Six poems, read aloud, spread across the year rather than blocked into a unit — because a poem beside a play or a novel does more than a poem beside five other poems.
| Poem | Poet | Read beside |
|---|---|---|
| Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes…“) | William Shakespeare | Romeo and Juliet, as an antidote to its own imagery |
| ”Letter to Sir John A. Macdonald” | Marilyn Dumont (Métis) | The unit on perspective and whose account survives |
| ”The Bull Moose” | Alden Nowlan | The short-story unit: an ending that reorganises the poem |
| ”Blues Spiritual for Mammy Prater” | Dionne Brand | Style and diction: what plain words can carry, and how a photograph becomes an argument |
| ”The Cariboo Horses” | Al Purdy | Setting as argument: a landscape that is not scenery |
| ”I Am a Canadian” | Duke Redbird (Anishinaabe) | The media unit: identity as a claim rather than a fact |
How we read a poem here
- Aloud, twice, before anything is said about it.
- Annotate: line breaks, the turn, the repeated sound.
- One claim each, with a line as evidence.
- Read it aloud a third time, by somebody with a different reading.
What to look for
- The turn. Almost every poem changes direction; find the word.
- The line break. The word left hanging at the end of a line is being pointed at.
- Sound. Where the poem slows, and what it slows for.
- The last line, which most poems are built backwards from.
Where these come from
Brand’s poem is from No Language Is Neutral (Coach House Press, 1990), written in response to a photograph of a formerly enslaved woman taken when she was well over a hundred. Purdy’s title poem gave its name to the 1965 collection that won the Governor General’s Literary Award. Dumont’s is from A Really Good Brown Girl (1996). Redbird’s was read to the Queen at the Silver Jubilee in 1977, which is worth knowing before you decide what its tone is doing.
Sonnet 130, specifically
Shakespeare spends thirteen lines insisting his mistress is not like the sun, coral, snow, or perfume — and then lands the fourteenth. Read it next to Romeo’s early speeches about Rosaline and ask which one the play agrees with.
Curriculum connection
B1.5
extend understanding of texts, including increasingly complex texts, by making appropriate connections between the ideas in them and personal knowledge, experience, and insights; other texts; and the world around them (e.g., recall similar structures of texts previously read to help in analysing a new text; with a partner, role-play a mock interview about a public personality’s reaction to a recent profile in a print or online source; explain how something in your own experience or background has influenced your understanding of a character’s behaviour)
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B2.3
identify a variety of elements of style in texts and explain how they help communicate meaning and enhance the effectiveness of the texts (e.g., determine the differences in meaning or effect when the same symbol, such as the sun or water, is used in two different poems; compare the images, symbols, and literary devices used in an Aboriginal myth and a Greek myth; explain how a mythical allusion in a piece of literature or an advertisement enhances the theme or message; determine what effects are achieved in works by two different authors, one of whom uses a variety of sentence types while the other does not)
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A1.4
identify the important information and ideas in oral texts, including increasingly complex texts, in a variety of ways (e.g., listen to a read-aloud of a scene from a Shakespeare play and summarize the content; use a graphic organizer to compile the main ideas and supporting details from several television newscasts about a current event/issue)
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B2.2
identify a variety of text features and explain how they help communicate meaning (e.g., “explanatory” titles or epigraphs for individual chapters in a novel; logo size, illustrations, font sizes, and colour in an advertisement)
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