The Troubadour Podcast
"It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind." William Wordsworth The Troubadour Podcast invites you into a world where art is conversation and conversation is art. The conversations on this show will be with some living people and some dead writers of our past. I aim to make both equally entertaining and educational.In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth called an experiment to discover how far the language of everyday conversation is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure. With this publication, he set in motion the formal movement called "Romanticism." 220 years later the experiment is continued on this podcast. This podcast seeks to reach those of us who wish to improve our inner world, increase our stores of happiness, and yet not succumb to the mystical or the subjective.Here, in this place of the imagination, you will find many conversation with those humans creating things that interest the human mind.
The Troubadour Podcast
Exploring William Blake's 'The Shepherd' with Kirk Barbera
Have you ever wondered how the simple melody of a poem can captivate the mind of a child? Join me, Kirk Barbera, as we journey through William Blake's enchanting "The Shepherd" from his iconic collection "Songs of Innocence and of Experience." Expect to immerse yourself in the soothing sounds of Blake's poetry while I read aloud and unpack the serene pastoral imagery and personification within the poem. Learn how to converse with verse and engage deeply with poetry, whether you're a student, teacher, parent, or simply a lover of literature. Discover practical tips to foster an early appreciation for poetry in young children, and understand the timeless allure of Blake's work.
Explore the power of rhythmic and melodic verses in nurturing a love for language in children. By examining Blake's use of shepherd imagery, we draw connections to both Christian and pagan traditions, shedding light on the deeper symbolic meanings. Delve into the contrast between the innocence of pastoral life and the corruption of city life, gaining a comprehensive understanding of Blake's artistic vision. By regularly reading poetry and creating a word-rich environment, you can cultivate a lifelong passion for literature in young minds. Whether you’re looking to enrich your child’s literary journey or deepen your own understanding of Blake’s poetry, this episode offers valuable insights and practical advice.
Today we will be exploring one of the simplest poems in William Blake's book of poetry Songs of Innocence and of Experience, showing the two contrary states of the human soul. There are other simple poems in this book that is filled with simple poems, but this one's one of the more simple ones and we'll talk about that in a minute. Hi, my name is Kirk Barbera. I'm the founder and editor of Troubadour Magazine and the Troubadour Show, where we elevate life, culture, education through art and literature. This is a standalone video of this poem, the Shepherd, but it stands in a series I'm doing on the whole book of poetry that I hope that you'll follow along with. In this video I'm going to do a reading of the Shepherd and then I'm going to give a quick little discussion about it, show some of the imagery, personification, some basic things to help you get a little bit more out of it. But I'm going to use my method of converse with verse. So this is not a didactic analytic method. It's more of a conversation between me and the poet in this case, and I hope to model this so you can do this for yourself, whether you're a student of poetry and literature, whether you're a teacher or you're just anybody who's in between. A parent, I think, is one. I'd love to reach more parents, because I believe this book in particular should be in every single English-speaking home in the world, for a variety of reasons that we'll explore as we explore this series. So let's get into the poem itself. And after the poem, and I do, the converse with verse, I also will teach you a simple way to explore this with a young child in particular something like five, six, seven, eight years old. Very simple, okay. But let's get into the poem itself, and you know my method is always read it aloud, then ask yourself what do you think it's about? Or what do you think happened in it? Anything, there are no wrong answers in this phase. And then the converse with the verse, which I'll model for you. Okay, so for the reading. How sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot. From the morn to the evening he strays. He shall follow his sheep all the day and his tongue shall be filled with praise, for he hears the lambs' innocent call and he hears the ewes' tender reply. He is watchful while they are in peace, for they know when their shepherd is nigh. That's it. I recommend, if this is your first time hearing this poem that you pause it and read it aloud yourself, or rewind and let me read it to you if you liked my reading.
