Post Archives: Homeschool Poems-of-the-Week

Great homeschool teaching ideas and little lessons on poets and poetry from the River Houses Homeschool Network. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox every week, and print your own homeschool poetry calendar for the whole year on our River Houses calendar page. 😊

🍎 WONDERFUL WORDS: “After Apple-Picking”

15 October 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-apples

The geese are flying and the woodchucks are preparing their winter burrows — it’s harvest season, so our homeschool poem-of-the-week for this third week of October is a dreamy story of orchard-labor from Robert Frost:

After Apple-Picking

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

This poem is full of wonderful descriptive images — if you take your homescholars to a pick-your-own apple orchard this month they’ll understand them all. 🍎 And after an hour or two of farm labor, perhaps they’ll be ready for a nap — one that is like, or perhaps not like, the woodchuck’s long winter nap.

“There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, / Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.” (Image: National Apple Harvest Festival, Arendtsville, Pennsylvania.)

There isn’t as much formal structure in “After Apple-Picking” as there is in many of Frost’s other poems, but there is still quite a bit of rhyme and it often follows regular patterns. (ABBA in the first four lines, for example.) In keeping with its theme, the poem has a rather dream-like quality. How often is our daytime work the subject of our dreams? Do we sometimes get so much of a desired thing that it wears us out? (“Be careful what you wish for.”) Do animals dream? Even in their months-long winter hibernation? Every open-ended question you ask will exercise and expand the young minds in your charge.

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

❡ I am overtired of the great harvest I myself desired: 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 website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Robert Frost) 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 (riverhouses.org/calendars) and follow along with us as we visit forty-eight of our favorite friends. 📖

🖋 WONDERFUL WORDS: “The Frosts were her condition”

8 October 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-gentian

For all late bloomers, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the second week of October is an autumnal gem from Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). Read it with your students — your own little gentians, perhaps — and give them a new friend for life.

God made a little Gentian —
It tried — to be a Rose —
And failed — and all the Summer laughed —
But just before the Snows

There rose a Purple Creature —
That ravished all the Hill —
And Summer hid her Forehead —
And Mockery — was still —

The Frosts were her condition —
The Tyrian would not come
Until the North — invoke it —
Creator — Shall I — bloom?

Great writers are always great observers, and Dickinson knew the wildflowers of her native New England well. This poem is about a specific plant, the Fringed Gentian (Gentianopsis crinita), one of the late-blooming wildflowers of the northeast. The flowers of exuberant summer tend to attract all the attention — they’re the showy extroverts of the natural world. The late bloomers, by contrast, just bide their time, wait for the noise to die down, and then “ravish all the hill.”

“The Tyrian would not come / Until the North – invoke it.” Fringed Gentians in bloom. (Image: Flickr.)

“God made a little Gentian” isn’t quite as formally metrical as many of Dickinson’s poems, but it does follow her usual pattern of short lines of six to eight syllables, and it has just enough rhyme to produce a strong sense of structure: Rose–Snows, Hill–still, come–bloom. Note also the lovely verbal plays on Creature and Creator as well as on Rose (the flower) and rose (the verb).

The glowing vocabulary word in this poem is Tyrian. That’s a jewel of a word for your students to look up in your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books), and you can use that one word to teach a whole little lesson in geography and history. (Be sure to check grid K-11 on plate 79 in your homeschool atlas.) Rare color words can be very powerful in writing, but like a sharp spice they have to be used sparingly. Consider how many striking words there are for blue and purple alone: azure, cobalt, cerulean, amethyst, hyacinth, violet, Tyrian. (“There are [words] to which I lift my hat when I see them sitting princelike among their peers on the page. Sometimes I write one, and look at his outlines till he glows as no sapphire.”)

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

❡ The cold never bothered me anyway: 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 website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Emily Dickinson) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

🌰🌽🍎 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”

2 October 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-keats

October has arrived, the fruit is ripening, and the migrating birds are gathering in the skies. This is the time of year to introduce your students to one of the most famous fall poems in the English language, John Keats’ “To Autumn” — our homeschool poem-of-the-week for the first week of October. Why not read it aloud this week and see how many of the scenes that Keats describes can be found in your own neighborhood.

