Slice of Life: Shel Silverstein vs. Edgar Allen Poe

We’ve been wrapping up one unit around Digital Life, and students are completing up a digital poster project, but we are inching our way into poetry, too. Yesterday, we talked about “mood” and “tone” with poetry, which is a fairly abstract idea for many of my sixth graders to reflect upon as readers. I was trying to think of a way to demonstrate a real shift in mood with poems and hit upon this idea of comparing and contrasting the writing styles of Shel Silverstein and Edgar Allen Poe.

Such different poets, such different styles.

First, of course, we talked about what those concepts of mood and tone mean. I had to do a lot of guided discussions here, particularly around the ways that word choices affect mood of a piece, and how that mood is designed to impact the reader/listener. (note to self: need to expand this part of the lesson in the future).

Then, I shared out two short poems from Shel Silverstein. Many of the kids have heard of him, but not nearly as many in the past (is he fading away? I hope not). The first poem was about writing a poem inside of a lion and the second one was about a magical eraser. Both are from the collection, Where the Sidewalk Ends.  The poem about writing a poem inside of a lion sparked a lot of discussion. On the surface, you would not want to be eaten by a lion, and if that happened, the mood would be … terrifying. Shel’s poem is whimsical, about a poet trying to write the poem in the dark because he got too close to the lion at the zoo. My students could see how the poet set a tone of silliness right at the start.

I had them put Shel aside for a bit.

We then read and listened to (from an audio version) Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. It’s interesting how many knew of the poem from pop culture references, such as The Simpsons, but had not read it. Some have seen variations of Poe’s famous poem in books they have read. It’s a difficult poem to read for sixth graders, due to vocabulary and structure. I helped situate the reading a bit and then told them to pay attention to mood and tone (and internal rhymes and alliteration) as we listened to The Raven, and its constant call of “nevermore.” The discussion that followed talked about symbols of death, the sad feeling of mourning, and the eerie night visit by the giant bird that then never leaves. We talked about Poe’s word choices. It was great.

Ideally, the next step would have been for them to write two poems with very different moods. That will have to wait for another day, since we had some projects to work on. But I think the use of Silverstein versus Poe really brought to the surface how a writer creates a mood for the reader by the tone of the subject matter and choice of words.

Peace (evermore),
Kevin