Have Fun on 101
Astral: (Theosophy) Consisting of, belonging to, or designating, a kind of supersensible substance alleged to be next above the tangible world in refinement; as, astral spirits; astral bodies of persons; astral current.
April’s celebration as “Poetry Month” has seen lots of famous and contemporary pieces published in the newspapers, in daily emails, on refrigerator notes, etc. We might be wondering why we haven’t seen the advertisers jump on this bandwagon, but – like marketing natural medicines – the money in poetry isn’t really so profitable.
Fortunately, the people at Burma Shave didn’t accept that, exploring down a “road not taken” with the poetic signs which used to be found along the backroads of America. Perhaps many of us can still remember “the good ol’ days” driving on those winding two-lane state highways (like the original Route 66 across country or Highway 101 along the west coast) and then coming across a series of five or six small signs on the side of the road, with about enough space in between to read and digest one before the next appeared. The final sign in the series always identified the source (Burma Shave), but we knew it long before it appeared.
Some samples went like:
The ladies
Take one whiff
And purr—
It's no wonder
Men prefer
Burma-Shave Lotion
The first signs carried content to advertise the benefits of the product, but once the brand name recognition became automatic, many verses focused on driving habits and road safety. A typical example is entitled “Daisies”:
If daisies
Are your
Favorite flower
Keep pushing up those
Miles-per-hour
Burma Shave.
You can find an exhaustive list compiled from the book Verse by the Side of the Road at this location:
http://burma-shave.org/jingles/
Of course, we don’t take the backroads in our current fast-paced culture, and we have the Interstates (I-5, I-90, I-84, etc.) slicing straight lines through terrains from point A to point B at posted speeds of 70 mph. Thus, the rustic local color of the country roads has been brushed over and aside for the state sponsored (and controlled) “Lodging / Food / Gas at the next exit” messages that preserve the natural beauty of the Interstate network and control the revenue flow.
High-fives for the I-5’s!
During this month, I experienced the “High-five for the I-5” attitude in my classroom while we were discussing the poem “The Man He Killed” by Thomas Hardy.
I imagine copyright laws prevent me from reproducing the entire poem here, but it’s readily available online for perusal prior to discussing it. Open it in a new window:
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/923.html
My students read it over and pronounced it was saying that “war turns potential friends into enemies. “
I suggested that might not be all there was to it, so they added that the poem shows that “war causes soldiers to act differently than they ordinarily would.”
This was followed by the attitude that said, “We’ve finished. Can we leave now, Mr. Lowe?”
“High five for the I-5!”
However, I had planned the class session with a “High fun on 101” perspective, and I was noticing some curves, so I asked, “Why does each stanza begin with quotation marks, but only the final stanza has quote marks at the end?”
While they puzzled over that one, I noticed a view from a different angle, asking them, “Why does he have those dashes in the third and fourth stanzas?”
Since one of the students had read the poem aloud to start the discussion, I suggested, “Do the dashes somehow affect the rhythm of the poem when it’s read aloud? Why would Hardy do something like that?”
As a class, we figured out that the quotations meant that the entire poem was that of a soldier speaking aloud, and the dashes interrupted the rhythm because it appeared that this was the first time the soldier had verbally told the story of the experience.
By now, we were actually out of the allotted time, but obviously we weren’t finished yet. We hadn’t decided what the circumstances were that prompted him to speak. So the assignment for the next day was to imagine someone needed an illustration to accompany the poem in a book. If the offer was $5,000 for the best concept, how would they compose their suggestion? How much time had elapsed between the event and the telling of it? How would they describe the scene and situation?
The next day they had forgotten the “High-five for I-5” view and completely pulled off the freeway. They wanted to spend the entire class time at this particular bend in the road with its panoramic view of the variety of possible scenes.
Obviously, the “I” and the “he” in the poem referred to the two soldiers, with “I” walking off the battlefield and “he” remaining a dead body on the battlefield.
However, the “He” in Hardy's title, now they had thought about it, wasn’t so clear. If the speaker in the poem had indeed realized in the third and fourth stanzas that the man who had died might easily be a mirror image of himself, that realization had not carried over to the fifth (and final) stanza, for he ends the story in the same matter-of-fact and somewhat detached voice he started with.
Whatever emotions he had acknowledged in stanza three and four were now safely bottled up again. Essentially, part of him had died out on the battlefield as well, and now this is something he has to carry inside.
The students felt that Hardy had recognized and described PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) back in the early 1900’s – long before the contemporary recognition in the 1970’s as a condition needing attention.
By their initial “High-five for I-5” approach, the students had missed the deeper implications of Hardy’s observations. However, a “Have fun on 101” approach offered much more value – value that perhaps could be found as we examine other things going on around us. What happens in the classroom doesn't need to stay in the classroom!
Perhaps it’s not a bad idea to pull out of the fast lanes and take a leisurely drive, for fun, on 101!
Walter Lowe
Astral Facts is a monthly presentation of Humanities Science, produced in the bowels of the Humanities Science offices.
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