Poet's Choice

For college teachers, September is the month of returning to work, often with mingled feeings of eagerness and dread. Here are two poems about the academic profession. William Butler Yeats directs his scorn toward certain professors in "The Scholars":

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,

Old, learned, respectable bald heads

Edit and annotate the lines

That young men, tossing on their beds,

Rhymed out in love's despair

To flatter beauty's innocent ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;

All wear the carpet with their shoes;

All think what other people think;

All know the man their neighbour knows.