Image Credit:
Students often have difficulty reading and interpreting poetry. It's an alien skill, it seems, for most of them. The challenge is even greater when there's a significant language barrier, such as trying to read Chaucer in Middle English. In my Banned Books course this semester, therefore, I had students collaboratively annotate passages from The Canterbury Tales with relevant images. This exercise would work, however, for any poem.
We began with a wiki page that had the introductory passage from the "General Prologue" in place. Students then searched for images that would annotate an individual line or phrase. For example, the famous first line ("Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote") received an image of flowers in the rain to illustrate April showers. The image at the top of this page remarks upon the Miller's portrait, in which Chaucer regularly compares him to a hog.
Once students annotated most of the lines, a visual narrative arose that gave the students an easier entry into the meaning of the lines. The prevalence of nature imagery and ideas of generation and rebirth in the first 18 lines of the General Prologue came through clearly. By making these themes visible, we were then able to return to a discussion of the text while also increasing student confidence in their ability to navigate the difficulties of the poem. We also were able to discuss how the images did not always match the precise meaning of the words, thereby re-emphasizing the textual specifics.
Because this exercise was done with a class-restricted wiki, we did not need to worry about making sure the images used were licensed appropriately. Only students in the course could see it. For a different method of interpreting poetry via images, see Elizabeth Frye's lesson plan "Teaching Poetry with Image Databases."
