My experience with Vietnamese students is that they tend to have a 'cram it' approach to learning English. Of course, they need to pass their classes and succeed in exams, but it is a shame that the potentially wonderful experience of learning a new language should degenerate into a largely utilitarian exercise.

Many Vietnamese students are under pressure to do well in tests like IELTS and TOEFL, and books promising to help them get good scores are very prominent in the bookshops. That's all very well so far as it goes, but it is easy to miss out on the artistic and creative uses of a language. Cramming for a TOEFL exam is hardly the ne plus ultra of the English language experience.

With that in mind, I thought I might post a few poems here, to give a bit of fresh air to learners and to enable them to appreciate the language as it is used by its most gifted and skilled exponents. I unfortunately don't know much about Vietnamese literature yet, but I have observed that many Vietnamese have a lively appreciation of poetry in their own language. It remains to introduce them to the poetic resources of English.

I don't intend to 'explain' these poems; it's better if each reader approaches them freshly and lets them sink in gradually. A bit of dictionary work can solve any unknown words. Learning a poem by heart is a good way to get to know it better. The poems should also be read aloud, as it is only in this way that one can get a sense of their 'music', which is a combination of such things as stress and intonation patterns, rhymes, the patterns of vowels and consonants employed, and so on. Learning about English in this way is, I hope, more satisfying and motivating than any number of routine grammar and vocabulary exercises.

I have chosen three poems by the English writer D.H. Lawrence. He vehemently opposed utilitarian and reductionist approaches to living, and his poems have a freshness and vitality that are very much his own. These two poems come from a collection called Look! We Have Come Through! They were written when Lawrence eloped with a married woman to Bavaria, attempting to get away from the scandal their affair caused in England and trying to find a more authentic way of living. So these poems are all about discoveries, of ways of living well and of each other.

Green

The dawn was apple-green,
The sky was green wine held up in the sun,
The moon was a golden petal between.

She opened her eyes, and green
They shone, clear like flowers undone
For the first time, now for the first time seen.


Gloire De Dijon

When she rises in the morning
I linger to watch her;
She spreads the bath-cloth underneath the window
And the sunbeams catch her
Glistening white on the shoulders,
While down her sides the mellow
Golden shadow glows as
She stoops to the sponge, and her swung breasts
Sway like full-blown yellow
Gloire de Dijon roses.

She drips herself with water, and her shoulders
Glisten as silver, they crumple up
Like wet and falling roses, and I listen
For the sluicing of their rain-dishevelled petals.
In the window full of sunlight
Concentrates her golden shadow
Fold on fold, until it glows as
Mellow as the glory roses.


Roses on the Breakfast Table

Just a few of the roses we gathered from the Isar
Are fallen, and their mauve-red petals on the
cloth
Float like boats on a river, while other
Roses are ready to fall, reluctant and loth.

She laughs at me across the table, saying
I am beautiful. I look at the rumpled young roses
And suddenly realise, in them as in me,
How lovely the present is that this day discloses.