High Points and Low Points

In the summer of 2015, I attended a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on teaching Shakespeare in Brooklyn, New York, and it was one of the best experiences of my teaching career. 

One day at the institute, we were given soliloquies from different Shakespeare plays to perform.

To students, “soliloquy” is another name for “boring speech” that is not advancing the plot (often the only thing students care about). 

The students aren’t entirely wrong, though; soliloquies are a real challenge for an actor.  Who listens to a speech nowadays when there are TikTok videos to be scrolled?  So how does an actor keep an audience attentive and listening?

We learned all sorts of acting techniques to “make a soliloquy exciting,” and one of the best techniques we learned involved mapping out the soliloquy.  Our leader asked us to examine our speech:   Does it end on a high point or climax?  Does it start out the gate at volume 11? Does it drift away into ghostly ambivalence at the end?  Does the speech continuously rise—or fall?  Every good speech, said one of my wonderful acting teachers, has a high point and a low point.

Actually, she didn’t really say this truism. She helped us discover this fact about our speeches by giving us the following instructions: 

“At one point in this speech, she said, “You’re going to make your body as small as possible” (the low point).  “At another point, you’re going to make your body as big as possible” (the high point).

 And we had to identify these “highs” and “lows” literally—by curling our bodies into little balls as we read or performed the speech and stretching out like we were doing a huge jumping jack for the highest point of the speech. 

When I returned to teaching after happy days in New York, I discovered that what was true of Shakespearean speeches was also true of most poems in general. 

Every poem is a ride.  A poem starts somewhere particular and ends somewhere else—and probably has some sort of shift located within it.  Every poem has a high point and a low point—and finding where those locations are is a fun, interpretive game and discussion.

One of my favorite poems to demonstrate the “high/low points” found in poetry is Shakespeare’s sonnet, “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes” (Sonnet 29).

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

       For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

       That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

This lovely sonnet is written with a Shakespearean rhyme scheme (of course), but has a stout Petrarchan structure (meaning the first eight lines “do one thing” and then the last six lines “do another” with a shift—or volta—in between the two sections). 

The first eight lines travel a downward path of depression.  In the first four lines, the speaker is increasingly sad about his lonely lot, and then—in the next four lines, or “the second quatrain”--the speaker becomes increasingly jealous of others who have it better than him in all sorts of way.  The first eight lines just get sadder and bitterer as we go. 

Then, at line 9, we hit a lovely conjunction—“Yet”—that turns the poem upward to “sing hymns at heaven’s gate.”  The sestet (the last six lines) remind the speaker that even if his life is unhappy and empty of material blessings that he still has the spiritual love of the one he’s addressing throughout the entire poem. 

The poem goes down into the pit of despair and then climbs right out again to the greatest of joy and furthest point from envy that can be imagined.

When I read (or recite) this poem in class, I do exactly as I was taught in New York[1].  (You can’t really be too self-conscious or precious about oneself as a teacher).  I curl up into a ball at “contented least” (line 8), and then stretch out into a star at “with kings” (line 14).

And whenever I’m faced with a challenging poem—something formidable and long like, say, Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” I use this same method to make the poem manageable.  I read the poem several times and try to sense how it moves, where it’s going.  I read the poem until I can draw a diagram of it on the board, and then I feel the poem in my bones by actually moving them around!  Finding the “high” and “low” of a poem is a great “key” to poetry.

[1] I’m nothing if not a good student.