On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High In his poem, “On Reading Poems to a Senior Class at South High”, the author, David Chapman Berry, has relied on metaphors and similes to carry out his view of a typical literature class and a teacher’s view of teaching. The setting of the poem is in a senior literature class, at South High School. The speaker in this poem is a teacher, who tells the reader about his or her students and about the course of his or her literature class. The teacher discusses poetry with his class, but at the same time compares the students and the classroom order to fish in an aquarium.The poem consists of seven stanzas. The first stanza states how the teacher enters the classroom and finds his or her students, orderly situated in their seats, where he or she uses a simile to compare them to frozen fish in a package. The second stanza holds the first metaphor. From the eyes of the teacher, the room starts to slowly fill with water, but he did not notice this until it reached his ears. What really happens here is that the teacher simply follows his or her regular teaching procedures in a monotone way until he or she suddenly notices that these students are interested in what he or she has to say. Thus, the water, which fills the room, is nothing else than the student’s unexpected attention to the poetry. In the third stanza the speaker uses a metaphor, an overstatement, and a simile, to describe the change of mood and situation. At this point, the mood has changed completely. The teacher says her or she can hear the sound of fish in an aquarium. This metaphor means, that he or she not only has the student’s attention, but that they are also willing to discuss the poem with the teacher. The speaker is surprised, for he or she had tried to drown them with words. This is an overstatement, which really holds that the teacher was simply lecturing to his class, and not expecting to ...
