[Xmca-l] Eighth Grade Reading and Paradise Lost

[David Kellogg]

Anthony--

I have a compromise for you. You are finding it hard to quit the "My
Hometown Minneapolis" thread, and you are, will-he nil-he, doing exactly
what you once condemned Ulvi for doing (posting links instead of thoughts).

Here's what I propose. The other day I was teaching READING. No, they
weren't eighth graders--they were Korean undergraduates, and I was teaching
Milton's Paradise Lost. Needless to say, the kids were finding it tough
going.

I think I know why. If you take eighth graders WRITING poetry, a sentence
usually maps onto a single prosodic line. For want of data (you really
could help out here, you know), I give you:

Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet.
. ....

Each line is a sentence, a simple major clause: subject, verb, object.
Milton doesn't do that: his first sentence ("Of man's disobedience...") is
sixteen lines long. So he  completely decouples the line from the clause.

Or does he? Milton loves acrostics (which is even more amazing when you
realize he's stone blind when he's writing this stuff)--according to
Melanie Phaal (not, I am almost sure, her real name), you find stuff like
this:

;;;who rather double honour gain

>From his surmise proved false; find peace within,

Favour from Heaven, our witness, from the event.

And what is faith, love, virtue, unassayed

Alone, without exteriour help sustained?

Let us not then suspect our happy state

Left so imperfect by the Maker wise,

As not secure to single or combined.

Frail is our happiness, if this be so,

Get it? You don't read it horizontally. You read it vertically, like a
Korean pub sign: FFAALL  (and "FALL" if you read it from the bottom up.
Double honor gained indeed....

That got me thinking. Alot of Paradise Lost becomes easier when you realie
that it's syntax is vertical, like a Korean or a Chinese crossword. Milton
puts  the subject in one line, the verb in the next, and the object in the
last.

No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades...

The problem is that when I teach this technique, I find that the kids
ignore it. A few years ago, there was a serious attempt to teach reading as
AUTONOMY--people like R.R. Day and Julian Bamford (influenced by Stephen
Krashen) wanted most reading to take place outside class, "extensively".
But this never really caught on, partly because we don't really know what
techniques to teach (besides "skimming and scanning", i.e. reading minus
comprehension). As usual, though, we tend to blame our own ignorance on the
kids (as I did in the first sentence of this paragraph).

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

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