[This piece appeared in The Leaflet (New England Association of Teachers of English), Winter 2007, 9-18.]

 

“In the Realms of Gold”: Teaching Reading

 

by Robert H. Bell  

 

Teachers, and not only teachers of English, are always ‘teaching reading.’ All teachers encourage, require, and demonstrate reading—closer, fuller, subtler, reading. Here are some aspects of reading, and conceptions of reading, this English teacher hopes to inculcate: enthusiasm; precision; implication; complexity; critical awareness; self-consciousness; magnanimity and skepticism; transformation.

Enthusiasm. A great old word: from the Greek for ‘filled with the gods.’ Teachers should preach it, bear witness to it, act it out. Fortunately it is everywhere in books: here is God’s plenty. Writers often celebrate enthusiasm, they discover it, define it, name it wonderfully: Joyce, punning gaily on his Gallic name, called this quality “Joyicity.” What Nabokov called “aesthetic bliss.” Frost touted “extravagance,” that “sheer morning gladness at the brim.” Blake (or at least one of antic devils in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) pronounced,  “Exuberance is beauty.”

A poem by John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” dramatizes the joy of reading, the enthusiasm of discovery. After identifying “Chapman’s Homer” as the great Renaissance translation of The Iliad and The Odyssey, I read aloud the sonnet.

  MUCH have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

    Round many western islands have I been

  Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

  Oft of one wide expanse had I been told          

   That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;    

    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

  Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

  Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

    When a new planet swims into his ken;     

  Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

    He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

  Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—

    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

 

If my oral performance is at all successful, the students will recognize that the poem enacts excitement, conveys a special feeling. We need to demonstrate as well as preach, to prove on their pulses the powerful pull of reading.

How, more precisely, does the poem explore and delineate this enthusiasm? First, by setting forth a sharp contrast between ordinary and extraordinary ways of feeling. The opening six lines depict meaningful experience, in the voice of a wise, authoritative traveler. His reliable perceptions are expressed in somber, measured language. Measured, to be precise, in stately iambic pentameter, end-stopped, divided into three units of calm, collected meaning. The first six lines, or sestet, are meticulously ordered to convey order, forming a large, apprehensible unit of meaning.

Thus prompted, the students can see and hear how the sonnet makes a sharp, unmistakable break at line 7, “Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.”  Now I ask a member of the class to recite the lines. Perceiving exactly where he language shifts, students can begin to specify how the sonnet changes dramatically in tone, rhythm, and diction. The words, all monosyllabic except for the name of Chapman, are emphatically articulated: Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. The rhythm begins to forsake the previously regular, iambic pentameter. Henceforth the words move much more quickly, in a rush, conveyed by run-on lines; the final four lines of the poem are one long flowing utterance.

A musical comparison might help: Keats changes key to produce different effects. Here I reiterate my earlier question, and draw attention to the kind of question I’m asking: what precisely are those effects, and exactly how does the poem convey the distinction between the traveler’s mundane experience and his ecstatic discovery? (As an advocate of precision, I must note that Keats incorrectly positions Cortez—instead of Balboa-- as the discover of the Pacific; apparently the speaker was too excited to pause for fact-checking!)

            I urge my reading students to begin by listening closely, and to notice the literal situation: who is speaking in what circumstances, and what is he saying? Only after we see clearly the real--then, only then-- do we consider possible figurative or metaphoric implications. Of course, Keatsian language is both denotative and connotative; it says something and often implies more. Poetic discourse, however rigorously literal in its precise descriptions of feelings and reflections, its meticulous depiction of people, places, and things, is charged with implication: compressed, arranged, and vibrantly resonant.

