10/11/06

Started doing poetry with religious themes with the Transition Year class and they were bubbling over with ideas. At first I did some material from the Leaving Cert English course (for 2009!). Unfortunately Hopkins and Kavanagh aren't on, but today Phillip Larkin's The Explosion and Church Going sparked some great discussion. We did ramble somewhat from the poems into discussion of the afterlife, but that made for a satisfying class. Neither of these poems is specifically religious and certainly not devotional. But Larkin seems open to faith. In Church Going he is the non-believer or non-practicer visiting a church, not a participant but drawn there by something of value. He wonders what will become of churches when religious practice declines (he imagines it disappearing entirely) - will they be museums or places of superstition? Yet he finds they are places that acknowledge the serious things of life, what's deep in the human heart. The Explosion deals with a real-life mining accident where apparently the miner's wives had a comforting vision that assured them that dead husbands were safe in heaven. Thought I'd get more done than two poems - it was a double class!

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