Alfred, Lord Tennyson and The Band Perry

Reading this blog, people must think that I was an odd child, reading Kipling and Poe and Steinbeck and Hemingway from the age of twelve.  Maybe I was an odd child with all of that reading, but I did normal things too.  We played daylong baseball games in the pasture next to the calf lot.  We played vicious games of tackle football, without pads in the same pasture.  I rode my bike into town and bought comic books and bubble gum.  I built camps in the woods and tree houses in the trees and forts out of bales of hay in the loft.  However, like as not, I would be holed up in my tree house or hay bale fort with a good book.

At around 12 or 13 I was reading a lot of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poetry. I was a bit carried away by the Arthurian legends and bold cavalry charges.  In fact, my favorite of his poems was The Charge of the Light Brigade.  "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all in the valley off Death, rode the six hundred....."  Oh, the majesty of that gallant but doomed Light Brigade!  In fact, I memorized the poem and had to go around and recite it to all the sixth grade classes.  They had no clue what I was talking about.

Imagine my surprise when, over forty years later, my 20 year old daughter comes to me and asks if I have a book of Tennyson's poems!  Of course, I do, and as I pull it down from the shelf, I ask her why she is interested in Tennyson.  Turns out that she has seen a music video by The Band Perry for their song 'If I Die Young'.  In the video, the beautiful blond singer for the group lies down in a boat with a book of Tennyson's poems on her breast, singing about what to do if she dies young.  At the end of the video, the pages of the book flutter open to the poem The Lady of Shallot, wherein the beautiful but cursed blond heroine floats in a boat down to Camelot but, tragically, dies before she reaches Sir Lancelot.  Off Emily goes to read The lady of Shallot and off I go to watch the video by The Band Perry.

What a wonderful link from new to old!  The modern media of a YouTube video sent my daughter in search of a very old poem.

Teachers should always be on the look out for new media, especially music, that can tie into the literary content of the subject matter that we teach.  If teachers can make the subject matter more relevant to what is going on in their students' lives, the students will surely be more receptive to learning the material.  There are lots of movies of Shakespeare's stories set in modern times, with modern characters and modern settings, but with the original story line.  Teachers should always be on the lookout for more modern media, videos, movies, blogs, music, that can bring the subject content alive for their students, and, hopefully, cause them to seek out original source material.