Resources

Magazine Resources:
Additional Exercise on the Elegy
from “Lost and Found: Reading and Writing the Elegy” by Michael Morse
Teachers & Writers magazine
Summer 2010, Volume 41, no. 4

The “George Bailey”/The World Without Me

One day I had students read W.S. Merwin’s poem, “For the Anniversary of My Death,” in which a speaker contemplates his own future absence from the world. And then we played with a different kind of imagined absence: their own. We watched some scenes from Frank Capra’s holiday classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” If you show your students about 25 minutes of the film (I recommend excerpts from DVD chapters 2, 3, 23, and 26) you can watch as George Bailey, the protagonist, with the help of his guardian angel, Clarence, sees what the world would have been like without him—thus learning how valuable his time and efforts have been for others in his small town. After watching excerpts, I had students make a quick list of examples:
1. someone you’ve helped
2. someone you’ve hurt
3. a vice/addiction that you have
4. something you built
5. something you broke
6. someone you wouldn’t have met/who wouldn’t have met you if you hadn’t been born.

With these real-life items in mind, I then asked the students to consider and write about what the world would have been like without them…It’s a void that they tend to fill with imaginative speculation.