“All good poetry is the spontaneous flow of powerful emotions...recollected in tranquility.” That’s what Wordsworth said about poetry. And that’s was MJ told her class of 20 odd students. This was the very year when I realized English after all was an interesting subject and much easier to understand with lectures delivered by good looking teachers.
MJ taught British and American poetry to us. Though her accent was not akin to the Queens’, her knowledge, the delivery style, and the genuineness bowled us. The last two were what we could judge for sure!
I remember her teaching us the shortest poem I have ever come across – A E Housman’s The Loveliest of Trees. This poem is all about life and the time and beauty we have with us as humans. While she was explaining this poem, she asked us how old the poet as per the poem was. We were baffled! How on earth we could decode his age from the poem, and especially when no biographical text was available in the book. We weren’t sure what a score amounted to, especially when we had not read it in our school math book, and I am sure all 20+ pair of eyes wandered in different directions except where M J’s was!
I don’t remember exactly which of the following two sonnets we had in college; I guess both – one in FYBA and the other in TYBA, but anyway they were good and though I could understand the second one, the first line of the first one I managed to understand based on my imaginations [holy & wild]:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate…
…love is not love, Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove…
Elegy Written In a Country Churchyard, a poetry about human mortality I guess, and written by not so prolific poet, Thomas Gray, has always sort of depressed me. And the best of MJ’s delivery style could not lift my learning spirits when this was being taught. Foggy winter days or winter in general is not conducive for learning or absorbing the literary significance of such pieces.
My love for the language and the power of words to carry mental me to a different sphere [read oblivious, undiscovered, naive romanticism] lead me to attend English Poetry classes for senior students. No questions were asked, no objection ever rose, for no one except for the students knew if English was their subject or the teacher!
I think I read La Belle Dame Sans Merci during my graduation days. My mother surprised me when she told me the title in English translated to ‘a beautiful lady without mercy’. During my working life I have had the privilege of associating and remembering few belle with this title – PK, zalim hasina is one such belle!
Though I am an avid poetry reader since college days, have acquired the maturity to understand those ‘spontaneous flow of powerful emotions’ post academic days only. My all time favorite poet is John Keats. I can still deliver at least the following two stanzas form the Ode to a Nightingale, of course with few pauses to recollect…
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, -
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
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