The River Houses

Here’s a wintertime poem-of-the-week to tug at your heartstrings: “Ice” by contemporary American poet Gail Mazur, for all homeschool fathers.

Ice

In the warming house, children lace their skates,
bending, choked, over their thick jackets.

A Franklin stove keeps the place so cozy
it’s hard to imagine why anyone would leave,

clumping across the frozen beach to the river.
December’s always the same at Ware’s Cove,

the first sheer ice, black, then white
and deep until the city sends trucks of men

with wooden barriers to put up the boys’
hockey rink. An hour of skating after school,

of trying wobbly figure-8’s, an hour
of distances moved backwards without falling,

then — twilight, the warming house steamy
with girls pulling on boots, their chafed legs

aching. Outside, the hockey players keep
playing, slamming the round black puck

until it’s dark, until supper. At night,
a shy girl comes to the cove with her father.

Although there isn’t music, they glide
arm in arm onto the blurred surface together,

braced like dancers. She thinks she’ll never
be so happy, for who else will find her graceful,

find her perfect, skate with her
in circles outside the emptied rink forever?

Most of our weekly poems are intended as examples for homeschool study, but a few are just for mom and dad (in particular) to enjoy. Here’s hoping you and your family are enjoying the special warmth that only winter brings.

What wonderful words have you found and what literary discoveries have you made in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ Explore more: The Poetry Foundation’s website includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many notable poets (including Gail Mazur) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers.

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Print your own River Houses poetry calendar for the whole school year at riverhouses.org/calendars and follow along with us as we visit forty-eight of our favorite friends.

Snow-season has arrived in the northern states, and that’s a good time to introduce your students to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s frosty “Snow-Storm,” one of the most commonly anthologized poems of nineteenth-century America and our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of January:

The Snow-Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

  Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), says the Poetry Foundation, “was one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century in the United States,” so every good homescholar should be acquainted with his name and his work. “The Snow-Storm” doesn’t look very poetical at first glance — it has a prose-y feel, and what’s worse, it doesn’t even rhyme. How can it be a poem? Well, if you start counting — always a good practice when you’re making the acquaintance of a new poem — you’ll see some of Emerson’s crafty art at work: the poem has 28 lines, and all but three have exactly ten syllables. That’s a very hard thing to accomplish without effort. One of the three misfits is the opening line of the second section and it’s typographically indented; that’s a standard marker for a partial line in poetry and drama. As for the other two irregularities — can you find them? — one has one extra syllable and the other is one short. I can almost imagine Emerson at his desk thinking, “That’s a really good line, but it has an extra syllable. Well, I’ll take one off somewhere else and it’ll balance out.”

In its content, “The Snow-Storm” can almost be read as two poems that are only loosely joined together. The first nine lines could easily stand alone as a separate work, and it’s almost tempting to think the two parts were written at different times. The first section emphasizes the storm’s effect on us, while the second section presents the storm as a builder, mason, and architect, creating overnight what it takes mortal masons an age to construct.

There’s some wonderful homeschool vocabulary to explore here. Send your students to your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books) to look up artificer, bastions, myriad, and maugre (that’s a rare one today). And what about those “Parian wreaths” that the storm mockingly hangs on coop and kennel? You can go off on a great historico-literary quest with that particular phrase. Your dictionary (page 1282) will tell you that “Parian” means “relating to the island of Paros” and also to “a type of white, semitranslucent marble quarried at Paros and highly valued in ancient times for making sculpture”; and so also in a more modern sense, to “a fine white porcelain” similar to Parian marble. (Send your students to plate 72 in your atlas to find the island of Paros.) What, then, is Emerson’s storm doing? Overnight it’s hanging finely sculpted white marble wreaths on … temples and grand statues? No, on the farmer’s chicken coop and dog kennel!

The next time you’re out in a storm this winter — or even watching the winter weather on TV around a radiant fireplace — why not take along Emerson’s “Snow-Storm” and contemplate the north wind’s masonry and the frolic architecture of the snow.

What wonderful words have you found and what literary discoveries have you made in your homeschool this week? 😊

❡ The tumultuous privacy of storm: If a special line or turn of phrase happens to strike you in one of our weekly poems, just copy it onto your homeschool bulletin board for a few days and invite your students to speak it aloud — that’s all it takes to begin a new poetical friendship and learn a few lovely words that will stay with you for life. 😊

❡ Explore more: The Poetry Foundation’s website includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Emerson) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers.

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Print your own River Houses poetry calendar for the whole school year at riverhouses.org/calendars and follow along with us as we visit forty-eight of our favorite friends.

One of the most famous New Year poems in the English language is Alfred Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells” (1850). What was the inspiration for that poem? It was something like this traditional New Year’s bell-ringing at Eckington Church in Derbyshire, England, shown here in a fine five-minute documentary you can share with your students tonight:

In this traditional New Year’s performance, the ringers start by ringing out the old year right up to midnight, and then they all stop as a single bell rings the twelve o’clock hour — and then all the bells begin again, more joyously, ringing in the New Year.

This performance is an example of “full-circle” ringing, with the bells turning through a complete 360º arc from upside-down on one side, to upside-down on the other. This makes it easier to control the full set or “ring” of bells as though it were a single instrument played by eight people.

Tennyson’s “Ring Out, Wild Bells” took this English tradition of church-bell ringing on New Year’s Eve and, through language, converted it into both an earthly wish for better times and also a Christian wish for the heavenly kingdom that will do away with all suffering. Tennyson was one of the greatest poets of the nineteenth century, and this finely crafted piece (eight syllables per line) is one of his best known and most accessible works — a great one to read and analyze with your students:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
  The flying cloud, the frosty light:
  The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
  Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
  The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind
  For those that here we see no more;
  Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
  And ancient forms of party strife;
  Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
  The faithless coldness of the times;
  Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
  The civic slander and the spite;
  Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
  Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
  Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
  The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
  Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Here’s wishing you and your family a peaceful, prosperous, healthy, and happy homeschool new year. 😊

❡ Ring out the thousand wars of old: If a special line or turn of phrase happens to strike you in one of our weekly poems, just copy it onto your homeschool bulletin board for a few days and invite your students to speak it aloud — that’s all it takes to begin a new poetical friendship and learn a few lovely words that will stay with you for life.

❡ Explore more: The Poetry Foundation’s website includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Tennyson) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers.

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Print your own River Houses poetry calendar for the whole school year at riverhouses.org/calendars and follow along with us as we visit forty-eight of our favorite friends.