Sherry Chandler

I was poorly educated. It was, to some extent, my own fault because, when I was in college, I tended to stay away from dry survey courses and take the ones that interested me: American novel, short story, creative writing. But it was also because of where I was born, where I started. Nobody in my family was college educated, many were not high school educated. I had no concept of what it meant to be educated—at least in the academic sense. I had no idea how even to think about getting educated.

Which is not to say I went untaught. I had many useful skills. I could sew and cook and drive a tractor, for example.

It was also a result of the canon. I was never asked to read a modern poet besides T.S. Eliot. My history of civ class didn’t progress into the 20th century.

On the other hand, I was well educated in that I went to a liberal arts college, small and Baptist though it was. I did have a history of civ class, and basic science and math courses, and even some required Bible study classes that have kept me from being at the mercy of extremists on either side of the religion question.

I read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind when it came out 20 years ago; it made me angry. I found it racist and sexist and it would probably still make me angry if I read it again today.

But, badly as I was educated, I don’t think my sons had the same kind of college enlightenment that I had. Maybe it was because they started further on. And probably it was because the culture had changed: so many of their fellow students seemed to spend their time in their dorm rooms watching tv or playing video games. College was where I learned radical ideas. My sons’ friends didn’t seem interested in ideas at all; they just wanted IT degrees so they could get rich.

That worked out well.

And I’m beginning to sound like an old poop. Back in my day—

Anyway, if you’re interested at all in questions of what young folk should learn in college, I recommend this essay in the NYTimes: Revisiting the Canon Wars

A follow-up: A thought-provoking rebuttal of the NYTimes article here by Jim Sleeper.

Bloom was eccentric, and not, shall we say, my cup of tea. But some of his arguments deserve rescuing from conservative ideologues and from journalists addicted to “left vs. right” scenarios or confused and embittered by what they think liberals did to their own educations. Such journalists thought I must be trying to rescue Bloom from the right in order to claim him for the left. They didn’t notice that liberal education is endangered far more now by conservative capitalist surges than by tenured radicals – an important distinction.

As with the stanza break in “Musée des Beaux Arts,” I have found that most online versions of Emily Dickinson’s 640th poem omit the dashes. That strikes me as sacrilege when you consider that Dickinson was so protective of her content that she refused to let her poems be published in her lifetime. It’s true that html is not mdash friendly. But still—

The version at the American Academy of Poets keeps the integrity of the poem’s dashes. They also provide an extensive reading guide. (AAP compares this poem to a sonnet, too.0

As I grew more comfortable with Dickinson’s words in my mouth, I tended to lose the notion that she herself is as quaint as the teacup the sexton locks away. Bone ash is sometimes a component of porcelain, so there’s a chilling sort of pun in the image of the sexton

Putting up
Our Life – His porcelain -
Like a Cup –

At any rate, I found the poem easy enough to speak, and those dashes operate almost like a score to guide the rhythm and emphasis of the recitation.

This poem is not Dickinson’s usual 4/3 stanza, the hymn (or ballad) stanza, that allows many of her poems to be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” You could also maybe more aptly sing them to “Amazing Grace.” Or “Barbry Allen.”

#640 breaks down something more like 3/2

I cannot live with You –
It would be Life –
And Life is over there –
Behind the Shelf

The Sexton keeps the Key to –

But that meter tends to break down, as does the rhyme scheme. It all becomes uneven in the darkest parts of the poem:

They’d judge Us – How –
For You – served Heaven – You know,
Or sought to –
I could not –

Because You saturated Sight –
And I had not more Eyes
For sordid excellence
As Paradise

“Sordid excellence” is a wonderful oxymoron but I really didn’t want that “you know” to be there.

The poem is definitely metaphysical in its constant use of paradox, it’s violent yoking of unlike ideas. Consider the closing stanza with its ocean as a door ajar:

So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White Sustenance –
Despair –

The idea floated and teased around in my mind that this poem is almost a feminist statement — it would go something like this: if a woman’s role in the love relationship, let’s say marriage, is to be completely subsumed by the man then a woman who loves/marries is lost because the man “saturates sight” and blocks her view of Jesus, her “personal relationship” with God. So a woman who would possess her soul but give up the solace of an earthly love.

But that argument would probably break down if I examined it very closely.

Ah well, this week I really will give myself a break and go for W.C. Williams’s To a Poor Old Woman. I have always been thoroughly charmed by that one.