Lesson Plan – Non-Fiction – Langston Hughes

Objective: Students identify, analyze, and respond to the effects of poetic form and language as it relates to theme.

Instructional Block

Activator: Students write a personal reflection about what they like or dislike about poetry that is different from other forms of writing.

Mini lesson: Teacher reviews theme, motif, and symbol, as it relates to poetry. Poets have a message to convey that is similar to other authors, and they use a different medium. Use Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” to explore theme, motif, and symbol by first identifying sensory images and figurative language. Also, review denotation and conation of words. Note repetition and sound devices. How does the form, a narrative poem, help reveal symbolic representation as well as theme? Review rubric for literary analysis of the poem.

Learning Activity: Students finalize choice of poem for literary analysis. Then, have students work in pairs, and take turns reading chosen poems aloud to each other several times. Each person in the pair should read each of the two poems aloud at least three times to help writer identify sound devices. Students then work individually to note other poetic elements of importance. Remind students that they are also looking for all figurative language, sensory imagery, symbol, and revelations of theme. If student was unable to print poem of choice, s/he must use this time to write poem in notebook. Also, have students create a web organizer and then group elements together to begin organization for the literary analysis.

Wrap Up: Write a thesis statement for the literary analysis of your poem.

Homework: Refine thesis statement and create a complete outline for the content of literary analysis.

Image © Joseph Breitenbach

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled and barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
–the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly–
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
–It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
–if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels–until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
Elizabeth Bishop

Tags: elements of poetry, elizabeth bishop, free english lesson plan, motif, poetry, poetry lesson plan, symbol, the fish, theme