This is the teacher’s opportunity to show, and thus define, metaphoric language, to help students (as Robert Frost says) to feel “at home in the metaphor.” In “Chapman’s Homer,” those “realms of gold” signify or denote places “discovered,” the new world Europeans explored, colonized (and pillaged) in the seventeenth century. Metaphorically, “realms of gold” also conjures mythic places, the land of fables, legends, and drama. It becomes clear that our traveler is not really, or merely, a person who visits distant places; he is a reader, exploring the imaginative realm of literature. And in line 9, the speaker feels like some  “watcher of the skies” to suggest not only the scientific observation of a modern astronomer but a visionary capacity: once an old traveler, suddenly a discoverer of beauty, wisdom, and truth: his quest reveals heavenly vistas. The “I,” so prominent in the first nine lines, is conspicuously absent in the final five lines: the speaker literally loses himself reading Chapman’s Homer—loses himself to find a better self.

Teaching reading to young students, I encourage them to regard complexity without being daunted by it. I urge students to welcome complexity, to seek complications, to define the nature of difficulty and the particular problems at hand. A problem, even if you haven’t got a fully persuasive explanation, gives you something to discuss. Asked to write or think about a text, difficulty is your friend: you need to identify a problem to pose an interesting response. (The possibility that one can and should be interesting might not have occurred to them).

In class discussion I ask, how is an idea or an attitude presented, complicated, and concluded? Is the idea or attitude resolved? To what extent, how and why? If not, why not? I conceive the text as an arena or stage for debate. I love to quote Yeats: “rhetoric is the quarrel one has with others; poetry, the quarrel with oneself.” Like writing, reading is a gradual process of discovery.  The complexity that provokes the writer should puzzle and might prompt the reader. Here lives a vital possibility: the mind turning back on itself, qualifying or entertaining a competing possibility. To perceive and define that back-turning movement, perhaps to emulate it, is one way students may become better readers and thinkers.

To suggest such strategies, and to ask such questions about reading is, naturally, to encourage a critical spirit. As teachers we should highlight the value and pleasure of critical reflection in the text, and in the movements of reading and thinking. For reading is a process, exciting provisional responses, burgeoning perceptions.

Hence a good reader like a good poet is highly self-aware, or self-conscious. Students may misconstrue this term, which should be distinguished from the debilitating sense of “self-consciousness” adolescents often feel and fear. The reader’s self-awareness is an enabling kind of self-consciousness: aware of one’s self thinking and feeling, in that vital critical spirit. The self-conscious reader is willing to regard oneself as a work in progress, open to change, ready to develop, complicate, or discard an idea and to try a new one. To reflect critically about one’s self as an audience: what is it like to read this text? What kind of reader does this poem or story expect—or create? What does this narrative want me to believe and feel? And why? What kind of reader does the text prompt me to become?

I exhort students to become more Magnanimous Readers.  One of Aristotle’s primary ethical virtues is “magnanimity,” signifying not merely financial generosity or charity but, more fundamentally and profoundly, largeness of spirit. A good reader is or becomes magnanimous, moving beyond the narrow confines of the self to heed multiple possibilities, develop empathy, and exercise compassion. To read alertly is to regard seriously and respectfully alien perspectives and contrary positions.

            Sympathy and empathy are fundamental attributes of our humanity as well as crucial components of rich reading. No prophet or moralist dramatizes more vividly than Shakespeare the morality of empathy. In The Tempest the spirit Ariel informs his master Prospero that his enemies are at bay, and that if Prospero saw them, his “affections / Would become tender.” Helping to move Prospero toward magnanimity, Ariel adds, “Mine would, sir, were I human.” To be human is to feel sympathy; to be a receptive, perceptive reader is to expand sympathy, broaden regard—to “see feelingly,” in another memorable Shakespearean expression from King Lear. Constantly Shakespeare asks us, enables us, to imagine the situation of another person. As Ariel suggests, such imaginative projection, or sympathetic identification, is the heart of humanity. If empathy is the beginning of morality, it is also the essence of humane reading.

