magic. words.

“. . . this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.” (Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses”)

I sit with my Brit Lit anthology, skimming pages, reminding myself of the magic that makes me love my job, that makes me want to do it thoroughly and well: this beat and pull of words that draw me along after them, words that explain my soul to me, words that make my soul grow bigger.

Can I capture even a bit of the magic and transfer it to my students, like Peter Pan shaking fairy dust on Wendy and her brothers, making them able to fly?

Can I show them that when I am

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least, (Shakespeare, Sonnet 29)

I am only feeling what Shakespeare expressed, as many as four hundred and twenty years prior to this?

Can I make them understand that reading literature is no arbitrary and useless exercise; that is not designed to cut them off from life, but to make them more thorough participants in life?

Will they be willing to crowd into the torch-lit mead-hall to hear the millionth retelling of Beowulf’s victory? Shall they be able to thrill when John Donne declares, “Death, thou shalt die?”

I turn the pages, and I find a cloud of witnesses to remind me that, when I am at my least and loneliest, others have been there too, and when I am at the peak of joy, others have also been there.

Ever since the beginning, when the Word that was with God made all things, mankind has been compelled to words, so that even those who believed in nothing and no one took the trouble to write it, eased, somehow, in putting words to their sense that “the best hope ever sown” is “unblooming” by the hand of “crass casualty” (Thomas Hardy, “Hap”), or that “the world . . . hath really neither joy, nor love, nor help for pain” (Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach).

And it seems somehow that the writing of it belies the meaning, that somewhere behind this tacit acknowledgement of the magic of words is the unacknowledged sense of the power of the Word.

Can I show my students that in this thick volume is a feast spread by the same Love which bade George Herbert welcome though his “soul drew back”? We are “guilty of dust and sin,” but Love insists we “must sit down . . . and taste [His] meat” (“Love [3]).

These are not “the words of eternal life” possessed by the uncreated, creating Word (John 6:68), but perhaps, just perhaps, they can point us towards those words? Perhaps, if we sit and eat at this table, we’ll find ourselves more able to partake at that table, as well?

The words lap like the waters of Lake Innisfree, and as I prepare to launch my students in frail paper boats upon those waters, “I hear [the words] in the deep heart’s core” (William Butler Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”).

Now I have remembered the magic; now I am eager to meet my class, to teach.

©2013 by Stacy Nott