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
    Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
    With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
    And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
        To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
    And still more, later flowers for the bees,
    Until they think warm days will never cease,
        For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
    Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
    Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
    Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
        Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
    Steady thy laden head across a brook;
    Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
        Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of spring? Ay, Where are they?
    Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, —
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
    And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
    Among the river sallows, borne aloft
        Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
    Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
    The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
        And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Keats has been a staple of high school and college curricula for generations, and this poem in particular is often used to illustrate the literary technique of personification. (Who is “thee” in the second stanza?) But what if you have small children, not high school students — can literature like this be part of their homeschool experience as well? Absolutely! Just pick a phrase or a line that strikes you and insert it into your own daily conversations. When you walk out into the beautiful fall backyard say, “It’s the season of mellow fruitfulness.” Or point to the evening sky: “See how the barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day.” Or listen in the local park: “Hear the gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”

[Barn Swallows on migration] — “And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.” (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

You don’t need to mention that you’re quoting a line from a poem — just use it: “It’s the season of mellow fruitfulness.” Fifteen years from now in a college English class, as the professor turns to John Keats and begins to read, your student’s eyes will open wide and she’ll exclaim, “Hey, that’s what my mom always used to say!” 😊

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

❡ Making a new friend: When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one in a traditional form, take your time, and don’t worry about “getting” everything right away. A good poem is a friend for life, and as with any friend, it takes several meetings to get acquainted. Before you even start to think about “meaning,” take a look at the poem’s structure. How many lines does it have? Are the lines grouped into stanzas? How many lines in each stanza? How many syllables in each line? Many traditional poems are highly structured and fit together in an almost mathematical way, which you can discover by counting. Do the lines rhyme? What is the rhyme-scheme (ABAB, AABA, ABCD, or something else)? By uncovering these details of structure your students will come to appreciate good poems as carefully crafted pieces of literary labor. 🖋

❡ Looking in the lexicon: There’s some magnificent vocabulary in this week’s poem to look up in your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books): mellow, thatch, hazel, granary, winnowing, furrow, gleaner, sallows, bourn. Send your students to the dictionary also for any poetical terminology they encounter: stanza, couplet, quatrain, sonnet, pentameter, hexameter, iambic, dactylic, and more — wonderful words, every one! 🔎

❡ Barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day: 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: For a quick homeschool review of the artistic and literary movement known as Romanticism — a movement with which Keats is often associated — turn to page 338 in your River Houses history encyclopedia (riverhouses.org/books). 📚

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

🍃 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Our Summer made her light escape”

23 September 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-light-escape

The Chimney Swifts are gone. (That’s how it is in my neighborhood.) The Kingbirds too. Did you notice? In the spring when they arrive the sound strikes your ear like a fresh spark. But when they depart — have they departed? — they slip away silently in the night.

As we pass today’s equinox and summer comes to its end, Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) provides us with a pensive homeschool poem-of-the-week for the last week of September.

As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away —
Too imperceptible at last
To seem like Perfidy —

A Quietness distilled
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon —

The Dusk drew earlier in —
The Morning foreign shone —
A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest, that would be gone —

And thus, without a Wing
Or service of a Keel
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.

If your students are learning how to read poetry — and poetry requires a special kind of reading, different from prose reading — tell them not to read too quickly or expect everything to be clear on the first pass through. Getting to know a poem is like getting to know a person: some things are apparent on the surface, but there are new things to discover over time with repeated engagement. If you make the effort you’ll often discover that good poems, like good people, can become friends for life.

[Emily Dickinson Homestead] — The Emily Dickinson Homestead, Amherst, Massachusetts. (Image: Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism.)

For traditionally styled poems like this one, the first thing to do as you make the poem’s acquaintance is not to think about meaning or abstract symbolism; instead, just count syllables. As imperceptibly as Grief (eight). The Summer lapsed away (six). Too imperceptible at last (eight). To seem like Perfidy (six). 8-6-8-6. The other three stanzas are shortened versions of that pattern: 6-6-8-6.

