Classic Poem

Sickness and Schooling

The later griping, when we suffer mind-woes —
This was once lesser pain of flesh:
" It hurts," we cried, " it seems to hurt.
Some something loves me not,
I am not loved — and where to fly
And what if not myself to be?
Is there a better I than this
Which Teacher Pain would not so pinch?"
We toss in hot self-inquisition.
It is our bed, the sweat and shivering
Are greatly ours, the Doctor's smile
Means that the world expects this very me
To be myself against what others choose:
The world is many, we are many,
And none the other loves so well
That to be lovable is to be loved.
And Nurse reads on: Jack scrambles toward the top.
I cannot scream " Don't go!"
The little Mermaid starts to float to heaven.
" I won't! I won't!" My legs keep sinking.
And then I sleep.
Nurse does not really care.
I care, I wake up well.

The lasting woes return the heart
To early sickness — oh, to be ill as then
And wake up well.
But the heart finds an empty schoolroom,
No child to be sent home,
No feverish bedside to embrace
The lonely nightmare —
It is no nightmare, but a realness
Like a name and face perhaps oneself.
And the bed is cold.
And the heart is many dreams by day
Which sleep instructs us of:
We wake up wiser but not well,
Not having fallen ill. Yesterday
We were not ill, to-day
We are but older in those woes
By which we have grown kind to pain,
Feeling it not, since we are many
And it must be so. We may not grieve
That life is much and numerous —
Since we live, and must be many.
We have learnt to know and to be known,
And no more ask for love.
Grief is a soft decorum now
Of usedness to love-lack.
The world is broken into knowledges,
And every part an undisputed woe is:
We dare not grieve, lest something fall away
And with it take ourselves.

Thus we make fast the world
And each a charge of numbers lays
Upon the haughty child each was
Once when the heart did nearly close
Against ordeal of numbers.
Oh, we have learnt.
Not one has never been to school,
Not come away a tearless devil
Whom the world has won to membership
In cordial hellishness.
Not one has ever found
The learning of gregarious profusion
For just so many years not stead of wisdom,
Not dear to hungry mind, consumable
For just so many years
Till wisdom was, and worldliness
Became the shadow of unjoy:
Through which our joy had need to pass
To reach the shining thoughts —
As heaven is a sight withheld,
Erratic among clouds,
If the eyes have not first dwelt
Thickly on what's near to see,
Hidden the rarer visions dark in time,
There to be sobered and attain
Numbered appearance with the common things
That also wait their hour of light.

We have been to school.
The world is many, we have learnt.
Neither together nor alone live we.
It is a ragged union,
As insecure as close.
We have learnt to do little, be little,
And to preserve intenser self
For a last excellence of world
That may not be, or cannot.
I have been to school, as all.
I was apprenticed to my time
And in the craft of contemporaneity
Grew accurate, and by the rule
Of then-and-now I babbled
The abrupt opinion, shuffled
Between what was and is
Like any nonchalant of taught experience.

" Know!" they said
And I knew.
The child grew girl of current kind.
I was obedient to my world,
I learnt to know the frown from the pursed smile,
I won the prizes which are won
By future citizens, trained dogs of wisdom —
A plaster Dante and a leather Browning
And, at the high degree of slavishness,
That stare of dire approval
Which follows good behaviour to its grave.

Having no mirror of my own,
Being by nature superstitious
Of what's mine and not,
I had not looked to claim
A featured someone for myself.
But the world pressed a mirror on my shyness.
" Not shy," to the no one in that mirror
I not self-recognized protested:
Not shy, but that not claimed by my own mirror —
Which I had not yet —
The seemly schoolroom countenance
Glassed like a wretched anyone
In the great overcast reflection
For just so many years my world.

I had been old.
Oh, hateful wizened youth,
Those just so many years
Of feigned astuteness, false incognito.
For it was not a guise of me,
It was a world without me,
As if I came into a room of strangers
And found myself not there,
And was a stranger,
By the law of courtesy which governs
Foreign presence, sudden stranding
In a place where one remains
About to go, about to go.

Did I fall ill again at last,
That I am now younger than then?
And have the little mirror which is mine
And make in it an image which I greet
Without a shudder, no, with even joy?
A joy of being as the first time myself
And reckless what my world decides —
Whether I am co-native or a trespasser
From the dread death-wrapt province
On live existence bent?

I fell forgetful.
Having been taught to suffer,
To be one among the many,
To go like leper in a world of lepers,
I became expert in equivocation,
Safe in my outer ways from being overheard
In candid converse with myself.
" I cannot now," I said, " offend.
I have the civil marks, my story must
Stand in the books next theirs.
What will they write of me?"
I fell forgetful, I fell curious.
What will they write of me?
They wrote nothing different, of course.
I saw that I should have to go back
And write my story myself.
But not to school.
At school we learnt to write nothing different.
But not to childhood,
Not to be ill, requiring of the world
A love of me it could not have,
Too made of many to allow
More than the passing love for each.
I should have to go back.
I must find somewhere to go back to
Like a life to live.
I fell forgetful.
I had learnt to be silent
And yet to be.
I had learnt how the world speaks.
I fell forgetful of speaking.
But had I continued to say nothing,
Nothing different, I should have died:
They would have written nothing different.
So I began to live.

It was outrageous,
I made mortal mistakes,
I did not mean to live so mortally.
But something must be written about me,
And not by them.
So I began those mistold confidences
Which now read like profanity of self
To my internal eye
And which my critic hand erases
As the story grows too different to speak of
In the way the world speaks.