FR HA WAR POEMS

The students worked on the topic of war in French poetry in their French class : they explored the links between history and poetry, compared different poetic forms (sonnet, ballad, rondeau, ode, blazon, fable, free verse poem, prose poem, calligram) and different historical periods (religious wars, wars waged by Louis XIV, Seven Years' War, Franco-Prussian War, two world wars), and identified the characteristics of poetic writing (versification, work on sounds, images in particular). 

The students were then divided into pairs. First, they were asked to write a poem in French about war in the form of a sonnet, a fixed form of poetry that appeared in France in the 16th century and was introduced by Clément Marot, consisting of two quatrains and two tercets (stanzas of 4 and 3 lines). They had to respect the writing constraints characteristic of this poetic form : the verses had to be decasyllabic or alexandrine (poems of 10 or 12 syllables), written according to the traditional rhyme scheme (abba abba ccd ede), and the last verse had to be a ‘punchline’ that summarised the overall impression, highlighted a contrasting detail, or created a surprise effect. In addition, at least three images (comparison, metaphor and/or personification) had to be developed. Second, they had to associate the poem they had written with an object and then rewrite their poem in English, in the form of a calligram, in the style of Guillaume Apollinaire's calligram ‘La colombe poignardée et le jet d'eau’ (The Stabbed Dove and the Water Jet), which is the origin of the word (formed by the contraction of ‘calligraphy’ and ‘ideogram’) in a collection of the same name (Calligrammes, 1918).

This activity developed students’ mother tongue and foreign language skills in a fun way, encouraging them to create unusual images and to write according to constraints they are not used to, such as the number of syllables or sounds. The students enjoyed writing these two forms of poetry, which allowed them to develop their creativity. Once the poems were written, they had to define the register in which they had written : each group wrote their register on the board, which helped them understand how poetry leads us to see the world differently and how it allows us to express our feelings and ideas in a unique way.