Inktober 11: #Wander
In which a poetry lecture leads to greater self-awareness
Remember that scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in which Lucy reads “The Spell for Knowing What Other People Think of You”? She doesn’t like it. This is a story of a time I had a similar experience.
I taught a literature class in which we spent a couple of class periods on Emily Dickinson. Listen, the last thing I would want to be is self-congratulatory or a tooter of my own horn. But my lecture on the poem “A bird, came down the walk” was one for the ages. Dickinson’s poem was beautiful already, but I like to think I beautified it considerably with this lecture. The poem starts with the image of a bird who caught a worm, “And ate the fellow, raw.” That’s pretty earthy stuff. The poem #wanders through a few beautiful images of the bird until, ultimately that same earthy, bloodthirsty bird takes flight like some kind of angel:
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home -
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,|
Leap, plashless as they swim.
As I waxed eloquent on the bird, I think I saw a few students wipe away tears. I got a little weepy myself. It wasn’t lost on me how fortunate those students were to have been there for this lecture.
Anyway, that same week a former student tagged me on Twitter for one reason or another. I got to clicking around on his Twitter page, and then I noticed that he was friends with a few of my current students.
Now we’re getting to the part where I read The Spell for Knowing What Other People Think of You. Reader, I clicked on the Twitter account of one of my students. And this is what she had written: “Somebody rescue me. I’m sitting in English class, and my professor is droning on and on about a stupid bird in a poem.”
You may have read my post from October 5 in which a student wrote a final-exam essay about Donkey Oatey. This was the same student. Apparently it was her calling in life to ensure I didn’t get too big for my britches. #inktober2023