外研版英语选修八module6原文

【MODULE 6】The Tang Poems【READING AND VOCABULARY】略【READING AND WRITING】The Power of PoetryReading and writing poetry is a very personal experience. Poets use language as a way of expressing their feelings, whether positive ones of love, happiness and hope, or negative feelings like anger and fear. Poems can describe the beauty of nature, a person, a dream or a memorable event. Most people have tried writing poetry at some time, for example at school. For children, it is a good way to explore language and have fun with words as well as to express themselves.But teachers and psychologists have found another use for poetry as a form of therapy to help people with problems. There are benefits for people of all different backgrounds and aged. Writing poetry can help people deal with changes in their lives, death or feelings of sadness, drug or alcohol problems or serious illness. By writing down your feelings, you can learn to understand yourself better and give yourself a voice if you feel you are being ignored. A poem might be a way of telling someone something when you do not feel able to talk about it face to face. And just because people are ill or having difficulties in their lives, it doesn`t mean they have lost their sense of humour. Poems written as therapy can be funny too, as laughter is also considered to be very good medicine.Students at a special school in Dudley, in England, read and write poems every day. Some of the poems they write are very good, but their reason for writing is not just to be creative. All of them have problems. Some of them have long-term medical conditions, such as cancer, while others have personality disorders or psychological problems. By writing poems students are growing in self-confidence. The poem provide a channel through which they can communicate with the world, and express their feelings. They also help them to recognize a positive attitude to life.But the poems are helping other people, too. The school has collected some of the students` poems and published them in a book which is being sold to raise funds for a local hospital. The book has proved very popular, giving students a sense of motivation and achievement.【READING PRACTICE】Poems on the UndergroundAnyone who is addicted to reading bus tickets or cereal packets will understand the appeal of Poems on the Underground. Some years ago, a few London, who used the Tube and loved poetry, decided that it would be pleasant to read a few lines by Tube, instead of just glancing upwards at the tiresome advertisements. The Underground had a surplus of advertising space on the trains. They suggested filling the blank spaces with poems, for the entertainment of the travelling public.London Underground approved of the idea, and once sponsors had been found to pay the expenses for half the spaces, they agreed to pay for the other half. So, in January 1986,Poems on the Underground was officially launched at Aldwych station, in the centre of London. Many of those who left the morning daylight and the damp streets above, and descended through the ticket barriers to the shabby old Underground platform saw theusual signs——TICKETS AND TRAINS, THIS WAY DOEN, CAUTION! DON`T CLIMB ONTO THE LINES, STAND CLEAR, DOORS CLOSING——assume a special literary significance. There was coffee, doughnuts, and wine too, served on the benches where they would usually sit and wait. When the train with a preview of the first poems arrived, everyone got on and within minutes of its departure, the carriages were merry with a chorus of voices reading verse by Shelley, Burns and of course, by themselves.The poems took on a new life when they were removed from books and placed alongside the adverts. Commuters enjoyed the idea of reading Keats` Much have I travel`d` in the realms of gold on a crowded Central Line train, or trying to learn by heart a sonnet between Hammersmith and Piccadilly. The choice of poems wasn`t arbitrary but specially chosen. It catered for all tastes and included living and dead poems from the homeland and from allover the English-speaking world, and especially poems which have associations with London.The success of the Poems on the Underground enterprise confirmed that Britain was a nation of poetry lovers. Hundreds of people corresponded with London Underground suggesting poems, or just to say thank you. In January 1989, on the third anniversary after the first poems on the Underground, London Underground promised to donate all the spaces free, to increase the number available (at least one poem in each train carriage), and to pay for the production costs as well. They also update the poems very few months. Posters of the poems decorate the British Council libraries throughout the world, but the best way to view the poems is to see them yourself, on whichever train you choose, in every zone of the network——for the price of an underground ticket.【CULTURAL CORNER】The Golden Age of English PoetryLike China, Britain had a golden age of poetry——but it came a thousand years after the time of Li Bai and Du Fu. It was a time of revolution and new ideas in Europe. The English Romantic poets, as they are now known, were very interested in what was happening in the rest of the continent.Wordsworth went to France to support the people`s revolution, while Byron died fighting for the independence of Greece against the Turks.But the Romantic poets were more interested in the individual, and in the power of the imagination than they were in politics. They produced wonderful images to express human emotions and to paint pictures of the natural world. They also got inspiration from the myths of past ages, especially the Greek myths, and from their own experiences of love. Typically, the Romantic poets lived hard and died young. Byron was the most famous of them; he travelled a lot and shocked people with his wild behaviour. Another Romantic poet, Coleridge, was probably a drug addict, and the strange journeys of his mind are reflected in his poems. Wordsworth was the only one who lived to old age. As he grew older he became lessinterested in political ideas. He went to live in the Lake District, in the north of England, where he wrote the poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.The most brilliant of the Romantics was probably Keats. Although he studied as a surgeon, poetry was his great love. But when he was just 24 he became very ill. He knew he was going to die, and went to Italy to spend his last months in a more pleasant climate. His friend Shelley,(whose wife Mary wrote Frankenstein), went to Italy to meet him and say goodbye, but he arrived too late. Shelley himself did not live much longer. He drowned in a boating accident off Italy the next year. In his pocket he had a book of Keats` poems.。