“Eights-and-sixes” is one of the most common hymn meters in the Protestant tradition, and Emily Dickinson learned her very precise prosody from the church hymns she grew up with. Compare the rhythm of the first stanza above with this familiar verse:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

A perfect match (8-6-8-6). Whenever you encounter Emily Dickinson in your homeschool reading — and I hope that will be often — start by counting syllables and you’ll gain a new appreciation for the details of her craft.

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

❡ Our summer made her light escape: 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. 🍃

❡ Looking in the lexicon: There’s some great vocabulary in this week’s poem to look up in your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books): imperceptible, perfidy, distilled, sequestered, harrowing, keel, lapsed. Send your students to the dictionary also for any poetical terminology they encounter: stanza, couplet, quatrain, sonnet, pentameter, hexameter, iambic, dactylic, and more — wonderful words, every one. 🔎

🖋 WONDERFUL WORDS: “When I said autumn, autumn broke”

16 September 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-jennings

What defines the seasons? Is it a change in temperature? Migrating birds? The position of the sun in the sky? An evocation in the air?

Here’s a wonderful poem for homeschool high-schoolers (and for mom and dad, too) that considers how the seasons arrive and what defines them. It’s from British poet Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001), and it’s our poem-of-the-week for the third week of September.

Song at the Beginning of Autumn

Now watch this autumn that arrives
In smells. All looks like summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.

Proust who collected time within
A child’s cake would understand
The ambiguity of this —
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that autumn gropes for us.

But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia. We give names —
Autumn and summer, winter, spring —
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.

But I am carried back against
My will into a childhood where
Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke;
I lean against my window fenced
From evocations in the air.
When I said autumn, autumn broke.

When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one like this that is in a traditional form, take your time, and don’t worry about “getting” everything right away. A good poem is a friend for life, and as with any friend, it takes time to get acquainted.

[Elizabeth Jennings] — Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001). (Image: Oxford Today.)

Before you even start worrying about “meaning,” take a look at the poem’s structure. How many lines does it have? Are the lines grouped into stanzas? How many lines in each stanza? How many syllables in each line? Many traditional poems are highly structured and fit together in an almost mathematical way, which you can discover by counting. Do the lines rhyme? What is the rhyme-scheme (ABAB, AABA, ABCD, or something else)? By uncovering these details of structure your students will come to appreciate good poems as carefully crafted pieces of literary labor.

“Song at the Beginning of Autumn” is a very precisely structured poem. If you count, you’ll find that every line has exactly eight syllables. (That pattern tells you that “flowers” should be pronounced here as a one-syllable word: “flowrs” not “flow-ers.”) Do the lines have a rhyming pattern? They do. The lines of the first stanza end with arrives–still–air and thrives–full–where. We’ll call that ABC ABC, and if you check all the other stanzas you’ll find they’re exactly the same: ABC ABC.

If you try to read this poem aloud you’ll discover that it has a kind of prose-y feel — it doesn’t seem very “poetical” at first. What creates that sensation? The prose-y feel comes from Jennings’ deliberate use of enjambment — a wonderful literary word for your students to learn that refers to the mismatch between the line breaks of the poem and the natural grammatical pauses in the poem’s underlying sentences.

The opposite of enjambed verse is end-stopped verse, in which the line-ends correspond to natural grammatical breaks: “Whose woods these are I think I know (pause). / His house is in the village though (pause); / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow (pause).” That’s Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods,” a heavily end-stopped poem with a sing-song-y feel.

Contrast that with Jennings, with natural grammatical pauses added: “Now watch this autumn that arrives / In smells (pause). All looks like summer still (pause); / Colours are quite unchanged (pause), the air / On green and white serenely thrives (pause). / Heavy the trees with growth and full / The fields (pause). Flowers flourish everywhere (pause).” In her case, many of the natural grammatical pauses don’t coincide with the line-ends — that’s enjambment, and that’s what creates the prose-y feel of the poem.

