The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
I. ANALYSIS OF THOUGHT
1. Understanding.—The meaning of each word, the meaning of each line, the meaning of the whole stanza. This should not be a mere passive understanding. Students should be made to reëxpress the ideas, not only by paraphrase in other words but especially by imaginative realization. “For instance,” “Just like what?” are two phrases to be often on the teacher’s lips. “Have you a heard a curfew?” “Have you heard a knell tolling?” “Did you ever see in picture or in reality a lowing herd winding o’er the lea?” A thought illustrated by the thinker’s imagination is realized fully, is felt as well as grasped, and will persist.
2. Judgment.—What is the logical subject and logical predicate of each line and of the whole stanza? That is, what is the author’s chief topic and what does he say about it? This need not always be the grammatical subject of the passage. The art of expression is not only apprehending by vivid understanding, but it is also judging by predication, by affirming or denying something of the subject. There is not a class of any grade which cannot profitably exercise itself in clear and concise judgements. The successive judgements briefly put are: The bell tells the end of day: the cows return to the barn: the ploughman comes home: I am left alone in the darkness.
3. Reasoning.—As as single sentence may be analyzed into a definite subject and a definite predicate for a judgment, so two or more sentences may be compared to grasp the relation between them. Poetry does not go through a process of reasoning. It states thoughts and presents pictures, permitting the mind to infer. The three pictures in the opening lines have a common trait which the mind detects: all three pictures are signs of nightfall. The mind draws an inference which is inductive in nature, and the whole stanza may be briefly stated: The coming of night leaves me alone in darkness.
These stages in analyzing the thought are elaborated here. In practice they may be expedited. Before being read, the judgment and inference may be presented as problems for solution: What does the writer say in each line? What one idea is found in the first three lines? What will be the title, the head-line, the summary of each line and of the whole stanza?[5]
II. ANALYSIS OF FORM
Form includes not only the words and sentences, their choice and their arrangement, but also the texture and color of the thoughts and their modification ending in their perfect expression, as contrasted with the bare and limited statements already determined. In the study of literature, words are not merely materials for philologizing, or merely sentences, free opportunities for grammatical anatomizing with all the bones properly numbered and labeled. Such analyses look chiefly backward and are not productive of writers. Language anatomy has its great utility, but literature, or the art of expression, must look to the flesh and blood of the thoughts, to the personality, to the imagination, to the concrete embodiment of the writer’s art. The student will take up, therefore, the thought already analyzed and note and appreciate how his author has clothed the ideas, the judgments, the reasoning. He will reënact the creative process the author went through, and so here, with a view to expression, he will strive to rival the excellence of Gray, but will do so with his own thoughts.
Grading.—At this stage the teacher may point out incidentally many excellences in the art of expression, but will drill and have practice on the particular excellence in expression, proper to his class. The textbook ordinarily determines the grade, but if there is no textbook or prescribed program, the teacher will determine his own order of matter.