An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum

Dr Rayners

POEM

EXPERIENCE

EMOTIONS

IDEAS

ASSESSMENT

Reading Listening Literature Presentation

An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum

The poet looks at the grim conditions prevailing at a primary school in a British slum. He calls on the authorities to do something to lift these children from their situation of educational squalor to a world of real literacy and learning.

Steven Spencer

Spender was born in London in 1909. His parents were both literary people, his father being a journalist while his mother was a painter and a poet. Theirs was middle class society and, typically for those days, they tended to despise the ways of the working class. His parents' attitude would naturally influence the poet as a young boy -- hence the theme of his poem "My parents kept me from children who were rough".

Stanza 1

Far far from gusty waves these children's faces.Like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor.The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper-seeming boy, with rat's eyes. The stunted, unlucky

heirOf twisted bones, reciting a father's gnarled disease,His lesson from his desk. At back of the dim classOne unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a

dream,Of squirrel's game, in the tree room, other than this.

On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head,Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed mapAwarding the world its world. And yet, for theseChildren, these windows, not this world, are world,Where all their future's painted with a fog,A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky,Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.

Stanza 2

Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, and the map a bad exampleWith ships and sun and love tempting them to steal--For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holesFrom fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these childrenWear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steelWith mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.All of their time and space are foggy slum.So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

Stanza 3

Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor,This map becomes their window and these windowsThat shut upon their lives like catacombs,Break O break open 'till they break the townAnd show the children green fields and make their worldRun azure on gold sands, and let their tonguesRun naked into books, the white and green leaves openHistory is theirs whose language is the sun.

Stanza 4