I Think I Scan, I Think I Scan, I Think I Scan...

      How do you deal with purple cows?   Here's one way:

(And women wonder why men don't care to read maps.    )   I'm never entirely sure of the value of imprinting students with such elaborately quantitative techniques of metrical analysis.   As valuable or as useful as it can be, such techniques can end up alienating a great number of students and fundamentally disengaging them from poetry period (even if all this could be applied to prose but almost-never is).   Readers do need to learn how to scan, and I fairly regularly do some elements of scansion in the classes I teach.   But there's a degree to which we can make things too intricate (not to mention jargonistic), and students can end up tuning out entirely.   There's something to be said for developing a poetic/metrical "instinct," an automatic intuition that can come from careful reading practice.   I'm aware that I'm not making an especially reasoned argument here, but that's because some things go beyond plain reason.   It leads to the great questions that daunts-- or should daunt-- all teachers: when am I teaching too much?   does this sort of thing really help students understand matters more clearly?   I'm not so sure.   All the students I've seen do this sort of thing end up with that glazed look of boredom in their eyes, and the material they examine never comes to mean anything to them.   And boredom, once induced, is usually terminal.   Approaches like this can end up draining the blood out of a poem if done too much or too exhaustively.   I imagine Misters Yeats or Eliot would roll their eyes at such stuff, dismissing it as silliness.   Walt Whitman would have a conniption.

      But, alas, this is the Age of Flowcharts! There must be a diagram for everything.   There is no tree like a poem...