In the spirit of the Valentine’s Day season, I again introduced to my students my “Metaphors in Serious Love Poems” unit.
We began by listening to “Who You Are” and writing down the song’s four metaphors. Since it’s an original song, and students generally complain about anything me, I preempted any whining dislike of this favorite of mine by asking, “Why might someone think these are good metaphors for a love song?”
Then we moved on to Bartholomew Griffin’s “My lady’s hair is threads of beaten gold,” albeit with its “Her breast displays two silver fountains bright” tamed to a mild “Her neck is as a silver fountain bright.” That and the poem’s remaining metaphors depict a woman of unparalleled physical beauty– “until,” as I told my students, “we get to the ‘but.'”
After the giggles finally subsided, I read the line again, careful not to dwell on the additional “behind” (“But Ah, the worst and last is yet behind: For of a griffon she doth bear the mind!”), and quickly clarified, “Which means we now have a contrast: the poet has been saying she’s beautiful; however, these last lines suggest something different.” We defined “griffon,” and the girls in class became indignant.
(The next day, though, I got to wondering: Could the last lines just mean that the best part of the situation is yet to come? And that the best is that she thinks about Griffin a lot even though he can’t spell his own name? Ah, what unrequited scholarship!)
Then we read Shakespeare’s “My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun” (with “breasts” again changed to “neck”), and I asked the girls, “Which poem would you rather receive from your boyfriend on Valentine’s Day?”
Several in my advanced class spoke up to say they’d rather be loved as they are for who they are rather than be thought beautiful but unintelligent; her classmates emphatically agreed.
In one of my other classes, however, the general female consensus was that even though they’d just said they’d slap Griffin for calling them a Griffon, they’d rather be considered beautiful and dull than be told their breath stinks.