To begin at the beginning:

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless

and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the

hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping

invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black,

crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea, …..

SECOND VOICE

          never such seas as any that swamped the decks of

          his S.S. Kidwelly bellying over the bedclothes and

          jellyfish-slippery sucking him down salt deep into the

          Davy dark where the fish come biting out and nibble

          him down to his wishbone, and the long drowned

          nuzzle up to him.

FIRST DROWNED

          Remember me, Captain?

CAPTAIN CAT

          You’re Dancing Williams!

FIRST DROWNED

          I lost my step in Nantucket. …..

FOURTH DROWNED

          Alfred Pomeroy Jones, sea-lawyer, born in Mumbles,

          sung like a linnet, crowned you with a flagon, tattooed

          with mermaids, thirst like a dredger, died of blisters.

FIRST DROWNED

          This skull at your earhole is

FIFTH DROWNED

          Curly Bevan, Tell my auntie it was me that pawned

          the ormolou clock.

CAPTAIN CAT

          Aye, aye, Curly. …..

That, of course, is Under Milk Wood, A Play for Voices, by Dylan Thomas.

In a summer school setting, this writer once staged a reading of it by a whole class with each student by means of a simple expedient playing many parts. Furnished with photocopy scripts, and seated in a semi-circle, the student ‘actors’ began from one end of the arc, with the next student taking up the reading whenever the dialogue alternated between characters or a new character spoke. The reading travelled back and forth from end to end along the arc, thus averaging out the waiting time between speaking parts. The students gave it the thumbs up.

That was at least a decade before smartphones became ubiquitous. Now people, particularly young people, are corresponding again, albeit by electronic media, and palm-of-the-hand size limitation plus the tedium of typing have combined to cultivate a brevity, albeit at the expense of vocabulary. This relatively recent vocab exercise was used to good effect with a fifth and sixth years primary class

          Although it seems like a dream, I would like one day to be a ....................

Beaches are where I like to ........................................................................

Chewing gum may help you to think, do you think? ...................................

Daydreams are stray thoughts, and are fun because .................................

Eating healthy food means giving up ..........................................................

Friends are good for us because ................................................................

Glue is useful for mending broken things like .............................and..........

Habits can be bad or good; a good habit might be to .................................

Imagination is great for ...............................................................................

Juggling several things in the air at the same time requires kinetic intelligence (good hand/foot/eye coordination) and this kind of intelligence is important also in activities like .....................................................................................................................

 And so on, A-Z. A similar exercise in the guise of character vocabulary for creative writing can be found in ‘To Cut a Long Story Short’ among the flipbooks here also. Such exercises undertaken in class become group-participatory, and still the outcome is measurable, pupil by pupil.

Do participatory exercises which do not have measurable outcomes, then have a value? Well, let’s try another:

ORGON

          Ah, Brother, good-day.

CLÉANTE

          Well, welcome back. I'm sorry I can't stay.                                                                                  

          How was the country? Blooming, I trust, and green? …..

ORGON

          Excuse me, Brother; just one moment.

          To put my mind at rest, I always learn

          The household news the moment I return.

(to the maid, Dorine)

          Has all been well, these two days I’ve been gone?

          How are the family? What’s being going on?

DORINE

          Your wife, two days ago, had a bad fever,

          And a fierce headache which refused to leave her.

ORGON

          Ah. And Tartuffe?

DORINE

          Tartuffe? Why, he’s round and red,

          Bursting with health, and excellently fed.

ORGON

          Poor fellow!

DORINE

          That night, the mistress was unable,

          To take a single bite at the dinner-table,

          Her headache-pains, she said, were simply hellish.

ORGON

          Ah. And Tartuffe?

DORINE

          He ate his meal with relish,

          And zealously devoured in her presence

          A leg of mutton and a brace of pheasants.

ORGON

          Poor fellow! …..

DORINE

          After much ado, we talked her

          Into dispatching someone for the doctor,

          He bled her, and the fever quickly fell.

ORGON

          Ah. And Tartuffe?

DORINE

          He bore it very well.

          To keep his cheerfulness at any cost,

          And make up for the blood Madame had lost,

          He drank, at lunch, four beakers full of port.

ORGON

          Poor fellow!

DORINE

          Both are doing well, in short.

          I’ll go and tell Madame that you’ve expressed

          Keen sympathy and anxious interest.

And so on, from Act 1, Scene Four, of Moliere's Tartuffe, in Richard Wilbur's acclaimed translation. Selected scenes from this play too were read with whole-class participation following the same method adopted for Under Milk Wood. In this case the readers were junior cycle students at, as it happens, an all-girls Dublin secondary school. Again, the reception was enthusiastic.

Wilbur in his introduction stresses that the reader and hearer can trust the words by themselves to convey the serious point of Moliere's comedy and to be sufficiently entertaining as well. Our student actors need have no worries: Moliere’s words, and those of Dylan Thomas no less, will not let them down.

So much for drama. But surely poetry would not lend itself to this method? Well, as it happens, again in an all-girls school, a variation on group participation worked very well. The poem was High Wood:

Ladies and gentlemen, this is High Wood,

Called by the French, Boix de Fourneaux,

The famous spot which in Nineteen-Sixteen,

July, August and September was the scene

Of long and bitterly contested strife,

By reason of its High commanding site.

Observe the effect of shell-fire in the trees

Standing and fallen; here is wire; this trench

For months inhabited, twelve time changed hands;

(They soon fall in), used later as a grave.

It has been said on good authority

That in the fighting for this patch of wood

Were killed somewhere above eight thousand men,

Of whom the greater part were buried here,

This mound on which you stand being . . .                                       

                                                                  Madame, please,

You are requested kindly not to touch

Or take away the Company’s property

As souvenirs; you’ll find we have on sale

A large variety, all guaranteed.

As I was saying, all is as it was,

This is an unknown British officer,

The tunic having lately rotted off.

Please follow me  ̶  this way . . .

                                                  the path, sir, please,     

The ground which was secured at great expense

The Company keeps absolutely untouched,

And in that dug-out (genuine) we provide

Refreshments at a reasonable rate.

You are requested not to leave about

Paper, or ginger-beer bottles, or orange-peel,

There are waste-paper baskets at the gate.

The poem was written by a British lieutenant, John Stanly Purvis, who had been invalided out of the war having been wounded in the same Battle of the Somme; it was published under the pseudonym of Philip Johnstone in The Nation, on February 16, 1918, almost nine months before the war’s end.

VIPs had been afforded visits to rear area and glimpses of the front throughout the war, but the poet here is anticipating the flood of commercial tourism that took off very soon after the war ended. Note the poem’s mimicry of the tour guide’s shallow manner and its implicit undertone of bitter outrage at the exploitation and desecration of sites lately the scenes of mass martyrdom.

The school classrooms were fitted at the front with a three-sided low dais which elevated the teacher and the whiteboard/blackboard. Using this prop as ‘trench terrain’ the teacher, the present writer, took the role of the guide, speaking the words of the poem and affecting to admonish ‘sir’ and ‘madam’ in the persons of two students chosen at random. The class were invited to traverse the dais behind the ‘guide’ as though they were the war-tourists of the poem.

Young people readily buy in to the imagination. So should teachers.