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

❡ Looking in the lexicon: You can ask your students some good vocabulary-related questions this week in the context of this poem — send them to your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books) for answers: Who is Proust? What’s the difference between “colours” and “colors”? What’s the origin of the word “nostalgia”? (And how is it related to the word “analgesic”?) How is the word “broke” being used here? (Hint: it’s intransitive definition #13.) (Wait, are you saying there are thirteen different definitions of “break/broke”? Actually, there are a lot more — look in the lexicon!) 🔎

❡ When I said autumn, autumn broke: 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. 😊

🦋 WONDERFUL WORDS: “The Tuft of Flowers”

9 September 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-frost

Our River Houses poetry calendar for the 2019–2020 homeschool year is now available on our main calendar page (riverhouses.org/calendars). It’s a collection of forty-eight friends we get to know over the course of the year, and we invite you and your students to join us! Our poem for this second week of September, as summer begins changing to autumn, is Robert Frost’s “The Tuft of Flowers.”

Frost is a wonderful poet for younger people because his poems are generally well structured and use direct language. “The Tuft of Flowers” is a poem about mowing a field, and its characters are two farmhands and a butterfly. The first farmhand is the narrator; the second farmhand is “off stage” and never appears, although we learn something about him by seeing the work he has done; and the butterfly — the butterfly is the character who brings the two farmhands together.

The Tuft of Flowers

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been, — alone,

‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ’wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

Frost is always a careful observer, and his details are precise. Have your students ever watched someone mow a field with a scythe? The video below demonstrates the process very well. The man in this scene is performing the first step, which the poem’s “off-stage” character performed at dawn before the narrator arrived: he is cutting the grass and leaving it in rows. Either he or someone else will come back later to turn the rows over so the cut grass will dry and not rot:

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“I listened for his whetstone on the breeze,” says Frost. Skip ahead in the video to the 2:25 mark and you’ll hear exactly what that sounded like (along with some “wakening birds around”).

“I left my place to know them [the flowers] by their name, / Finding them butterfly weed when I came.” Is “butterfly weed” an imaginary invention? Not at all. Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly weed) is a common field-flower of the northeastern United States that is particularly attractive to butterflies.

It’s now late summer, grading into autumn, and in many parts of the United States the Monarch butterfly migration is underway — I’ve probably seen at least twenty in the last couple of days. Perhaps you can find a few Monarchs in an open field near you this week and trace the paths they take on tremulous wing. Who knows where they may lead you. 🦋

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

❡ Whether they work together or apart: 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. 😊

❡ Looking in the lexicon: There’s some good vocabulary in this week’s poem to look up in your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books): whetstone, tremulous, and scythe. Send your students to the dictionary also for any poetical terminology they encounter: stanza, couplet, quatrain, sonnet, pentameter, hexameter, iambic, dactylic, and more — wonderful words, every one! 😊

🖋 WONDERFUL WORDS: “This was ever my wish”

3 September 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-hoc-erat-in-votis

(This is our first homeschool poem-of-the-week for the 2019–2020 school year. Print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar and follow along with us, and add your name to our free weekly mailing list to get great homeschool teaching ideas delivered right to your mailbox all through the year.)

Every great institution should have a motto (or two). The United States has “E Pluribus Unum” and “In God We Trust.” The Supreme Court has “Equal Justice Under Law.” The Boy Scouts have “Be Prepared.” McDonald’s has “I’m lovin’ it.”

The motto of the River Houses is Hoc erat in votis, which we translate freely as “This was ever my wish.” The phrase comes from Book II of the Satires of the ancient Roman poet Horace, written about 30 B.C. “Satire” in the Horatian sense doesn’t carry the sharp connotation that it carries in modern English. Horace’s Satires are poems of daily life — modest, sometimes self-deprecating, never grandiloquent, mindful of human foibles and often amused by them.

The sixth satire in Horace’s Book II begins with a famous image of domestic contentment (just as we might wish for in a homeschool — aye, there’s the connection), and this little extract in its several renderings counts as our first homeschool poem-of-the-week for every new River Houses year:

Hoc erat in votis: modus agri non ita magnus,
hortus ubi et tecto vicinus iugis aquae fons
et paulum silvae super his foret.

