The Schoolmaster

I

=A Snowy Day in School=

All the slow school hours, round the irregular hum of the class,
Have pressed immeasurable spaces of hoarse silence
Muffling my mind, as snow muffles the sounds that pass
Down the soiled street. We have pattered the lessons ceaselessly--

But the faces of the boys, in the brooding, yellow light
Have shone for me like a crowded constellation of stars,
Like full-blown flowers dimly shaking at the night,
Like floating froth on an ebbing shore in the moon.

Out of each star, dark, strange beams that disquiet:
In the open depths of each flower, dark restless drops:
Twin bubbles, shadow-full of mystery and challenge in the foam's
whispering riot:
--How can I answer the challenge of so many eyes!

The thick snow is crumpled on the roof, it plunges down
Awfully. Must I call back those hundred eyes?--A voice
Wakes from the hum, faltering about a noun--
My question! My God, I must break from this hoarse silence

That rustles beyond the stars to me.--There,
I have startled a hundred eyes, and I must look
Them an answer back. It is more than I can bear.

The snow descends as if the dull sky shook
In flakes of shadow down; and through the gap
Between the ruddy schools sweeps one black rook.

The rough snowball in the playground stands huge and still
With fair flakes settling down on it.--Beyond, the town
Is lost in the shadowed silence the skies distil.

And all things are possessed by silence, and they can brood
Wrapped up in the sky's dim space of hoarse silence
Earnestly--and oh for me this class is a bitter rood.


II

=The Best of School=

  The blinds are drawn because of the sun,
  And the boys and the room in a colourless gloom
  Of under-water float: bright ripples run
  Across the walls as the blinds are blown
  To let the sunlight in; and I,
  As I sit on the beach of the class alone,
  Watch the boys in their summer blouses,
  As they write, their round heads busily bowed:
  And one after another rouses
  And lifts his face and looks at me,
  And my eyes meet his very quietly,
  Then he turns again to his work, with glee.

  With glee he turns, with a little glad
  Ecstasy of work he turns from me,
  An ecstasy surely sweet to be had.
  And very sweet while the sunlight waves
  In the fresh of the morning, it is to be
  A teacher of these young boys, my slaves
  Only as swallows are slaves to the eaves
  They build upon, as mice are slaves
  To the man who threshes and sows the sheaves.

                  Oh, sweet it is
  To feel the lads' looks light on me,
  Then back in a swift, bright flutter to work,
  As birds who are stealing turn and flee.

  Touch after touch I feel on me
  As their eyes glance at me for the grain
  Of rigour they taste delightedly.

                      And all the class,
  As tendrils reached out yearningly
  Slowly rotate till they touch the tree
  That they cleave unto, that they leap along
  Up to their lives--so they to me.

  So do they cleave and cling to me,
  So I lead them up, so do they twine
  Me up, caress and clothe with free
  Fine foliage of lives this life of mine;
  The lowest stem of this life of mine,
  The old hard stem of my life
  That bears aloft towards rarer skies
  My top of life, that buds on high
  Amid the high wind's enterprise.
  They all do clothe my ungrowing life
  With a rich, a thrilled young clasp of life;
  A clutch of attachment, like parenthood,
  Mounts up to my heart, and I find it good.

And I lift my head upon the troubled tangled world, and though the pain
Of living my life were doubled, I still have this to comfort and
sustain,
I have such swarming sense of lives at the base of me, such sense of
lives
Clustering upon me, reaching up, as each after the other strives
To follow my life aloft to the fine wild air of life and the storm of
thought,
And though I scarcely see the boys, or know that they are there,
distraught
As I am with living my life in earnestness, still progressively and
alone,
Though they cling, forgotten the most part, not companions, scarcely
known
To me--yet still because of the sense of their closeness clinging
densely to me,
And slowly fingering up my stem and following all tinily
The way that I have gone and now am leading, they are dear to me.

  They keep me assured, and when my soul feels lonely,
  All mistrustful of thrusting its shoots where only
  I alone am living, then it keeps
  Me comforted to feel the warmth that creeps
  Up dimly from their striving; it heartens my strife:
  And when my heart is chill with loneliness,
  Then comforts it the creeping tenderness
  Of all the strays of life that climb my life.


III

=Afternoon in School=

THE LAST LESSON

When will the bell ring, and end this weariness?
How long have they tugged the leash, and strained apart
My pack of unruly hounds: I cannot start
Them again on a quarry of knowledge they hate to hunt,
I can haul them and urge them no more.
No more can I endure to bear the brunt
Of the books that lie out on the desks: a full three score
Of several insults of blotted page and scrawl
Of slovenly work that they have offered me.
I am sick, and tired more than any thrall
Upon the woodstacks working weariedly.

                                And shall I take
The last dear fuel and heap it on my soul
Till I rouse my will like a fire to consume
Their dross of indifference, and burn the scroll
Of their insults in punishment?--I will not!
I will not waste myself to embers for them,
Not all for them shall the fires of my life be hot,
For myself a heap of ashes of weariness, till sleep
Shall have raked the embers clear: I will keep
Some of my strength for myself, for if I should sell
It all for them, I should hate them--
            --I will sit and wait for the bell.

Biography | Poems | Best Poems | Short Poems | Quotes | Email Poem |

Poems are below...