I was trying to decide which poem to share with you, when I saw that a reader suggested one of my favorites: “Ozymandias.” What a lesson this poem teaches about life, time, the illusory nature of power and fame. And when we read it, we ask ourselves what matters most, what endures, what can we do in this life that matters?
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m afraid that this, too, is apt:
Jake Gittes: How much are you worth?
Noah Cross: I have no idea. How much do you want?
Jake Gittes: I just wanna know what you’re worth. More than 10 million?
Noah Cross: Oh my, yes!
Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can’t already afford?
Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future. Now, where’s the girl? I want the only daughter I’ve got left. As you found out, Evelyn was lost to me a long time ago.
Jake Gittes: Who do you blame for that? Her?
Noah Cross: I don’t blame myself. You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they’re capable of ANYTHING.
So, forget it, Diane: it’s Educationtown.
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“Who’ll show a child just as it is? Who’ll place it within its constellation, with the measure of distance in its hand?” R. M. Rilke http://www.geocities.ws/SoHo/1826/duino.pdf
Do not forget it, Michael, Diane and others. The educator’s legacy lies not in ephemeral sand castles, but in generation after generation of coalescing star dust…
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In a way, it troubles me that this despot was forgotten, for it dooms us to repeat the mistakes of the past. It also bothers me that I will probably be long gone before our latest bunch of Ozymandias clones die out. I would like to live to see a shift back toward truly democratic institutions.
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Food for thought. King Canute the Great [early eleventh century] had himself taken to the seashore and—in full view of his courtiers [in current parlance, educrats and accountabully underlings] ordered the waters to roll back at his command. Seated full upon his throne, his feet and legs, er, got wet.
Online sources are contradictory on his motivations. Was he so full of himself that he truly believed he had command of the deep? Or was he, as a Christian, cleverly demonstrating the feeble power of earthly kings and the all-power of God?
Not having him around to question, there is one thing certain: his modern counterparts, the edubullies, do believe with all their hearts that they deserve to have uncontested say over all matters educational and that their Holy EduMetrics of standardized testing and the like have the godlike-power of revealing every quality of teacher, student and community.
Eduluminaries seem to have misunderstood Mark Twain: “To succeed in life you need two things: ignorance and confidence.”
I know this is not covered in the Common Bore Non-animated-State Standards, but he was providing a cautionary admonition, not trying to encourage bad behavior.
🙂
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Great choice! I read this poem in 4th grade, PUBLIC school, and it has stayed with me all these years…What about for you, Mike, Rahm, Bill/Melinda, and Barack?
And does Rhee read poetry?
Does Arne read?
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I doubt that John’s question about the love of literacy in his collection of corporate cronies would rise to the level worth noting. They all are in one accord about reducing critical thinking in the shabby, educational constructs!
I always had my students memorize classic poems. They loved the exercise, as did their proud parents. Maybe through poetry we as educators can convey to young minds a sense of ethics and wisdom that is totally lacking in the general public and definitely in “entertainment” venues! My last years were spent in an upscale, public school that allowed teachers freedom to enhance the curriculum with such worthy adjuncts. Sadly, it was taken over by a principal of infamous character who quickly banished most of the creative faculty and turned a once joyful school into dungeon like straits.
I hope many teachers can add a “poem of the month” to their curriculum! It’s easy, takes just the time out of a day to recite the poem ONCE, and have the child practice it once a day at home.
The children’s open minds quickly deduce the lesson from a poem. I extended this into essay writing, class discussions and presentations to the parents. Here’s a list of the
poems I used:
1. The Owl and the Pussycat
2. Little Orphan Annie
3. The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat
5. The Night Before Christmas (if in our PC world, that would be allowed…)
6. The Spider and the Fly
7. Casey at the Bat
8. The Sneetches by Dr. Seuss
9. “If” by Rudyard Kipling
The lesson conveyed in each poem truly are wonderful. I’ve had students who in later years told me they recalled verses from these gems when certain issues arose.
I’m sure that the corporate crushers of public education would find such an academic
gold mine, verboten. Too bad for the students, too bad for the nation.
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Hmm. At the risk of revealing my literary critical training from an earlier lifetime, I’d always thought that literature and art didn’t generally contain “lessons” or “messages,” per se, and that the purpose of them was to delight, not instruct. Further, to the extent that poems in particular convey “meaning,” it’s got much more to do with how they work as poems than what didactic message(s) it is ostensibly delivering. My question for those who think that poetry and other literature try to deliver messages is this: if that were the case, why didn’t the writer just give us a persuasive essay?
Thus, I doubt that David Coleman would have any truck with that kind of modern thinking about text, but I don’t see what objection he could have to what you describe, except that he likes his messages spelled out in non-fiction prose.
