I was just thinking of my wonderful good fortune in getting to go to an excellent graduate school with many excellent teachers and excellent fellow students in the same classes and programs. Then I was able to teach for forty some years, 1966-67, OU; 1967-2008, Berea College. And what did I get to teach, but poems like this by Marvell and Donne, Crashaw and Herbert; Shakespeare’s marvelous plays, especially the comedies, then the histories, then the tragedies. I think my passion was always better and much greater than my insight and understanding, but I always worked hard on preparations. About the best I can claim for myself.
Then there was the giant John Milton, whom I inherited from CG, and even wrote and had published an essay on Wisdom and Beauty in PL: Two Principles. (A little pleasure there!). And the wonderful Spenser whose Faerie Queene was and still is one of my delights. C. S. Lewis said somewhere he imagined Spenser in Heaven finishing the last 6 books. Because in 1599, God said no to finishing them here. Probably!
I had one course in graduate school in American literature, but Berea assigned me the first and second semesters of American Texts anyway. I learned the delights of American literature too and also delighted in teaching it. Jonathan Edwards, not Sinners, but The Divine and Supernatural Light! The wonderful Hawthorne and the truly magnificent Scarlet Letter, the image in the novel that controls the action and forces Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester to their scaffold revelation. Literature can truly be transformative and that novel is.
Many students disliked Melville’s Moby Dick but if you understand how images work in life and literature, you can appreciate more fully what Melville and Ishmael accomplished in that novel! Well, then the women, first people at the foot of the cross, the last to see Him alive, the first to hear the good news, Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb. In literature the other person at the top of my hierarchy is (those who have had to or chose to take my senior requirement class will know) Flannery O’Connor! Her short stories are marvels of real presence, skill, inspiration and grace: Parker’s Back, Revelation, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, etc. then her Mystery and Manners, and Habit of Being! Add Eudora Welty, short stories, and Emily Dickinson, poetry, for starters.
Oh well, just enjoy! Truthfully, I have loved that Juliana / Julia all my life! Read Byron’s She Walks in Beauty like the night of cloudless climes and starry skies, and all that’s best of dark and bright meets in her aspect and her eyes!
The Other “Mower’s Song”
My mind was once the true survey
Of all these meadows fresh and gay,
And in the greenness of the grass
Did see its hopes as in a glass;
When Juliana came, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
But these, while I with sorrow pine,
Grew more luxuriant still and fine,
That not one blade of grass you spy’d
But had a flower on either side;
When Juliana came, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
Unthankful meadows, could you so
A fellowship so true forgo?
And in your gaudy May-games meet
While I lay trodden under feet?
When Juliana came, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
But what you in compassion ought,
Shall now by my revenge be wrought;
And flow’rs, and grass, and I and all,
Will in one common ruin fall.
For Juliana comes, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
And thus, ye meadows, which have been
Companions of my thoughts more green,
Shall now the heraldry become
With which I shall adorn my tomb;
For Juliana comes, and she
What I do to the grass, does to my thoughts and me.
AND
Upon Julia's Clothes
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes, and see
That brave vibration each way free,
O how that glittering taketh me!
SEE C. S. Lewis’s The Personal Heresy with E. M. W. Tillyard!
Image: The Mower Today. [Bishop’s Small Engine Repair]. Alas!