Speaker 1:But one of the joys of poetry is the exploration of different interpretations and different readings of it, because the sound is as important as the meaning, if not more important sometimes and this is very different than prose, which is how we normally write in our day-to-day lives logical sentence structures. The difference there is that the meaning is paramount, ultimate. That's wonderful and there's a beauty and a joy and an importance of prose. But poetry is about the sound and the meaning. It's about how does Kirk sound in this moment when he's singing or you know, not singing saying these lines. You can sing many of these lines, for instance, in this book of poetry.
Speaker 1:Most of these poems if not all of them, I believe, are modeled on nursery rhymes, so it should sound like a nursery rhyme. But that's the first thing. Read it aloud, read it several times. This is very short, it won't take you a long time. Later I'll tell you some little things to do with children to help them get the most out of it. Because this is William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. I recommend getting a book, like I have, that has the plates that he hand drew each of these plates himself, engraved them and colored them himself, every one that he ever sold in his lifetime. So you can imagine this was not a huge seller because of that, but they all sold out. And then on the right side, in my case, there's just the text, because sometimes the plates can be a little difficult to read in a printing. So this will help you get the full image and picture and what Blake is trying to do, and I think this will help you to see the elevation of the poetry as artwork.
Speaker 1:So in the painting, or I should say the illustration, we have a young shepherd boy. He doesn't look like a little child and we know this because we see other children in the book as we go through. He looks like he's a young man, maybe 15 to 20 something. He's a young man of some sort and he's holding his shepherd's crook and there's a whole flock of sheep grazing and walking around and there's some birds. So it has a very pastoral grazing and walking around and there's some birds. So it has a very pastoral, calm feeling to the nature, to the actual illustration. Very simple, not much is going on right, you have a nice big sun in the background shining overhead.
Speaker 1:I'm going to do a quick converse with the verse, the. You know what is the poem about to you. I kind of just did with that pastoral. That's one thing I did. What do you think it is? What do you think it's about? What comes to your mind? Remember, if you watch my first video, I talked a lot about this and this is very important. It's not about what's the right answer in society by going to Google or somewhere to get those answers. It's about you. Or, if you're talking to a fifth grader, a five-year-old, a high school student, what is in their mind? That's the most important thing here. It's training their mind, or your mind, as a lover of literature and someone who wants to educate your own mind, develop your own consciousness and elevate your life. So now we're going to get into the converse with verse.
Speaker 1:Okay, so the title of this poem is called the Shepherd. How sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot? So we have someone saying this is. You know, I'm thinking this through as I'm going. I haven't written this down, by the way. When I converse with verse, it's, it's blank, it's by, it's just me what I come up with, you know, to the best of my abilities, how sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I'm thinking someone is saying something about the sweetness of the shepherd's sweet lot. Maybe it's the shepherd talking to himself, I don't know. From the morn to the evening he strays. So you know, the ending words can sometimes mean something important. So he strays. So there's a kind of meanderingness to his nature as a shepherd. Okay, he shall follow his sheep all the day. That's interesting. So the shepherd is following the sheep all the day. You know, you don't always think of it that way, right, or at least I don't. I think of it as the shepherd is leading the sheep, but he's saying he shall follow his sheep all the day and his tongue shall be filled with praise. So he's praising the sheep, he's praising their lives, he's praising the scene that he's in the sweet lot of his own life. Maybe that's what he is. So there's like an omniscient narrator, is the sense I'm getting here. Okay, so his tongue is filled with praise for he hears the lambs' innocent call. Okay, so this is maybe where the praise is coming from. I'm getting now. So, because it's saying you know, the first stanza ends and his tongue shall be filled with praise period Next stanza, for he hears for right. That indicates to me why, for he hears the lamb's innocent call and he hears the ewes' tender reply. So these are the infants of sheep. Right, we're talking about the very young here. He is watchful while they are in peace, for they know when their shepherd is nigh.
Speaker 1:This is one easy word to teach young kids, and I'll have a word on the teaching of literature and poetry in a minute and as we go through. But that word means near. If you didn't know that, by the way, and you're an adult like me, you're fine, because I didn't know that until I was way older than I probably want to admit. So it's totally fine to not know certain poetic words. We often aren't taught them. That's the real problem. But for they know when their shepherd is near or nigh. So now you know nigh, or you can teach this to your student. You don't even need to, you know.
