Higher Learning

"Margaret, are you grieving

 over Goldengrove, unleaving?"

-Gerard Manley Hopkins, Spring and Fall

[to Dr. Robert J. Connelly]

you will get a failing grade, perhaps

if you refuse to take apart the watch

to find what makes it tick

but in harsher countries, schools

you'll be punished for not having

even a wish to see the gears mesh

in their goldeness.

their goldeness...

your heart flies out the window where

the trees are gold and lose their light

and light is heaped up on the ground

and not lost, after all-

and shining

and shining seems within you, too, the same.

this was your simple vision in the burning of the year.

the one you tolled out everywhere

in gladness, in all your poems

and in conversation with all your

friends and teachers

till you were banned from even

entering the teaching program

by the entire English department

meeting overnight

in a closed session, I guess.

you got a letter signed by all of them,

even the ones who never had you in class.

a teacher shouldn't be a mystic

I suppose, they thought,

and called an emergency session.

but who can teach goldeness

anyway?

when God shines within:

predating the syllabus

by so many autumns earlier

mary angela douglas 7 august 2014

Note on the poem: this poem is entirely autobiographical except that I didn't fail anything, I had an A average in all my course work but one where a teacher asked me how I studied Shakespeare.  I said I leave out the scenes for the groundlings

designed to make people laugh so that I could focus on the heart and soul of the tragedies. The teacher said, ah, how interesting.

The next week I failed the semester exam because fifty percent of the grade was on the scenes for the groundlings.   As a result my A average in Shakespeare turned into a C.  And where in the academic world could I go after that as an English major with a C in Shakespeare.

It didn't matter.  I didn't want to go anywhere in the academic world anymore.  I was happy to read on my own in freedom and to glean the gold I had received from my education from kinder, more ethical teachers.

Let me say to anyone listening who has had  similar or worse experiences.  Only the goldenness matters and they can't cage Light. It is God who illuminates the page. And teachers who aren't ashamed of visions (their own, or those of their students). And I loved and love that school anyway.  It was a beautiful place to me and remains that way.