The Play Way
Heaney reflects on the experiences of a trainee teacher seeking ways to encourage creative writing in his class. He describes then assesses the effectiveness of his attempt on one occasion to use a piece of classical music as a catalyst.
The classroom presents an age-old quality to the sunlight that enters in shafts through window-panes and probes each desk/ For milk-tops, drinking straws and old dry crusts; the trainee has decided to defy equally age-old teaching methods, enlisting innovation in the shape of an orchestral recording: music strides to challenge it. His aim is to replace his remembered experience of teacher-led methods and seek the creative and emotional responses of the pupils themselves: mixing memory and desire with chalk-dust.
His italicised lesson-plan seeks written responses to a piece of Beethoven’s music.
Initial impertinence (and the cultural implication of ‘Can we jive?’ amongst ordinary kids for whom at the time the sight of a record presumed contemporary ‘popular’ dance music) is silenced by The big sound produced by a full orchestra.
Heaney assesses the swelling effect that Beethoven’s music exerts both on himself and on the class: Higher … firmer … each authoritative note … Pumps the classroom up tight as a tyre.
He perceives a bewitching effect, the sound Working its private spell behind eyes/ That stare wide. The recipe appears to be working both as a teaching-aid (The pens are busy) and as it affects him: They have forgotten me/ For once, giving him time to reflect on what is happening.
His pupils might not be the most linguistically equipped (their tongues mime/ Their blundering embrace of the free/ Word) but, engaged by their task, show positive signs not seen before: A silence charged with sweetness/ Breaks short on lost faces where I see/ New looks.
After its initial impact, however, the challenge appears to defeat the limited concentration span amongst the lost faces for whom notes stretch taut as snares. The trainee-teacher senses that the task proved too testing for youngsters who lacked the linguistic and musical abilities to prevent the experiment from imploding: They trip/ To fall into themselves unknowingly.
- milk-tops: after 1945 pupils in post WWII schools in Britain were given free half-pint bottles of milk on a daily basis for health reasons; these would traditionally be brought and consumed at the end of a lesson or during a break. The tops were circular and fitted the mouth of the bottle; an indent at the centre could be pressed to facilitate the use of a drinking-straw. Hence the class-room litter;
- Heaney opted initially for teaching and became influenced by Michael McClaverty, Head of the Ballymurphy school where he was sent to practise; 1962-3 marked a turning point: Heaney seems not to have come terms with Secondary teaching, eventually becoming a university lecturer;
- the jive imported from America became the universal UK rock-‘n-roll dance style in the late 1950’s;
- five quatrains variously 8 or 10 syllables; combination of punctuation, (some of it mid-line) and enjambement provides for the rhythmic ebb and flow of oral delivery;
- the rhyme scheme affects the even lines of each quatrain; odd lines are free;
- assonant effects: [æ] Play Way; [ɪ] pillars/ milk/ drinking; [ai] Sunlight/ strides/ desire/ behind eyes/ wide; [ʌ] pumps/ up/ blundering;
- alliteration: [s] silence/ sweetness/ lost faces/ see/ looks; [m] mixing memory
- interwoven chain effects: [ð] [s] [t] Then notes stretch taut as snares / trip
- poetic licence permits use of pillar as a verb to suggest a slender shaft of light that probes as a school-inspector might;
- the un-poetic lesson-plan is set out in italics but fitted to the rhyme scheme; trainee teachers were required to complete lesson plans for their supervisors;
- final suggestions of implosion possess a kind of cinematographic ’black-hole’..