The prose translator of the Loeb Classical Library’s edition of Horace renders it as:

“This is what I prayed for! — a piece of land not so very large, where there would be a garden, and near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and up above these a little bit of woodland.“

“In the opening words,” the translator observes, “Horace gives utterance to a feeling of deep satisfaction as he contemplates the scene before him in the morning sunshine. His former prayer has been realized. Hence the past tense of erat.” This was ever my wish — and now here it all is before me.

Horace’s expression of contentment with domestic life has long been a favorite of country estate owners, and it has often been inscribed on the walls of rural villas.

[Hoc erat in votis] — Horace in the wild, inscribed on the wall of the Poggio Verde country villa in Lombardy, Italy. “Nil amplius oro.” (“Nothing more do I ask.”) (Image: ilpoggioverde.com.)

Here in the River Houses, we think these ancient lines from Horace capture something of the homeschool ideal as well, and that’s why we’ve drawn our motto from them. A home with family and friends, a garden and a little stream — nothing more do we ask.

The verse translation that we especially like is this one from the English poet Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) — it reflects some of Horace’s light-heartedness:

I’ve often wished that I had clear,
For life, six hundred pounds a year,
A handsome house to lodge a friend,
A river at my garden’s end,
A terrace walk, and half a rood
Of land, set out to plant a wood.

Starting from the Latin original and abbreviating Swift, we can produce this extended version of the River Houses motto: Hoc erat in votis — This was ever my wish: a handsome house to lodge a friend, a river at my garden’s end.

Nothing more do we ask.

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

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

❡ A river at my garden’s end: 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. 😊

🏡 ENVOY: “A Living River by the Door”

22 August 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-envoy

The River Houses year is coming to a close and this is our very last homeschool poem-of-the-week for 2018–2019. We hope you and your students have enjoyed visiting with forty-eight of our favorite friends. 😊 The new school year will begin in a few days, but in the mean time, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) gives the departing year a perfect River Houses send-off:

Envoy

Go, little book, and wish to all
Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall,
A bin of wine, a spice of wit,
A house with lawns enclosing it,
A living river by the door,
A nightingale in the sycamore!

“Envoy” (or its French form, “Envoi”) is a generic title, not a specific one — like “Appendix” or “Afterword.” An “Envoy” in the poetic sense is a note of departure: a short verse that appears at the end of a longer work and that wraps up the whole and sends readers on their way.

Homeschooling, Robert Louis Stevenson style: illustration by Dorothy O’Reilly from a 1908 edition of *A Child’s Garden of Verses*. (Image: Library of Congress via the Internet Archive.)

As this school year comes to a close, our little blog wishes all our homeschool readers, by way of envoy, “Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, / A bin of wine, a spice of wit, / A house with lawns enclosing it, / A living river by the door, / A nightingale in the sycamore!”

What wonderful words will you and your students discover in the homeschool year ahead? 😊

❡ A living river by the door: 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 Robert Louis Stevenson) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

🌞 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Poor, middle-agèd summer!”

16 August 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-helen-hunt

Summer is showing its age and the River Houses year is winding down — late August is upon us. The Song Sparrows and Yellow Warblers in my neighborhood have gone quiet, and the thistles and goldenrod are filling up the fields and riverbanks. There can surely be no better homeschool poem-of-the-week for us at this seasonal moment than the lovely sonnet “August” by Helen Hunt Jackson:

August

Silence again. The glorious symphony
Hath need of pause and interval of peace.
Some subtle signal bids all sweet sounds cease,
Save hum of insects’ aimless industry.
Pathetic, summer seeks by blazonry
Of color to conceal her swift decrease.
Weak subterfuge! Each mocking day doth fleece
A blossom and lay bare her poverty.
Poor, middle-agèd summer! Vain this show!
Whole fields of golden-rod cannot offset
One meadow with a single violet;
And well the singing thrush and lily know,
Spite of all artifice which her regret
Can deck in splendid guise, their time to go!

Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) is not well remembered now, but she was very popular and widely read in her day. Born Helen Fiske in Amherst, Massachusetts, she was a childhood friend of Emily Dickinson, and she wrote for many leading magazines of the era, including The Atlantic, still in publication, where this poem first appeared in August 1876.