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Because MPG, the poem is a virtual experience, and the wisdom is embodied in that experience. A persuasive essay is also a virtual experience but not of the same kind, i.e. lived experience that a poem or short story or a novel is. The lived experience of Updike’s “A & P” is quite different from a persuasive essay on how to manifest one’s integrity. Ovid says somewhere that the aim of poetry is to delight and instruct. It is in popular entertainment, archetypal only entertainment, that we get the delight by itself without much instruction.
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Well said, Harlan! One enters imaginatively into the world of the work, has an experience there, and that experience is what has meaning, which may or may not be be characterizable as a “message.” This is one way (the most common, I think) in which literary works work. Love the Updike story, BTW. I think he was a better short fiction writer than novelist. Another great one by him: “The Music School.”
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First of all, Harlan, you’ve got your ancient poets mixed up. It was Horace who wrote:
“The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both pleasure and applicability to life. In instructing, be brief in what you say in order that your readers may grasp it quickly and retain it faithfully. Superfluous words simply spill out when the mind is already full. Fiction invented in order to please should remain close to reality.”
Second, I was referencing that in my original comment when I wrote, “I’d always thought that literature and art didn’t generally contain ‘lessons’ or ‘messages,’ per se, and that the purpose of them was to delight, not instruct,” but of course I was daring to disagree with Horace. In the history of literature and its criticism, there was a long war between those who felt that the MAIN purpose of art was to INSTRUCT (see Inquisition, The Spanish) and those who thought that maybe artists could be forgiven for occasionally getting in a little of that delight stuff.
In more modern thinking, there’s been a movement away from holding artists (including writers, which includes poets) responsible for stuffing instruction into their work to justify whatever else they might be up to, which has generally been viewed with a good deal of suspicion by various powers that be (see that Horace quotation again).
Finally, I think I was implying rather strongly that there are significant differences between experiencing art and experiencing didactic things like persuasive essays, instructional textbooks, and so forth. Where I’d disagree, I suspect, with your take is that the POINT of art isn’t to teach lessons. Of course, it CAN be. See pretty much any Soviet or Chinese Communist “art” or National Socialist German “art” for that matter. If you can stomach it. I’ll likely take a pass, however. When I want THAT kind of experience, I’ll pull out some recent essays by David Mamet.
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Harlan Underhill, I’m pretty sure that was Horace, but you make a good point. I’ve agreed with you twice today.
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Michael Paul Goldenberg,
Please use the correct lingo in Common Core.
Not “non-fiction prose,” but “informational text.”
You know, like instruction manuals, government regulations, recipes, the telephone book.
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Diane, I’m not sure even David Coleman is QUITE that stupid. But it IS interesting that he doesn’t see art as providing “information.” He’s wrong, of course, but at least there’s a tiny chance that he gets that prose fiction and poetry aren’t meant to be instructive and that few governments write their laws in the form of, say, villanelles (though it might spice them up a bit). ;^)
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As someone who is not a trained, experienced K12 educator, Coleman really has idea what kinds of texts teachers have been using in their classrooms. Unlike when I attended school in the 50s and early 60s, in my teaching experience over the past 45 years, all kinds of texts have been integral to classrooms in Early Childhood Education (ECE). I always had “instruction manuals, government regulations, recipes, the telephone book” etc. in my Kindergarten and Preschool classrooms.
I remember the year my principal’s kid, who was in my Kindergarten class and had repeatedly stated he had no interest in reading, picked up the Rules of the Road for Motorcycles and asked, “Do you have to learn how to read to drive a motorcycle?” BINGO! Suddenly that child was interested in learning how to read.
Not long later, he child found me in the phone book which I had put in the classroom and called me at home. In fact, over the years, I had many Kindergartners who called me at home simply because they learned how to read the phone book in class and found my name and number on their own. They also learned how to find each other in there. Pretty good for 5 year olds who were just learning how to read!
I never pushed kids to read when they were not ready and interested, but my class was filled with incentivizers. I provided a print rich environment, with most objects and materials labeled –which children participated in labeling– and all kinds of great literature. Informational texts often helped kids to discover what they wanted to read ABOUT, so I found they can be very effective with emerging readers. Clearly, Coleman has no clue that ECE teachers have been doing this for decades.
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I apologize for the typos. WordPress really needs an edit feature!
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Although I have always been bothered by Accerated Reader (surely reading is intrinsically rewarding), my new administrator really likes it. And I am on board with kids reading more. My thought, maybe we should let teachers participate. And sure, we would include Bill and any other billionaires who want to join us. We should all be reading more!
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