40-Love

by
Roger McGough

Click on the microphone to listen to Roger McGough reading the poem.

[Notes]

Roger McGough is a well-known British performance poet, as well as a playwright, broadcaster and children's author. He was / is one of the 'Liverpool Poets', who were fashionable in the seventies. They were 'pop-poets', who liked to present their poetry on stage. Hence their poetry has a simple vocabulary and deals with simple subjects.

This poem has a very unusual shape; it makes your eyes fly over the net like a tennisball. In a 2001 interview McGough stated: "The tennis poem started off as just a five line, straight poem, then I had the idea of setting it out on the page, then when I was reading it, years afterwards, I started looking from left to right, so the tennis poem didn't come as one idea."

[Discussion in class]

Before your students enter your classroom, make sure that the two halves of the poem are written at the far left and at the far right side of the blackboard and cannot be seen.

Start the lesson by asking the question "Can anybody tell me what poetry is?" Try to elicit the following reactions:
• poetry must / should rhyme;
• it is different from prose;
• rhythm is important.
Write your students' answers on the blackboard.

Open the blackboard and reveal the poem. Ask one of your students to read the poem out loud. Most probably he will make the mistake of only reading the left column of words: "middle - couple - ten - when - etc." Let someone else try until one gets it right. Then have your students watch the face of the one reading the poem. He will have to move his head from side to side in order to read the poem. It is as if he is watching a tennismatch.

Ask your students if they think 40-Love is a poem. Most of their earlier reactions to the question about what poetry is do not apply to this poem and yet everybody will agree that this is a poem.

Have your students answer the following questions:
1. Who are playing tennis and what kind of people do you think they are? Are they happy? Why or why not? What is symbolized by the net?
2. Explain the title.
3. Why didn't the poet write about a game of chess, or bridge?

Conclude the lesson by giving your students the following definition:
"A poem is a piece of writing, arranged in patterns of lines and of sounds, expressing in imaginative language some deep thought, feeling, or human experience."