Making Learning Enjoyable: An Approach to Teaching Sonnets

I teach an introduction to poetry course to first year undergraduates in seminar groups of 14 and the name of the course is slightly misleading as the poems are often complex and the students need to learn how to discuss form as well as meaning so that they can complete their summative assignments confidently. This can be difficult for some of the students who have taken the course as it’s compulsory rather than because they feel enthusiastic about poetry.

One method I’ve devised is to have fun with the poems by setting ‘spot the difference’ activities that I hoped would catch the students’ interest by showing the difficulties for Victorian women poets writing love poetry to men, seeing as they were writing in a tradition that had a predominantly ‘male gaze’ approach to the muse, developed over centuries. Each week there are about 10 set poems and a lecture, as well as the seminars, in which we do a close reading of one or two of the poems.

I use Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese: 43’ (‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways’) and the first sonnet in Christina Rossetti’s sequence ‘Monna Innominata’ so the group can consider the different techniques the poets have adopted.

To start, I have a PowerPoint presentation showing the muses of well-known poets, including Robert Burns and William Butler Yeats as well as Sappho and I would like to add more to this. The final slide is of Robert Browning and the students usually laugh as they spot the difference. They then break into smaller groups to discuss and feed back on whether it’s clear from both poems that the writer is a woman and that the muse is a man.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem was written under a pseudonym at first (‘the Portuguese’) and I give a handout of the poems for the students to work from so they can see the differences between Browning and Rossetti, who put her name to her poem. The students also notice that Rossetti openly states in the poem that the beloved is a man, while Browning’s poem could be from either a man or woman to either a man or woman.

This exercise brings out some strikingly insightful comments from the students when they talk together and then tell the whole group their ideas. They find subtle interpretations in the poems that indicate the gender of writer and muse, which can lead to interesting discussion.

The gender-based approach to the sonnets has so far worked at getting students involved, and it’s then possible to bring in considerations of metre and rhyme scheme, starting with a ‘spot the difference’ on whether they’re in Petrarchan or English/Shakespearean sonnet form or another form of the poet’s devising.

Scanning poems, including the iambic pentameter of the traditional sonnet form, and identifying rhyme schemes can be one of the tedious parts of teaching and studying poetry but we look at it to see which poet we feel is most innovative, both in terms of subverting the male gaze approach to writing to a muse and also in inventing or manipulating the technical aspects.

While Browning deviates from iambic pentameter in ways that enhance the meaning and also help teach other metres, Rossetti is seen by students as being risk-taking in her open declaration of love to a male muse. The three lines starting ‘I love thee’ in the Browning sonnet illustrate the use of anaphora, while Rossetti has a rhyme scheme of her own devising.

The students identify the rhyme scheme in pairs on their handout and discover Rossetti’s unusual ABBA ABBA CDDECE arrangement, where the long delay between the C rhyme words in the final six lines imitate the long wait for the lover to arrive. I use the PowerPoint to show the poems with their rhyme schemes so they can check if they identified it accurately, as they’re often reluctant to answer simple questions in case they’re wrong.

Finally I ask them which poem they prefer and there’s quite an even division between those who opt for Browning and Rossetti. They also give their reasons, from innovative form to how the poets have approached revealing whether or not they are a woman and whether the addressee is a man.