By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, September 16, 2007
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.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
In contrast is Barry Spacks's "Freshmen":
Full of certainties and reasons,
or uncertainties and reason,
full of reasons as a conch contains the sea,
they wait; for the term's first bell;
for another mismatched wrestle through the year;
for a teacher who's religious in his art,
a wizard of a sort, to call the role
and from mere names
cause people
to appear.
The best look like the swinging door
to the Opera just before
the Marx Brothers break through.
The worst -- debased,
on the back row,
as far as one can go
from speech --
are walls where childish scribbling's been erased;
are stones
to teach.
And I am paid to ask them questions:
Dare man proceed by need alone?
Did Esau like
his pottage?
Is any heart in order after Belsen?
And when one stops to think, I'll catch his heel,
put scissors to him, excavate his chest!
Watch, freshmen, for my words about the past
can make you turn your back. I wait to throw,
most foul, most foul, the future in your face.
Both poems meditate on a project central to any life, academic or not: mediating between what we know or suppose of the past, and the future.
(William Butler Yeats's poem "Scholars" can be found in "The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats." Macmillan. Copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats. Barry Spacks's poem "Freshmen" is from his book
"Spacks Street." Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.
Copyright 1982 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.)
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