We’ve had a very on-again-off-again relationship with poetry in our family.

Today I worked out *why*

I have always tried to *do poetry* with the kids, because I thought it was something we should do. Never mind that I was a little scared of it and still allowed such words as “boring” to be placed in close proximity to “poetry”, yea, even in the same sentence.

That said, we have been *doing* poetry this year, and it’s been remarkably on-again, rather than off-again. We’ve delighted in childhood rhymes from “Lavender’s Blue”, giggled with Edward Lear’s hilarity, wandered country lanes with Emily Dickinson and William Wordsworth.

But this week poetry changed for us, because it changed for me.
This week we met Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 
Ordinarilly, his title alone would have been enough to give me the jitters, but, well, maybe I’m growing up. I enquired of the gentleman (for surely such he is, with a name like that), “Sir, what have you to teach us?”

The first poem on the page may well have been wonderful, but the second one was SHORT. Six lines. Thoughts of methodically working through the forty poems were abandoned instantly. Six lines it was to be.

I read them out, feeling a little like I was cheating, because it happened to be the very poem mentioned in one of the booklets I had read earlier this week. I omitted the title, and didn’t even get to ask the children what they thought it was about when one of them cried out “It’s an eagle!” *connection * success * thrill *
We re-read the poem and worked out how they knew, what clues had given it away. That was for my benefit, not the children’s

Yesterday I flicked through the pages wondering if there was another short one.
There wasn’t, but Number Eight was “Charge of the Light Brigade”
I’ve heard of that! It’s famous. How about we read that one.

Half a league, half a league,
half a league onward…..

The rhythm grabbed us.
Then the story.
The tragedy.

We HAD to read it again.

We had to discuss the lines
Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to question why,
Their’s but to do and die:

What a powerful piece.
I now loved poetry and I was sharing a new-found love with the children.
Not that I realised this yesterday.

Today we didn’t *do poetry*
But I read Early Spring to the children. It’s spring here and it seemed an appropriate piece. I’m sure there are many things to be learnt from this poem, but we just talked about the ones we loved this time.

Once more the Heavenly Power
Makes all things new,
And domes the red-plow’d hills
With loving blue;

We talked about the changing sky.
We talked about using a noun as a verb and decided if the boys were writing a poem about their shaghais, they just might say they “rubber-banded the stone across the garden”

And speaking of interesting ways of using words, how about this line?
blah-de-blah-de something falls
on greening grass,

Can’t you just see the snow melting away and the new grass pushing up, making the ground so green the adjective should be turned into a verb, a “doing word”?

At that moment it struck me.
I was talking with the children about something I was loving myself. And that is oh so right when they are in the Love of Learning stage. Poetry isn’t something we just do, because we should. It is so much richer if I am sharing something I am newly-excited about. And this morning I was.

That is not to say some day I will not grapple with poetry. I expect to. I’m getting my Scholar Education and so it *can* be hard, it’s supposed to be, I will dedicate myself to struggling with ideas and learning…but just before I start that, before I jump into the Scholar Phase of Poetry,  I’m having my own little Love Of Learning phase, setting the scene for the work that is to come, and the children are tagging along.