POEMS and POETS (English B2.1 group A)

It was poetry day on Saturday 21st Mar. Just the week before, our guest speaker Kirsten Tinkler, came to the school as part of the Cultural Days and talked a bout Roald Dahl’s life and work . And, since we’re reading this year in English B2.1. , Matilda, by Roald Dahl, we had a look at one of the poems in the book .

In Roald Dahl’s Matilda, the opening lines of a poem written by poet Dylan Thomas’s are recited. Listen or read them here: “In Country Sleep”.  In our book, the character Miss Honey recites  to Matilda as they approach the teacher’s cottage, which becomes a symbol for shelter and safety. Matilda describes the poetry as “music,” highlighting a thematic connection between the two authors; Dahl was heavily inspired by Thomas, even modeling his writing shed on Thomas’s in Laugharne, as some of us attending the talk last week learned about Dahl’s admiration for the Welsh poet. Dahl in turn, included one of his poems in Matilda, one that speaks about shelter and safety.

And the next day in class we talked about how much we understood!

Never and never, my girl riding far and near
In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,
Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood
Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,
                                        My dear, my dear,
Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year
To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.

In this video Roald Dahl tells us about his writing shed: