say, that he or she has gotten through to the …show more content…
In the first stanza the tone is neutral and monotone. The teacher does his or her day-to-day job, and thinks this class to be just like every other class, that he or she teaches. During the second stanza the first change in mood occurs. The poem adopts a rather positive tone, for the teacher realizes he or she has the student's undivided attention, and later the teacher is even aloud in their circle. But by the fifth stanza, the tone becomes melancholic. The speaker feels that for these students, class is something they have to go through, and as soon as the bell rings everything is
...r’.” Poetry for students. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 43 Detroit: Gale, 2013. Literature Resource Center. Web. 30 Mar. 2014. http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?>.
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