Classic Poem

There is a Boys' Club that meets of Sunday nights
About our fiery teacher, the Settlement Head …
He teaches us ethics: he reads Kipling to us: he feeds us Emerson …
He tells us we must be pure and chaste …

We fall madly in love with him, for we are about at fourteen or fifteen …
And when we are asked by our Father of Ethics to take another teacher
We are unkind …

This other teacher is a quiet spade-bearded man, an educator,
Who believes in drawing out children not drenching them …
But we are used to the vivid exhortations that dilate our spirits,
And this man seems tame and weak …

Father of Ethics comes to hold an inquiry,
And our teacher waits in the hall for the verdict …
It is I that get up and indict the teacher …
He is neither Yes nor No, I say, neither black nor white,
We are not inspired …

So the teacher is dropped, and our beloved Emersonian is returned to us …

Years later, that teacher that I ousted
Shall be another father to me …
Even then, he spotted me with sure eye among those boys
As the one who should go some deeper, darker way
Than the way of middle-class comfort, public position and noble righteousness …

From then on, from afar, he watches my course,
Until our lives meet, and he sustains me at two terrible moments,
And in all days leads my thought from James to Bergson,
Bergson to Freud and Jung … until I may think for myself …