Teaching Children to Love Poetry, Part 4: Pangur Ban

In 2nd grade literature, we recently studied a poem together called “Pangur Ban.” It is a comparison between the author’s delight in pursuing knowledge and his cat’s delight in hunting mice. I love the poem, so do my students, and comparing two seemingly-unlike things has become one of my favorite classroom activities recently, so “Pangur Ban” fits right into that.

Here is the poem:

I and Pangur Ban my cat,
’Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
’Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

‘Tis a merry task to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur’s way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

‘Gainst the wall he set his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
’Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den,
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our task we ply,
Pangur Ban, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

As usual, I walked my students through the poem one line at a time, having them copy down a translation of it into everyday language. Then, we discussed the poem’s meaning as a whole. This is the phase of class when I ask the question, “Can you explain what the poem is about in one short sentence?”

Usually, the first several tries are not short at all. I’ve had students say, “This poem is about how a guy likes to learn about things and stays up all night studying, and how his cat likes to hunt, and the cat is good at hunting, and he practices a lot.” I try not to shoot anybody down for something like this, but instead take it as a starting point. I’ll say something like, “That’s a great start! Who can say it even shorter?” And the students very adorably try to compete for who can come up with the shortest sentence that still describes the essence of the poem.

For this poem, we ended up with the sentence, “This poem is a comparison of the happiness felt by a man and his cat when they study and hunt mice side by side.”

Last week, this led us into a discussion of what it means to “pounce” on something. One of my students very astutely pointed out that, “hunting is just looking for something, and anybody can do that. The thing that makes them similar isn’t just the hunting, but the POUNCING. The cat pounces on a mouse just like the man POUNCES on the ideas he’s looking for.”

I promise, that’s what she said. Sometimes even my youngest students floor me with their insights.

We talked about the way it feels to “pounce” on something we’ve been looking for, like a lost belonging that has finally been located, or for me, the correct answer to a troubling math problem. And, of course, I couldn’t lose the opportunity of telling the students that they had just pounced on the meaning of Pangur Ban.

It is through discussion that we help children to access the most valuable part of poetry—the connection to real life. And, with children, you can’t be too explicit about that connection. That is what will motivate them to love poetry, to memorize it so they can have it at the ready, and to seek out more. Most importantly, by witnessing an illustration of the train of thought and the abstract connections involved in applying a poem’s meaning to one’s life, a child gains valuable insight into how to do that themselves. This way, they can learn to harness the power of poetry for themselves, and that is quite the superpower. I am glad that I often have an appropriate line of poetry to pull out at just the right moment which captures my feeling precisely, and I want my students to have that too.

Don’t just leave it at reading poetry and encouraging memorization—discuss it as well. Too often this part of literature education is completely neglected. Discuss poetry with the children in your life at length and model your love for it, so they might see the value of that poem in particular, and eventually grow to see how poetry in general can enrich their lives.