Colin Sheridan: Paradise lost? Today's teens miss out on beauty of yesterday's poetry

Soundings was dumped off the Leaving Cert curriculum in 2000, but was something lost in the move to make the syllabus more diverse and contemporary?

Leaving Cert students get to study a more diverse curriculum but are they being deprived of the beauty of poetry from days gone by? File picture

Good weather can only mean one thing: Leaving Cert English paper one. Soundings. The Planter’s Daughter versus Paradise Lost. Emily Dickinson vibing on a funeral in her brain. Dylan Thomas’s point-blank refusal to mourn. Paddy Kavanagh counting the bicycles headed down to Billy Brennan’s yard, hornier than a goat, thirsty at the prospect of chasing a bit of skirt down Iniskeen Road on a July evening.

Feeling nostalgic, I reached for a copy of the great green book and started to leaf through its fabled pages. First published in 1969, Soundings — more cultural touchstone than simple poetry anthology — had more reprints than the King James Bible.

There isn’t a house in Ireland built in the last 55 years that hasn’t had a half dozen copies cycle through it. Notes, scribbled in pencil, about the margins. Arrows and underlines elucidating on curious metaphors. A girl’s name. A heart with an arrow through it. The lovestruck doodles were poems all by themselves.

An introduction from editor and academic Augustine Martin implored students to ignore the glossaries provided in the footnotes. “Nobody — teacher, classmate, critic or parent — can read a poem for you,” Augustine warned.

“Ultimately, the reader himself must lay hold to the poem and experience it in the intimacy of his own mind. Unless he does this, the whole effort of teaching is at worst a fraud, at best a waste of time.”

The front cover of the much-loved Soundings poetry book, which was part of the Leaving Cert English curriculum for many years.

Strong words, and ones that my own English teacher taught by. To dare read the footnotes was a cowardly surrender to conformity. He would rather you die thinking Austin Clarke had genuinely lost a heifer if it meant you read the poem your way — even if you misunderstood it — so long as you didn’t go straight to the bottom to see what the cheat-sheet said.

Sadly, Soundings was dumped off the Leaving Cert English curriculum in 2000 after a significant revision of the English syllabus.

This new module introduced a broader and more diverse range of texts, including contemporary authors, modern novels, and film studies.

The aim was to modernise the curriculum and move beyond the traditional, predominantly male and canonical selections that characterised Soundings.

While the reasoning was sound, one can’t help wondering what students today and for the last 25 years have lost by being deprived of the exposure to some of the greatest minds in literature. 

When you’re young and live in your own head, reading Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Stanzas written in Dejection near Naples can be quite formative. Especially if you had a teacher who brought it to life, as I had.

What happened? Was Paradise Lost too dark, too apocalyptic, too critical of Man’s first disobedience, to be trusted in the hands of an 18-year-old?

Has the Department of Education ever watched an episode of Euphoria?

Perhaps the straw that broke the lost heifer’s back was The Planter’s Daughter, Austin Clarke’s love letter to a beauty so profound, it silenced entire pubs.

Nowadays, a line of pure genius such as “They say that her beauty/Was music in mouth” could be construed as a sentiment a little too close to outright objectification, and therefore be disqualified as leery misogynistic nonsense.

If that’s the calculation, then, oh, what a loss.

Some German students visited our school during my secondary school years. I slow-danced with a young fraulein from Baden-Württemberg to The Pretenders I’ll Stand by You at a disco in the town hall, and weeks later, in an effort to keep the romance alive until I was old enough to run away to the Black Forest to lumberjack, I wrote her a letter in which I may have told her that she was “the Sunday in every week”.

The scribbles in the margins were commonplace.

In my defence, it was the pre-internet age, and we had bonded over our mutual love of poetry and Dawson’s Creek. You miss all the shots you don’t take.

Weeks passed before a letter arrived with a German stamp on it. “Why Sunday?” the fraulein asked, obviously unimpressed. “It’s the worst day of the week. It is long and boring, and I get depressed because I have to go back to school on Monday.”

Bloody Germans, one might say, but here was a valuable lesson in her cold-eyed critique.

“No poem means quite the same thing to any two readers,” Augustine Martin said, “or even the same reader at different periods of his life.”

The fraulein read it her way, and I read it mine. Nostalgia is a seductive sauce, but I can’t help thinking Soundings was something worth keeping in the schoolbags of our kids.

How else will teenagers come to know that "beauty is truth, truth beauty”? And "that is all we know on earth, and all we need to know". So too, that "the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”.

When you’re young, there’s surely no more relatable a sentiment than that.