“Whole [late-summer] fields of golden-rod cannot offset / One [spring] meadow with a single violet.” (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one in a traditional form, take your time, and don’t worry about “getting” everything right away. A good poem is a friend for life, and as with any friend, it takes several meetings to get acquainted. Before you even start to think about “meaning,” take a look at the poem’s structure. “August” is a sonnet. Sonnets usually have fourteen lines that are grouped into either an octet of eight and a sestet of six (a Petrarchan sonnet), or into four quatrains of four and a couplet of two (a Shakespearean sonnet). I’d say “August” is closer to the Petrarchan type, although it’s a bit of a hybrid — and that’s fine, because creative writers can invent new forms as they please. Sonnets usually have a very precise rhyme-scheme, and you can see that here: I make it out to be ABBA ABBA CDDC DC. By showing your students these details of structure they will come to appreciate the intricate literary craftsmanship that poets put into their work.

And did your scholars recognize a little punctuational detail that’s important to the poem’s meter and to correct pronunciation? In the phrase I pulled out for the title of this post — “Poor, middle-agèd summer” — Jackson uses a grave accent to indicate that “agèd” is pronounced as two syllables (age-ed) rather than one (aged). (Turn to page 768 in your family dictionary to find an explanation of the grave accent in English.) Each line in this sonnet is ten syllables long, and to maintain that pattern, Jackson needs “agèd” to count as two. The learnèd little ` accomplishes just that.

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 important poets (including Helen Hunt Jackson) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

❡ Poor, middle-agèd summer: 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. 😊

🌠 WONDERFUL WORDS: “A Star in a Stoneboat”

8 August 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-stoneboat

The annual Perseid meteor shower is expected to peak this coming weekend, but this year the meteors will be competing with a nearly full moon, alas. The Perseids may be wonderful or washed out, but our homeschool poem-of-the-week for this second week of August will still be a playfully brilliant verse drawn from the world’s small store of meteor poems: Robert Frost’s “A Star in a Stoneboat.”

Usually we dive right in with the text, but this week your students really do have to know first what a stoneboat is. It’s not a boat, and it’s not made of stone; it’s a piece of farm equipment like a sled or toboggan that’s used for dragging stones out of a field. Frost was a New England poet, and here in New England if you wanted to plant an acre of corn, you first had to drag a few tons of rocks out of the way.

“Stone boats were the pick-up trucks of yesterday.” (Image: Stoneboat Farm, Hillsboro, Oregon.)

And since wise old farmers never let anything go to waste, those few tons of rocks were generally piled up along the edge of the field where they served pretty well to keep the pigs out of the corn, too.

Stone wall beside Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Old Manse” in Concord, Massachusetts. (Image: Robert Thorson via atlasobscura.com.)

With that background — that stoneboats were the pickup trucks of yesterday — we can proceed with the meteoric tale of “A Star in a Pickup Truck.”

A Star in a Stoneboat

Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.

Some laborer found one faded and stone-cold,
And saving that its weight suggested gold
And tugged it from his first too certain hold,

He noticed nothing in it to remark.
He was not used to handling stars thrown dark
And lifeless from an interrupted arc.

He did not recognize in that smooth coal
The one thing palpable besides the soul
To penetrate the air in which we roll.

He did not see how like a flying thing
It brooded ant eggs, and had one large wing,
One not so large for flying in a ring,

And a long Bird of Paradise’s tail
(Though these when not in use to fly and trail
It drew back in its body like a snail);

Nor know that he might move it from the spot —
The harm was done: from having been star-shot
The very nature of the soil was hot

And burning to yield flowers instead of grain,
Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain
Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.

He moved it roughly with an iron bar,
He loaded an old stoneboat with the star
And not, as you might think, a flying car,

Such as even poets would admit perforce
More practical than Pegasus the horse
If it could put a star back in its course.

He dragged it through the plowed ground at a pace
But faintly reminiscent of the race
Of jostling rock in interstellar space.

It went for building stone, and I, as though
Commanded in a dream, forever go
To right the wrong that this should have been so.