            To encourage magnanimity is one of the central purposes and sublime effects of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, a book that rigorously challenges and gloriously rewards its readers.  George Eliot’s compassion extends to the pathetically vain, egocentric, proud Causabon, and, in a radiant surprise, to the righteous, hypocritical, disgraced Bulstrode. The heroine Dorothea illustrates the nobility of sympathetic compassion when she painfully, deliberately rises above her grievance, “looking into the eyes of sorrow,” to forgive her apparently faithless lover Ladislaw and the shallow self-absorbed Rosamond: “all this vivid sympathetic experience” of Dorothea, the introspection and compassion, reflection and magnanimity, “all this vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as power.” It is a power to which readers have access, a largeness of spirit, a generosity of vision that George Eliot teaches, renders, and embodies.

Yet even that paragon of compassion George Eliot knows and shows that magnanimity, sympathetic reading, what we might also call imaginative yielding, is only part of reading and being. Were we sensitive to the beating of the heart of every squirrel, Eliot observes, we would be deafened by the sounds. Fortunately, Eliot notes wryly, we walk around, most of us most of the time, “well-wadded with stupidity.” The challenge of reading Middlemarch and any great work of literature is, I frequently remind my students, to be both a sympathetic and critical reader, yielding and resisting— magnanimous, one might say, and skeptical.

The Skeptical Reader applies and tests critical inquiries to work toward reliable evaluations and rigorous judgments. Skepticism, I tell my students, is a great virtue—to be distinguished from cynicism. In Oscar Wilde’s formulation, “a cynic is one who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.” A skeptic, by contrast, has no programmatic dogma or uniform responses; always questioning but open to persuasion, perpetually doubting but capable of believing. Again, as so often, Shakespeare provides us with compelling reasons to be capacious readers, magnanimous yet skeptical.

A wonderful exercise for students of Shakespeare, even at the beginning of their studies, is to examine Bottom’s speech in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when he awakes from what seems to him a strange and memorable dream.  Confused and disoriented by his sudden return to reality, his sense of identity and reality blurred, Bottom struts, stumbles, pontificates, ridiculously. I ask students to explain the sources and effects of the humor, to specify why Bottom is amusing and how he is foolish. It’s evident that his self-regard is titanic: "it shall be called 'Bottom's Dream,' because it hath no bottom" (4.2.218-220). Bottom as usual thinks he is perfectly wonderful, which is silly. Yet—and here students are less likely to give Bottom his due-- Bottom is also wonderful, though not quite for the same reasons he loves himself. Simple Bottom, we come to see, requires complicated attitudes, requiring readers to be both yielding and receptive, skeptical and magnanimous.

 

God's my life, stolen hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if

he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the duke . . .

 

Accustomed to Bottom’s ridiculous antics, students readily not how Bottom tramples logic, mixes senses and scrabbles Scripture: "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen. . ." His botched citations, mixing bodily parts, is deliciously bawdy: "his hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive." Yet equally important is a development students find harder to perceive and define: Bottom is a kind of holy fool, an inside vessel, as even his exclamation suggests: "God's my life!" Bottom is remembering (vaguely but unmistakably) a beautiful passage from Paul, defining the state of grace and distinguishing spiritual vision and natural vision: "But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for him that love him" (I Corinthians 2:9).

Bottom takes something high, grand, and makes it low, ridiculous. At the same time, as keener readers realize, Bottom struggles to articulate, fitfully and confusedly, in his gloriously foolish way, with a touch of divine inspiration, his "most rare vision" of a higher realm. For all his goofiness, my best students notice, he is surely right that his vision "hath no bottom" accessible to logic, sense, or analysis. I suggest to the class that the silliest character in the play has the finest impulse, one that his maker surely valued, to transform experience into art: "I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream." Intractably ridiculous, Bottom is closer to the sublime than anyone else, as the inspired rhythms and homey idiom suggest: "God's my life . . . a most rare vision. . . to make it the more gracious. . ." Truly, the last shall be first. Or, as one clever student proclaimed, the ass shall be first!

