Poem 203 - On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High

This poem's whole idea is being signified through the imagery Berry crafts together. Turning his classroom into an aquarium and making a metaphor relating his students to fish, Berry shows his audience how his students absorb, instead of reject, the poetry discussion. He opens his poem up with a simile representing the students as obedient and rather fearful of what is to come. By the fourth stanza, though, he represents them in a simile, "Together we swam around the room like thirty tails whacking words till the bell rang" that shows their willingness to join in the discussion eagerly. He manipulates the use of alliteration, "frozen fish" "whacking words", which adds more poetic language to the poem and helps it to flow better. We are reading a poem about analyzing poems and the alliteration technique helps to separate creating a story from creating a poem.

Although the poem does not follow much of a rhyme scheme, the important aspect of this poem comes from the speaker of it. The speaker is the teacher and is more effective than if it was a student or outside source. Coming first hand from the teacher adds to the title of the poem in that it is from the perspective of the first-hand person teaching poetry to his students. If this poem had been written by a random student in the class, we may have got a more bias approach to what was occurring. If they were bored, they may represent everyone as being bored. Therefore, the teacher being the speaker of the poem is the most effective way in which the poem can be projected to the audience.

This poem was interesting to me because it is exactly why were blogging and what we have been focusing on for a while in class. In this way everyone in my class can relate to it personally. Some days we are "frozen fish" drowning in "an aquarium" because we do not understand a poem and are fearful of the one-sided discussion to come. Other times, we have those "gills", soaking and reciprocating the information we all get out of the poem. Especially when we easily recognize most poems are about slavery. (Just Kidding).