Speaker 1:For me, whenever I teach this stuff, it's always when the kids don't know it. It's just a casual observation oh, it's just near. Yeah, that's it. It's not like, oh, it's for a test or anything like that. It's just help them understanding and it becomes more integral into their mind. It's to me a superior teaching method in teaching to the test. That's my opinion, but I think there's a lot of evidence for that.
Speaker 1:For he hears the lambs' innocent call. So the first stanza is kind of this overview of the pastoral scene and it's almost from the sheep's perspective. In a sense he shall follow his sheep. The second stanza is, well, you know, actually I shouldn't say it's from the sheep's perspective. That's not fair. Because in the second stanza he's hearing the lambs' innocent call. He's hearing the lamb's innocent call. He's hearing the ewes' tender reply. Oh, you know what, I never caught that before. So I'm doing this live. This is what I love about Converse with the Verse. So there's a strays, he's straying, he's following his sheep. There's a call and reply. I don't know how I never caught that. It's tender reply. So there's a call reply. We're talking about the sweet lot.
Speaker 1:So there's something about this symbiotic relationship between the shepherd and the sheep. That's a basic converse with verse. I've gotten some more out of it. I've had an understanding of what the poet's trying to say. Remember, my favorite poet, william Wordsworth, says that a poet is just a man speaking to men, you know, or a human speaking to human is a more modern way of saying that, but that's really all it is. It's just speaking. So I want to speak back. You may think that it's a little crazy. Okay fine, that's all right, but I, you know, go in your own room by yourself, read it aloud and speak to the poet. That's what we're doing here. That's what converse with verse is. How sweet is this shepherd's sweet lot? So I have this symbiotic relationship between the shepherd and the sheep. He's one with nature. There's a harmony, there's a sympathy. It goes both ways. He follows and he also observes the ewes and the tender lambs and so on and so forth, and that's it.
Speaker 1:So let's get into a simple way of approaching this with children. My advice, if you're a parent, a teacher, an administrator or just someone who loves with poetry, is to simple one start young, and the way you start young is with poems like this. There are many books of poetry that you can read to children. Many of us do this. There are a lot of great books that we like, but we sometimes don't get into something that we think is more serious because we think that the child won't understand it.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to show you that that doesn't matter, that the sound is enough. And it doesn't matter if they don't know what shepherd is. Nigh means they don't know the word nigh. As a three-year-old, they see the picture, they hear the words, and it's about the nursery rhyme. How sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot. From the morn to the evening he strays. He shall follow his sheep all the day and his tongue shall be filled with praise, for he hears the lamb's innocent call and he hears the ewe's tender reply. He is watchful while they are in peace, for they know when their shepherd is nigh. There's a rhythm, there's a meter to that. How sweet is the shepherd's sweet lot. That is what you're conveying to the child. That that's it. He shall follow his sheep all the day. That's all you're conveying, for he hears the lamb's innocent call. That's it. It's just the sound. They will not understand everything.
Speaker 1:Like you will understand, we're going to talk a little bit about the symbolism of shepherds. They don't need to know the meaning of that, they just have to hear the sound. It enters into our minds, all these lyrics and sounds and music movies, without us really consciously having much effort in it. That's what this is like and that's what you're trying to do, except it's focused exclusively on the sound of the words. It's focused exclusively on words. No other art form does this, and we use words to build the world around us, to think, to build anything, to write, to communicate anything. So that's the value of literature and poetry.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I want to just give you the tip that I was kind of implying here. It's implicit tip is simply start young. That's what to do with the end. Don't worry about them understanding it, just read it to them. You know, if you're a parent, just when you're doing bedtime stories, get out some poetry once a month, once every every couple months. Just let them get used to the rhythm and don't tell them, don't quiz them on it. Don't, you know, put too much in into their heads about the meaning and understanding everything. It's just about letting them hear the words and say the same poem more than once. If you see the child, you know kind of like oh, I like this. If you see any kind of positive, then make a note of that and do it again. That's it, just make a note. Read it again, maybe put it up on the walls.
