Here I sit, nearly paralyzed by sheer number of projects I need to do between now and our department's accreditation visit next Tuesday, trying to focus on the task at hand, not to think about the lessons for tomorrow that are barely sketched out. My fingers are tripping along so quickly as I type this that I keep having to hit the backspace because my brain is outpacing my typing. I am trying to breathe, and take it "bird by bird," as Anne Lamott might say.
But right now, the iTunes shuffle fairy has decided to grace me with Loreena McKennitt's rendition of "The Lady of Shalott," and I start thinking, "this is all your stupid fault, Tennyson."
YOU are the reason I am plowing my way through this ridiculously under-valued, unprofitable, marginalized field of study, the English teacher. YOU are the reason I labor away at words day after day, the reason I'm stuck at school at 9 p.m. on a Thursday trying to put together a PowerPoint presentation for regional English language teachers, entitled, "What is Good Writing?" I can trace my entire career path (besotted and rewarding in equal measure) from those fateful minutes in the opening scene of Anne of Green Gables, the 1985 PBS production that I saw as a 7-year-old, where Anne is wandering in the woods, mouthing your lines like an incantation:
"Willows whiten, aspens quiver
Little breezes dusk and shiver."
This, Tennyson - my life and devotion to language, my committed laboring to teach others (and myself) how to wield and honor words - this is pretty much all your fault.
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7 years ago
6 comments:
Tennyson is a mass seducer of future English teachers--for me it was Ulysses--"come friends, tis not too late . . ."! (I'd write more, but I must get back to directing soph. multi-genre research papers).
Jen--I love your blog and check it every day during lunch!
Oh Amanda - how lovely to hear from you again! I keep missing you at church when I've been back, but think of you often.
Dear "Ulysses", I loved it too (probably for Robert Sean Leonard's recitation of them in "Dead Poet's Society" as much as anything. Yum).
And also, "There is sweet music here that softer falls than petals from blown roses in the grass.... music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies"
Those lines of his (From "The Lotus Eaters," I think) are STILL stuck in my brain having memorized them in, like, 9th grade!
See, we would have fit perfectly into the Victorian era, full of people reciting Tennyson at the drop of a hat.
Yes, sorry to keep missing you at church as well--hopefully, some year, we can meet again!
I blame Eliot.
And Heaney.
And Poe, Dickens, Lewis, Longfellow, and even some writers than aren't dead white men. (Apologies to Heaney, who, I believe, is still exchanging carbon dioxide for oxygen).
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
--Prufrock
Oh, gosh, Prufrock. I taught it to seniors once, and I was enthralled, and loving it, and leading them towards all the neatest meanings and analyzing, and watching them yawn--when I realized that you have to be less immortal than a high school senior to "get" Eliot.
As I'm teaching "Romeo and Juliet" right now, I must also blame Shakespeare.
I'm free to blog to my heart's content now that dreaded Tuesday is over, and thus I must add...
Eliot
"do not let me hear of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession
of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility.
Humility is endless."
I wandered into the Four Quartets in the midst of making my Jr. year American Lit. anthology project. I'm still poking around in them, in open-mouthed awe, and probably will be for years to come.
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