Using a Poem by Effie Waller Smith in the Multi-age/grade Homeschool

Effie Waller Smith was a Kentucky teacher and poet whose poetry is about current events from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Cumberland’s beauty and its people, and her Christian faith. She wrote about the Spanish American War, the San Francisco Earthquake and what it was like to be a single woman suffragette. She wrote about her personal griefs: the death of her baby and of a student. She wrote about her childhood and about holidays and pastors’ wives. Her poems are largely forgotten despite having published three volumes. She was from Pike County, Kentucky, the educated daughter of formerly enslaved parents. The Kentucky Faith and Public History Education Project is proud to feature her story in the fourth FKCC book, Picked Last, by Lesley Barker, available for sale here as a paperback or as a kindle e-book. This blog post models how to use one of Smith’s shorter poems, “Benefaction”[1] in a multi-age/grade homeschool context. The poem is as follows:

Benefaction, by Effie Waller Smith

If thou the lives of men wouldst bless,

live thine own life in faithfulness;

Thine own hard task, if made complete,

Shall render others’ toil more sweet;

Thy grief, if bravely thou endure,

Shall give men’s sorrow solace sure;

Thy peril, if met undismayed,

Shall make the fearful less afraid.

Each step in right paths firmly trod

Shall break some thorn or crush some clod,

Making the way more smooth and free

For him who treads it after thee.

Suppose your homeschool has an elementary student, a middle school student and a high school student. A lesson about this poem can be used to advance grade/age appropriate learning activities for each. Here’s how.

• Introduce the poet. Show the students a picture of Effie Waller Smith. Tell them when she lived and discuss what her life may have been like as a single woman and then as a widow.
• Read "Benefaction" aloud to the students. Ask what they understood on this first experience with the poem. Explain that poetry often is packed with meaning but that the meaning must be mined. Say that that is why we learn to analyze a poem.
• Introduce the vocabulary that relates to the poem’s structure. It is one verse made up of how many lines? Ask the youngest student to count the lines in the poem. There are twelve. Explain that many poems use rhyme. Read the poem again. This time ask the students to stop you whenever they hear a rhyme. Ask them to figure out the rhyme scheme. Show them that each new rhyme can be assigned a letter which makes this poem’s rhyme scheme: AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, FF. Because each pair of lines rhyme, they can be called rhyming couplets. Ask the students if there is another pattern in the poem. See if they can discover that each line contains a total of eight syllables. Elementary students should be able to divide words into syllables and middle school students should be proficient at this task.
• Discuss the words that are no longer commonly used in English: thy, thou and thee and the verb ending on would’st. Write the vocabulary words that the students must be able to define before they can really understand the poem: benefaction, bless, faithfulness, render, grief, endure, solace, peril, undismayed, fearful, trod, clod, treads. The students can race looking up the definitions of these words online or in a dictionary. Using the definitions of these words, ask the students to work together to paraphrase the poem. One student should be assigned to write the paraphrase.
• Now that the students can paraphrase the poem, ask them to each write a one sentence summary of what the poem says. Let them each share what they wrote with the group.
• The last analytic activity deals with the students’ reaction to the poem. Do they agree with its message? Is it something they are going to think about after the lesson is over? Does anyone feel that the poem is important enough to memorize? How would they illustrate the poem if they were hired to do so? Do they like the poem? Why or why not?
• End the lesson by reading the poem aloud again. Ask if the poem is more meaningful because they have spent time really thinking about its structure and meaning.
• Make other poems by this famous Kentucky Christian available for the students to read and think about.

By Lesley Barker

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[1]Smith, Effie Waller. “Benefaction” on Poetry Explorer. ONLINE at https://www.poetryexplorer.net/poem.php?id=10128234 ACCESSED 11/18/2020