Chanced upon some very old mark-lists of my mine from my schooldays. One of the subjects mentioned was ‘Non-detailed’, something which may seem Greek & Latin to today’s school children.
A huge rewind, slow & steady and then the flashback!
In school, English was not a single subject/language — It was broken up into Prose, Poetry & Non-detailed, with the last one meaning that although the subject matter included Shakespearean classics, they would be in simple English ( not in the original drama form) and importantly, the questions in the exam would be fairly simple and straightforward. Prose was the paper where there would be questions of comprehension, who said to whom & so on.
Imagine an entire subject on Poetry and an exam on that as well!Am sure this is something the kids of today miss. After so many decades, I still recall some of the verses & the vivid explanations the teachers would give. Christina Rossetti’s…
The earth was green, the sky was blue
I saw and heard one sunny morn
A skylark hang between the two
A singing speck above the corn.
The scene of a bright, clear blue sky with lush green fields below and a skylark fluttering around would be visible before our eyes and for city-dwellers, it was like a totally alien scene which was showing up. Sparked the desire to travel and take in these sights.
Another Rossetti gem which I recall:
Boats sail on the rivers, ships sail on the seas
But clouds that sail across the sky
Are prettier far than these
There are bridges on the rivers
As pretty as you please
But the bow that bridges heaven
And overtops the trees
And builds a road from earth to sky
Is prettier far than these.
As a child, certainly we had enjoyed seeing clouds of different shapes and sizes sail across the sky, but the description of a rainbow here certainly kindled our curiosity about Nature. Of course there were other poets too, whose simple works I enjoyed reading — ” How beautiful is the rain after the dust and heat” said Longfellow while Wordsworth said ” I wandered lonely as a cloud” & Tennyson representing ‘The Brook’ said ” I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally”.
Maybe ……..subjects have changed, teaching methods have changed, education has become more job-oriented/profession-oriented or a business in itself, so much so that Poetry as a subject cannot exist. What a child of today would miss are the slow, almost lazy poetic descriptions which bring home the magnificence of Nature and its admiration by a young mind. No doubt, at a click of a button, the child of today can get these details & images online and with ability to travel also increasing, he/she can well travel and view these scenes………… but alas, again the assimilation of the natural beauty and admiration of the grandeur take a backseat as taking selfies and social media posts gain prominence.
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Loved your musings on poetry.and how uncommon it is today to find a young mind which appreciates simple words magically stringed to cast the most breathtaking spells..
Beautiful…these lines still echo in our minds even though we learnt them ages ago….Panorama in Class X and Radiant Readers in junior classes had such an excellent selection of poems that you can still quote from them.