Yet ask where else it could have gone as well,
I do not know — I cannot stop to tell:
He might have left it lying where it fell.

From following walls I never lift my eye,
Except at night to places in the sky
Where showers of charted meteors let fly.

Some may know what they seek in school and church,
And why they seek it there; for what I search
I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch;

Sure that though not a star of death and birth,
So not to be compared, perhaps, in worth
To such resorts of life as Mars and Earth —

Though not, I say, a star of death and sin,
It yet has poles, and only needs a spin
To show its worldly nature and begin

To chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm
And run off in strange tangents with my arm,
As fish do with the line in first alarm.

Such as it is, it promises the prize
Of the one world complete in any size
That I am like to compass, fool or wise.

This is a wonderfully clever poem — a long string of comparisons and contrasts — and you and your students can spend quite a bit of time trying to figure it out sentence by sentence. I won’t go through all the components here, but just look first at the very tight structure. “A Star in a Stoneboat” is made up not of couplets (rhymed pairs) but of triplets, where all three line-ends rhyme: all–fall–wall, cold–gold–hold, remark–dark–arc, all through the entire poem. That’s fairly uncommon in English, and it’s difficult to do. Next, count syllables: you’ll find that every line has exactly ten. The constraints Frost imposed on himself in adopting this compact form account for some of the complexities of the poem’s word-order, which admittedly can take a bit of effort to follow.

What the content of the poem generally does throughout is contrast the “life” of this imagined meteor once upon a time when it was flying through space, with its “life” after its arc was interrupted and it ignominiously landed in some farmer’s field, got pried out of the ground by a workman, and was dumped onto a stoneboat. Formerly it had raced past the planets; now it’s keeping pigs out of the corn. “Yet ask where else it could have gone as well, / I do not know.” See how many earthly–heavenly contrasts or comparisons your students can identify, all of them mediated by this imagined meteorite. And ask them if they’d like to be, like the narrator, a wanderer along the walls, mile on mile, searching for stones that had once been stars.

“From following walls I never lift my eye, / Except at night to places in the sky / Where showers of charted meteors fly.” (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

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

❡ Stars thrown dark: 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 Robert Frost) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

🍻 MELVILLE @ 200: To the Meteor Rolling Home

1 August 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-melville

The great American writer Herman Melville (1819–1891) was born in New York City exactly 200 years ago today. Happy birthday, Herman! Most people think of Melville as a writer of novels and short stories, but he also wrote quite a bit of poetry, especially in his later years. In honor of Melville’s many talents, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for this pleasant bicentennial is a gem of a little toast-poem that Melville wrote to his brother Thomas, who was then at sea as captain of a ship called the Meteor, on its way home:

To the Master of the Meteor

Lonesome on earth’s loneliest deep,
Sailor! who dost thy vigil keep —
Off the Cape of Storms dost musing sweep
Over monstrous waves that curl and comb;
Of thee we think when here from brink
We blow the mead in bubbling foam.
Of thee we think, in a ring we link;
To the shearer of ocean’s fleece we drink,
And the Meteor rolling home.

“To the Master of the Meteor” connects two widely separated scenes — can your students see them? The first scene is the sailor far at sea (brother Thomas), keeping watch from the deck of his ship as it shears the foam from the ocean’s waves. “The Cape of Storms” is specifically the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa (find it in your homeschool atlas), but it can also stand generically for any hazardous passage on the world’s oceans.

The second scene is ashore, not at sea, and it’s cozy: it’s the circle of friends and family around the table raising their glasses in a toast to brother Thomas and wishing him a safe voyage home. Note how the blown foam of glasses and the blown foam of the waves are linked, and note how auditory Melville makes the scene, with think, brink, think, link, drink — and the one word you can hear even though it’s not really there: clink. 🍻

So, in honor of Herman on this his 200th birthday, why not reenact this toast today with your students around your homeschool dinner table (root beer will work fine in place of mead): “To the Meteor rolling home.”