Speaker 1:I recommend putting up poetry all around your house, all around your classroom, surround children with words, because, again, words and art of all types, but words are what we build our world around In our heads and out in the world. A couple of thoughts on the possible symbolism and things of that nature. If you're interested in even a deeper dive, I'll have a PDF worksheet with some of the definitions, some breakdown, things of that nature. But just to give you some idea, is that we're talking about the symbiotic relationship between a sheep and a shepherd. You probably have some inclination of the idea of shepherds in relation to Christianity.
Speaker 1:Now, william Blake was a deeply mystical Christian, but he believed that the church and the Christians of his era, particularly in England, but in all of Europe, all of the West, were corrupt and corrupting of the real message of Christ, or at least the message that he interpreted in his own mystical mind as a core, universal message that Christianity should be teaching. So this is a very important thing is we're going to be talking about this more as we go. And here's one question that you can actually ask if you wanted to do a writing assignment for high school students I think this is for older students this book, I think, should be taught throughout the ages for students, and I mean from taught in terms of five-year-olds by reading it to them, by eighth graders by choosing some of the songs of innocence, having them, you know, memorize some of them and then, in high school, getting into the deeper meanings, imagery, symbolism and things of that nature. One of the questions you can ask a high school student, college student or even adults is why might Blake choose nursery rhymes and an audience of young children for his reformism, for his attempt at reforming? So think about that. I think it's a good question to ask high school students as you explore this book.
Speaker 1:So Blake was a Christian. He wanted to reform, he wanted to make improvements to the Christian message to the people of his time who were deeply, devoutly Christian, or many of them were. But think about what the shepherd is. So the good shepherd in the Bible is Jesus. Jesus protects his sheep. The meek shall inherit the earth.
Speaker 1:That's often imagery as the sheep. Jesus is often represented as a sheep in relation to Savior, king, god of Israel, jehovah. All these. There's kind of imagery and words are used of shepherd. One other indication in the Christian Bible and Christianity is shepherds are the first to receive the news of Messiah's birth, as they represent social poverty and showing the prophetic nature of the peasant class. So this is important Prophecy the ability.
Speaker 1:Prophecy not just in the ability to predict the future, but the ability to envision, having a vision of anything of your people today. If you have a clear vision of what America is today, you're a prophet. It's not just about having a vision of there's going to be some downfall in 50 years, that's a prophecy as well. But a prophecy of having a clear vision of your world is also a prophecy, especially in the ancient use of that word. So here's paganism symbolism.
Speaker 1:Often the shepherd is represented as a lover of nature, of humanity, and he has selfless qualities. So there's a lot of similarities between paganism and Christianity in this relationship. You see this in Greek mythology and then in pastoral literature and art, which was a very common theme from ancient times until our own times today. I mean you see this when you see Lord of the Rings, watch the beginning of Lord of the Rings, watch the beginning of many epic adventure stories. There's often this sweeping into the landscape, the greenery. You see this in Lord of the Rings where you're going into the shire it's all greenery, it's all grass, it's all trees and the hobbits, the buildings, their houses are built right into the hills. So there's a symbiosis, there's a oneness with nature. That's a pastoral scene. That's pastoralism, is the relationship between humans and nature and there's a symbiosis to it.
Speaker 1:This is often discussed, even in pastoral poems, in contrast to city life, which is busy, it's loud, it's dirty, it's corrupt, it's sinful. So pastoral, like the shepherd, is innocent, sinless, pure, clean. These are important to think about as we go through. So that's my discussion of the shepherd. I hope, as you stick with this series, what you'll see is these simple puzzle pieces will slowly start to build into a large mosaic of meaning. That William Blake is endeavoring to help the people of his own era and all eras see about his vision is not actually important. What's important is that it is a vision that he's showing, and our responsibility as readers and as ingesters of art is to try to understand this to the best of our abilities. I'll see you next time.