Keith Sanders, Drake's Bay, February 1980.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
--from Tennyson's "Ulysses"
I really missed my pal Keith today. He died back in March.
Very unexpectedly, I choked up while reading Tennyson's "Ulysses" aloud in class today and had to stop. Ulysses is asserting his need to keep seeking, to going out beyond the horizon, rather than just slowing down, just dying at home. The poem is many things: the complaint of an underemployed, active man; a celebration of ambition and exploration; a variation on happy-ever-after; a paean to friendship; a poetic death-wish; a farewell. Even as I was reading aloud, I was looking ahead at the place in the poem where the Ithakan king calls upon his comrades, his sharers in adventure, to seek further conquests, further explorations, and the thought of my belated best friend took hold of my voice. I staggered, as it were, to a stop.
Keith is supposed to be here; we were supposed to grow old together, you know?
We were supposed to say the sorts of things Ulysses is saying to his crew to each other. Glory days and scars. Rallying cries. Shared folly and achievement. So much loss and anger flashed through my head.
The silence lengthened, and then I picked up the next line, continuing, but I had to stop again. Instead, I paced around the front of the room, and I told them why I had to stop, that the poem brought back my dead best friend, even though I hadn't expected it too.
Then, I shifted back to the beginning of the poem and the rather difficult first five lines, which I had written on the board already, and we considered the voice and the tone of that voice together. Shoring up my fragments--to steal from Eliot--against my ruin, I used the intellectual to hold the emotional in its proper place, more or less. As an English teacher, I moved forward in the poem, meaning to do honor to friendship as well as to Tennyson and his Ulysses.
Today, the students took all of this in stride, working with me. I've gotten a bit emotional, a bit engaged, with our reading before, treating characters and situations "as if they were alive," as if they mattered. They seem to like that. I'm not sure how many other teachers have acted this way, and the thought occasionally hounds me.
Here's a favorite image from the poem that transcends mere character, that we can all engage with, I hope. Certainly, the lines recall Keith's amazing energy, his wonderful engagement with life, his own aspirations and actions to "shine in use."
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
I recall years ago preparing to teach an essay by Ellen Mairs, I think, on "being a cripple" (her choice of phrasing) and on multiple sclerosis, her affliction, being behind in my prep, and so I arose at 4 a.m. to catch up, and something about that early hour allowed me to be more vulnerable and I just wept reading the piece, a piece I'd always approached intellectually before. I went in and told my students how I wept, and more of the students than usual opened up to discuss the emotional and then the intellectual aspects of the essay.
I have learned to teach, for example, Richard Rodriguez's essays through the emotions first, and the students get so much more, emotionally and intellectually, out of these pieces. And so forth.
Another arrow in the quiver of instruction? I say that as I don the armor of the intellectual for another day in the classroom, but whether or not I am wearing such armor, my heart is still on my sleeve. Emotions matter, and critical thinking that doesn't consider and value emotional responses isn't really all that properly engaged, is it?
Here is the whole of Tennyson's poem on the Greek adventurer long after the close of Homer's epic:
ULYSSES (1833)
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
This my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.
There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892)
P.S. Today, one student thanked me after class for being openly emotional in relation to our reading and commented on how the class was helping her to revisit a slightly younger self, as self who read, who had time to read, feel, and be.
I appreciated hearing those words, and I think the ghost of my pal appreciated them too.
