Do you grow up loving words or do you learn to love them later? Is it love at first sight or familiarity breeding attempts?
My earliest experiences with words occurred whenever I had to write a distant aunt or uncle a thank you note for a birthday or Christmas present that revealed the vast depth of their cluelessness. I would become enraged trying to squeeze a single syllable from the tip of my pencil, as if I pressed down hard enough I could make the graphite bleed a grateful word.
I have a vivid, not to say livid, memory of the yellow lined paper my mother would set out to practice a reply before I was allowed copy an approved message on an expensive notecard.
It’s the thought that counts, I heard over and over again, but why should I be called upon to paper over someone else’s thoughtlessness with carefully wrought thoughtfulness, especially when one is so over-wrought that he cannot think of what to wrought?
Well, as you learn eventually, there’s something in the asking that reveals an answer.
Words on paper make ungrateful thoughts more graceful. I began to realize that you could write something that is completely true, but with the nuance of a hidden incendiary on a delayed fuse if you could get it by your censor. And the written word worked when the spoken word failed. Who could ever possibly be clever enough, in the grip of rage or fear, to have the right words come right out of one’s mouth unless you were some kind of rightful genius?
Sharon O’Connor, a classmate in my 7th grade biology class, was such a genius.
Called upon to identify the parts of a plant stem we were looking at under a microscope when she was not paying the least bit of attention, our teacher, the fearsome Miss Carter, demanded an answer the question, “Sharon, do you know what pith is?”
“Yeth,” replied Sharon to the hysterical approval of her classmates before being excused for a trip to the principal’s office. I am still in awe of the nuance in that completely true response.
Later in high school, like everyone else, we had to study English and American poetry. I had a little head start because my father was interested in elocution. He thought learning proper enunciation should be part of every schoolboy’s education, as it had been for his, especially when speaking in public.
I had to memorize Rudyard Kipling’s “If” in fourth grade to earn some reward from him and Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” the following year. I have forgotten the rewards but not the lines about keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs and riding into the valley of death with the six hundred.
I cannot recall admiring poetry any more than my other classmates. It was just something you had to slog through like spring rain. It came and it went; it mucked up your shoes, but then it dried up and the sun came out and you wiped your soles on the doorstep. But T.S. Eliot stopped me in my tracks:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
When you are a high school junior or senior, and just beginning to be interested in how breeding lilacs with a dull root might mix desire and spring rain, this poem did not seem like a wasteland. Maybe getting away with such license — or licentiousness — just required a little nuance!
Back then, before multi-culturalism, we all were assigned to read Shakespeare and Donne and the other Elizabethans during our senior year of high school, but your teacher probably did not include Donne’s earliest poems after he had just met Anne More and wrote some of his most explicit love lyrics, including:
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
Now these are lines a college freshman can get his mind around!
Even Gerard Manley Hopkins, consumed ultimately by his love of Christ, had wise words for sinners sowing their Old Testament oats in spring when all is juice and joy:
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy”¦
And so it was that we slowly learned how every good schoolboy does fine: Learn what’s words worth in the spring of your life.
Philip Conkling is president and founder of the Island Institute.