Imagine that your Literature teacher had given you a group task to come up with a creative way of presenting the poem below, how would you do it?
Children’s Hour
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Between the dark and the daylight,
When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
That is known as the Children’s Hour.I hear in the chamber above me
The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
And voices soft and sweet.From my study I see in the lamplight,
Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
And Edith with golden hair.A whisper, and then a silence:
Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
To take me by surprise.A sudden rush from the stairway,
A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
They enter my castle wall!They climb up into my turret
O’er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
They seem to be everywhere.They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!Do you think, o blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
Is not a match for you all!I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away!
Most people would probably make it into a choral recitation piece; that is, recite the piece as a group with matching actions and props. But since I am not most people, how do you think I tackled this issue when our third year high school Lit teacher Sir Lem gave it to our class? Why, I turned it into a song, with the help of my classmate Ira. We actually sang this particular poem to the tune of the Backstreet Boys’ All I Have to Give. We made the first stanza into the chorus, the sixth and seventh into the bridge, and the rest into the longer parts of the song. We even made a skit such that it appeared like Marichelle was listening to us over the radio, and by us I mean Austine was the DJ, Jotie was the wrong number caller, Rouella was the song requestor, and Ira and I were the Backstreet Girls. It was easily the most hilarious presentation, and Sir Lem was so proud of us that he even asked to borrow the tape so that he could play it for his co-teachers.
But this wasn’t the only poem presentation that I turned into a song. During my second semester as a College freshman, I became a part of the special English section, the creative writing class. One time, another ADMU graduate teacher, Sir Bendix, gave us the task to rap certain classic poems. That’s right – rap, like Eminem. Our group had been assigned the famous poem below:
How Do I Love Thee
Elizabeth Barret Browning
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
For some reason, my groupmates were looking at me as though I knew exactly how to do that and I was thinking hello? What do I know about rap? I was just about to say that but instead, I found myself rap-singing the first lines of the poem to the tune of Mariah Carey’s Heartbreaker. At the end of the night, our teacher gave us the award for the best performance – a bag of Chippy.
Then during my summer as a Sophomore in College, we had another Literature teacher who gave us the same assignment. This time my group was assigned the Egyptian love poem below.
Love, how I’d love to slip down to the pond,
bathe with you close by on the bank.
Just for you I’d wear my new Memphis swimsuit,
Made of sheer linen, fit for a queen–
Come see how it looks in the water!
Couldn’t I coax you to wade in with me?
Let the cool creep slowly around us?
Then I’d dive deep down and come up for you dripping,
Let you fill your eyes with the little red fish that I’d catch.
And I’d say, standing there tall in the shallows:
Look at my fish . . . .
But then I’d say softer, eyes bright with your seeing:
A gift, love. No words.
Come closer & look,
it’s all me.
This was the one that I choreographed like a choral recitation piece. I gave each person in our small group a solo to perform, with gestures. Then I had Maya vocalize the Little Mermaid song while the rest of us recited the last lines of the song, coming closer together with our eyes on the ground. Then we paused before the last line, snapping our heads up together to look at the audience before delivering it. When we were done, our entire class gave us a standing ovation. Our teacher gave us a grade of 100%
Oh yeah. I am sooo missing English classes right now.