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

❡ Looking in the lexicon: There are a few good vocabulary words in this week’s poem for your students to look up in your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books): vigil, mead, shearer, fleece — wonderful words, every one! 😊

❡ In a ring we link: 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. 😊

🖋 WONDERFUL WORDS: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

25 July 2019 by Bob O'Hara

For live links, click to: riverhouses.org/2019-hopkins

This coming Sunday is the birthday of one of the most innovative poets of the nineteenth century, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1899), a name every homeschool literature student should know. In Hopkins’ honor, our homeschool poem-of-the-week for this final week of July is one of his masterpieces: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”

Hopkins was a religious poet and he is famously difficult, but if you approach him with the right attitude — an almost scientific, puzzle-solving attitude — you’ll be richly rewarded. If your high-school homescholars can learn to decode Hopkins they’ll be more than ready for college-level work.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Christ — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Like Emily Dickinson in America, Gerard Manley Hopkins in Britain was seemingly born in the wrong century. The vast majority of his work, like Dickinson’s, was not published until some years after his death, and it was only after World War I that he came to be recognized as one of the great poets of the Victorian era.

Hopkins grew up in an exceptionally creative family, full of artists and illustrators and musicians and writers — a family that was also devoutly religious in the Anglican tradition. Gerard himself rejected his Anglican upbringing, eventually converting to Catholicism and becoming a Jesuit priest, which led to estrangement from his family.

Hopkins’ poetry is regarded as difficult because it bends English grammar and syntax almost to the breaking point. He likes to change nouns into verbs and he likes to coin new words to express abstract philosophical ideas.

Beginners sometimes think Hopkins’ writing sounds like a jumble, but in fact it’s just the opposite. In this week’s poem, before you try to work out the meaning, look first at the intricate structure. Far from being chaotic, “Kingfishers” is actually a perfectly regular sonnet, one of the most tightly fitted of all poetic forms. It’s in fact what’s called a Petrarchan sonnet, divided into an eight-line octave that sets up a topic, and then a six-line sestet that resolves or concludes the topic. The rhyme-scheme is regular and precise: ABBA ABBA CDCDCD.

But what’s it about? You almost have to translate Hopkins back into ordinary English first, to get the basic meaning, and then return to the original to appreciate how the meaning plays out. This poem expresses an idea in Hopkins’ Catholic theology: that all human beings are made in Christ’s image. The octave sets up the idea by describing the lesser mortal things of this world — animals and inanimate objects — and how they all give voice to some inner essence that is distinctive of themselves. Here’s my prose “translation”:

Just as kingfishers “catch fire” (flash color);
Just as dragonflies “draw flame” (glint iridescence);
Just as stones ring when they tumble into deep wells;
Just as the string on an instrument, when plucked, speaks its own name;
Just as a bell, when rung, rings out its own name;
Just so, all mortal things in this world express their inner selves:
They shout “this is what I am — to do this is why I am here.”

Now Hopkins makes the religious turn in the sestet: what about us? Do we also express our inner essence like all those lesser beings? We do. And what is that inner essence? For Hopkins the Catholic theologian, our inner essence is the image of Christ and His righteousness. Here’s a prose “translation” of the sestet:

But we humans do even more than these lesser beings;
We enact justice in our lives (Hopkins makes the noun “justice” into a verb);
We enact Christ’s grace in our lives — that is how God sees us;
Christ’s image is reflected (“plays”) in all we do,
And everything we are is beautiful to God,
Just as a child’s face is forever beautiful to its father.

Hopkins was a master of sound — his poems are meant not just to be read, but to be heard. Go back from my “translation” to the original text and listen to how he makes his words “speak” the things themselves in lines like “tumbled over rim in roundy wells / Stones ring” (you can almost hear the stone bouncing off the walls and echoing all the way down); or in “each hung bell’s / Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name” — the line itself almost vibrates like a giant bell. (How many “-ng” sounds can you count?)

Hopkins was not only a religious poet, but he was also quite a nature poet in many ways. If “Kingfishers” captures your imagination, fly over to “The Windhover” next, another Hopkins masterpiece that has captivated many a student’s heart.

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

❡ As kingfishers catch fire: 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 Hopkins) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