Lesson Overview 

Snow/Rain reading   anytime after All Quiet Chapter 4 – when it is snowing or raining (go to the window and read these both).  Gather the students to the window so they can watch the rain or snow while they listen to you read.  The entire lesson takes about 10 minutes from beginning to end and is put at the end of any lesson, including Lesson 7 - The Chapter 4 discussion.

First read this aloud to the students (they should all be by the window) – from Chapter 4:

Monotonously the lorries sway, monotonously come the calls, monotonously falls the rain. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up in the line, on the body of the little recruit  with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich's grave; it falls in our hearts.

Before you read this excerpt from “The Dead” – you will need to set it up.  Gabriel discovers by chance that his wife was passionately in love when she was very young.  A young man – a tenor with a beautiful voice – fell in love with her decades ago – and when she would not see him – he stood outside her window – in the rain – and sang to her – contracting pneumonia – and dying from it.  Sometimes, I also play the theme song from John Huston's movie - "The Dead" as I read the excerpt.

From “The Dead” by James Joyce

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.