My heart will go on

Literature, and poetry in particular, is often met with mixed feelings by teenagers. Sometimes, they think it's an old-fashioned form of writing which doesn't have a lot in common with their lives. To challenge that misconception, we have faced students with poems written by some of the best English poets of all time, and we have challenged the students to find a connection between themselves and the poems. We have done this by identifying the themes in each poem, and then, by linking them to current aspects of people's lives. 
The students were then required to produce a piece of writing based on or inspired by the classic poem of their choice. 

Claudia Prieto, Sofía Pérez and Regina Salazar wrote a poem inspired by the following sonnet by Edmund Spenser:

Amoretti LXXV

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

But came the waves and washed it away:

Again I wrote it with a second hand,

But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.

"Vain man," said she, "that dost in vain assay,

A mortal thing so to immortalize;

For I myself shall like to this decay,

And eke my name be wiped out likewise."

"Not so," (quod I) "let baser things devise

To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:

My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,

And in the heavens write your glorious name:

Where whenas death shall all the world subdue,

Our love shall live, and later life renew."

This is the poem written by our students on the themes of love and immortality:

MY HEART WILL GO ON

It’s been 84 years since his name drowned in you, harsh sea

since your waves washed away the only thing that mattered to me.

Everything that one day was, vanished with your foam

vain sea, why couldn’t you just have let us be?

Everything felt so real back then,

that it seems like you never left my side.

A mortal thing so to immortalize

that my love for you rises, like the moon helps the tide.

I refuse to accept the fact that you’re gone

and I know the eternal moon will bring us back together,

our memories are what makes my heart go on

and as your gaze, our love will last forever.