Regarding Bottom through bi-focal, we discover a key element of Shakespeare’s comic vision: the proximity, perhaps the identity, of sublime and ridiculous. You might say, as one of my students actually did, Bottom hits the hammer on the head! It's a comic revelation, that dreams and imagined visions are past the wit of man. Babbling funny nonsense, Bottom delivers an important insight, for like Shakespeare, he intuits that something merely imagined can be real and important. Bottom, “read” both skeptically and magnanimously, makes the play's case or main point in spite of himself. Heeding Bottom, readers come closer to perceiving how the holy and the humorous conjoin, melt, merge, blend—and why and both resisting and yielding are crucial elements of imaginative, responsive reading.

Transformation: Reading, as teachers know and should perpetually testify, is a habit of mind and an addiction to pleasure. We read to become more informed, more deeply and wisely feeling and thinking; to read passionately and carefully is to become greater, happier-- and different. I’ve argued that when we teach reading, we should demonstrate enthusiasm, to apply precision, to explain implication, to explore complexity, to display critical spirit, to regard one’s self with self-reflexive scrutiny, to investigate impulses both yielding and resisting, magnanimous and skeptical. And we read to be transformed, like Keats uplifted to Homeric heights, Adam and Ever restored to grace, and Bottom inspired to rare vision.

Let me close this mediation on reading with a contemporary poem, “Eating Poetry,” by Mark Strand, a poem that renders this exciting, disorienting, mysterious process of transformation with power, respect, wit, and irony.

 

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

 

The librarian does not believe what she sees.

Her eyes are sad

and she walks with her hands in her dress.

 

The poems are gone.

The light is dim.

The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

 

Their eyeballs roll,

their blond legs burn like brush.

The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

 

She does not understand.

When I get on my knees and lick her hand,

she screams.

 

I am a new man,

I snarl at her and bark,

I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

 

Like “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” “Eating Poetry” dramatizes change and vividly expresses the possibilities of reading—dramatizing (how convenient for my lesson plan!) the multiple aspects of reading I’ve characterized.

Strand begins with sheer enthusiasm, the assertion that, above all, reading is fun, so invigorating it makes you romp with joy. His joy is sudden and inexplicable. So the purpose of the poem, like that of “Chapman’s Homer,” is to explore the sources of his enthusiasm—to explain it as precisely as possible.

But in this poem the speaker encounters two kinds of complications. First, there is an adversary, calling into question the nature of the speaker’s experience. For Strand’s speaker experiences a metamorphosis, more radical that that of Keats’s traveler, more frightening than that of Bottom’s “translated,” a glorious change that is also a terrible transformation. His audience, witness to his metamorphosis, is the librarian, that traditional figure of precision, regulation, and order. And the advocate of precision is baffled, accosted, and terrified.

 “Eating Poetry,” it seems, has ramifications more complex than simple happiness, the joy of yielding, acquiescing to the power of poetry.  Initially felt one way, with enthusiastic exuberance, it is gradually regarded differently. This reader’s ascent to the sublime is also an unexpected return to the primal or bestial. The surprisingly complex effect of reading thus precipitates more critical scrutiny, and requires more skeptical inquiry. Who are the dogs? How and why does our reader, in becoming a “new man,” become canine? The implication or connotation is complicated, and disturbing; the critical spirit required by the poem demands a heightened self-reflexivity. The librarian is mystified, and we can’t understand either; does the speaker?

One thing is becoming evident. Reading, eating poetry, is not so easily or simply advocated as we first, complacently, thought. This is not any straightforward ode to joy, though it seemed to begin as an exhortation to acquiesce. Yield yourself up, it seemed to exhort us, to gourmet reading and astonishing happiness awaits you. You’ll romp with joy!

But wait. Some resistance may also be necessary, and prudent. Eat poetry and you may snarl and bark, overflowing with energy and becoming more different than you bargained for—in fact, quite scary. Reading “in the bookish dark” may also be maddening, and dangerous. This reader has been transformed, from a reader into a poet. Maybe he will write poems that make you happy, or make you snarl and bark. Or both.

Read, I tell my students, as if it will make you new. It just might.

 

Robert H. Bell is Wells Professor of English at Williams College. His most recent book, co-authored with William Dowling, is A Reader’s Companion to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. In 2004, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education named him "Outstanding Baccalaureate College Professor of the Year."