Dead Poem Society

There are still times when my students write something that catches me completely off guard. I know you would expect that this happens in a freshman composition class or (perhaps especially) in a developmental writing class. However, I'm often willing to give those students the benefit of the doubt when they make mistakes. They are, after all, still learning the intricacies of the language and how to express themselves better.

No, the ones that really stun me are the ones written by students in literature courses. Many of them are, as you might expect, English majors and should appreciate the nuances of words and meanings. Most of them assert that they really like reading and have even expressed a desire to become teachers some day. It gives me a sense of optimism for the future of my profession when young people want to carry on the traditions of literary study.

And then I'll read a sentence that stops me cold.

I assign several poems written about and during World War I when I teach British literature. It's a particularly rich period for British poetry: Wilfred Owen, Sigfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke are all from this era. You can sense that it's dominated by poems by men. However, there were women who served as nurses or who saw loved ones go off to war who wrote some exceptional poetry during that time. One of those is May Wedderburn Cannan, whose poem "Lamplight" is a favorite of mine. (Should I spell that "favourite" in honor of the British I'm discussing?)

"Lamplight" is a poem about regret, about the plans you make with someone, only to see them destroyed by the death of your lover. Its first line, "We planned to shake the world together, you and I," is so optimistic and audacious; it's that emotion so powerful in the young, that sense that you will accomplish great things in life. You will survive and succeed.

However, this being a war poem, it seems inevitable that tragedy will strike. And it does. The last stanza echoes the optimism of the first, but it signals just how much has changed: "We shall never shake the world together, you and I." If you've never read the poem, look it up. It's a wonderful evocation of the raw emotion one feels after having lost someone. Some of the references might send you to Wikipedia or Google, but doing so won't negate any of the poem's powerful final images.

One of my students a couple of semesters ago decided to tackle this poem for her final out-of-class essay. Not a great deal has been written about Cannan and her work, just a few biographical sketches and such, and not a great deal was or is available in our library about her or her poetry. So the student was venturing off into unknown territory. Sometimes, when you're doing that, you try to figure out a way to use whatever information you can find. And she did.

Here's the sentence that still makes me crazy with its lack of attention to the language used: "The poem has similarities to Cannans' [sic] personal life which gives the reader a reason to think it may be based off Cannans [sic] personal life while engaged to Bevil Quiller-Couch, who like the poem, had died after the war."

Yes, I know what the student intended to say there. Well, I think I know. I'll bet her spell check function let that one pass too. I think I just circled it on the page and hoped the student would figure out the error on her own.

What I would have loved to have said is that the poem has not died. It still lives on in our anthology and in our class discussions. In fact, every class that uses the Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2C, to be precise, keeps the poem alive. And each student who reads it, whether it is assigned or just found, makes another small but successful attempt at CPR for Cannan's "Lamplight." I might have even asked if her choice of the poem to be the subject of her essay didn't indicate to her that it still had vibrancy, that there's still a pulse to be found. I would have probably punctuated all of these comments with exclamation marks.

I said none of this.

I just puzzled over it and wrote down the sentence and let it "simmer" for almost a year before writing this post about it. Even now I am trying to doing my part to keep alive this poem my student has seemingly buried along with Cannan's real-life paramour. It seems to be a losing battle (no pun intended) sometimes.

I know it's probably unfashionable in some circles to think of literature as a living, breathing entity, something that still has the capacity to speak to us, something that can still resonate with us both personally and intellectually. (And I realize that, for some people reading this, I'm making far too much of an issue out of what was likely a simple grammatical mistake.) Yet it's that feeling about literature that made me want to study English in the first place, and it's why I still sign up to teach literature courses when many of my colleagues have given up and started to concentrate just on composition classes. As much pleasure as I derive from seeing students become better writers in all of my classes, I need an occasional foray into literary study just to maintain my sense of purpose, and that's why I wasn't ready then and I'm still not ready to accept the "death" of this poem, no matter how many times a student's essay might suggest that the designation of "DNR" has been attached to it.