We began a new unit on Nightjohn and literacy in the English Studies class today. Just as the students were starting the kick-off, which was to answer the essential question, “How does literacy change lives?”, I had remembered William Meredith’s “The Illiterate.” It’s always been one of my favorites, a sonnet that takes all the rules about sonnets and bends them slightly. Cursing (internally only), I was frustrated that I hadn’t thought of it earlier. It was one of those moments where the teaching-as-an-art kicked in. I thought about it for a moment, Googled the title, and, finding it available online, decided to improvise.

I thought I’d try a technique I’d learned at the South Carolina Middle School conference at Myrtle Beach last year, but not having printed copies, I had to improvise.

I projected the poem on the whiteboard and read it aloud to the students.

The Illiterate

By William Meredith

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think that this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

“Turn to a partner,” I said when I finished, “and select the five to eight most important words in the poem.” As they finished up, we went though the poem line by line, and I circled important words students called out from behind me. In the end, with a few suggestions from me, it looked something like this:

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think that this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

“That’s more than five to eight words,” one student pointed out.

“True, but this was what I was aiming for in the long run, so it worked out well.”

I read the poem again, and then we talked about its meaning based on the highlighted words. They quickly saw that the letter contains three options: riches, sadness, and love. We jumped to the last line and reread it.

“Turn back to your partner and come up with three words that might describe his “feeling for the words that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved.” The responses were varied, as I’d hoped:

  • concerned
  • worried
  • mysterious
  • curious

We went back to the poem once more, and I led them to see that the  majority of the poem is an extended simile to explain the poets feeling when touching the unnamed subject’s goodness.

Turning it back to the essential question, I had students write in their journal how literacy would change the narrator’s life. We shared a few, then moved on to the next portion of the anticipatory lesson for Nightjohn.

As I write this, though, it occurs to me that I missed a significant portion of the potential power of the improvised activity. The narrator is not illiterate in the literal sense of the word (pun not intended). He is, however, illiterate. It might have been worthwhile to see if the kids could pick up on the emotional illiteracy that the poem is expressing.

Still, not bad for ninety seconds of planning and another sixty seconds of preparation.