Day #31--The Tyger

Blake's original illustration for his poem

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

All I had to do was open the book and William Blake carried me back 50 years to a high school in southwest Wisconsin and a classroom I considered mine, first room on the left, lower floor--"Mr. Schaap--English."

I was a late-summer hire. I'd made no plans before my draft physical, and when I flunked--a goofy heartbeat--I felt stranded. College grad was not the most wonderful moment of my life because I felt as if all of my life were behind me. I had no idea what lay ahead. It was scary.

I was offered the job in July. I'd followed up an ad from the Sunday Milwaukee Journal. Blackhawk School District needed an English teacher who could coach freshman basketball and do the drama too. Oh yeah, did I mention newspaper? I was a first-year teacher, four years older than my students.

"Senior English" was Brit lit. I'd gone through most of a fat anthology in college, but I'd not been the most ardent student, so while the material I was to teach wasn't new, it was neither familiar nor beloved. 

Farm kids filled that classroom, kids who either milked cows or made cheese. Not one of them had ever heard of William Blake. Truth be known, I hadn't really met Blake myself, but a contract in my desk drawer told me it was my job to "teach" him. I'm wasn't sure what that meant exactly.

So last night that Tyger turned up when I turned the page in a devotional book we're into, the Lenten things back on the shelf, Easter o'er. This one is "A Year of Christian Poetry," a gift from a friend culling old books from her library on the occasion of her retirement: "Maybe the Schaaps would like this one." Oddly enough, we've found it interesting.

Last night, the Tyger showed up, flashing his fierce danger and Blake's bewonderment about evil--where did the beast come from? If God is good, who's creating the evil? It's a human question most every kid in that room would face--and likely has--sometime during their lives. Me too.

There was the Tyger. I remembered that school room and had to giggle because it seemed an what I had to do seemed impossible.

Not then. Back then, it was my job. I'd suffered the miseries of Brit Lit as a high school kid. I knew what it was like to look at The Faerie Queen or Chaucer or Joseph Addison with no idea what to make of them. Fifty years ago I knew I was taking over a well-established cultural task loaded into the back pack of what we called an education, a rite of passage. Blake was everyone's misery. Those cheese-makers had to suffer through it too.

Seems now as if it was a herculean task, downright foolhardy, just plain impossible.

But I did it--because I had to, and also because I rather quickly began to believe myself that those farm kids might actually be better dairymen if somewhere along the line they learned something of vengeful evil from Macbeth or all-consuming passion from the Bard's star-crossed lovers.

I believed that. Still do. As a culture, we're no longer sure of the place of literature, but I wouldn't be typing these words right now if I didn't believe that I certainly did no harm fifty years ago trying to open "Tyger, tyger burning bright" into vital questions of the nature of good and evil.

I'm not making a case for Brit Lit, although I could. I'm making a case for nurturing the human imagination with the very ideas that have come to define us.

That's why I feel the loss of something rich and fully human in the college down the street, where beloved members of the English department were released from their contracts because, really, who gives a darn about William Blake? The liberal arts, long the heart and soul of higher education, have been at risk for decades, but when they are gutted from a college education they are gone.

I hadn't thought much about William Blake for fifty years. My first year of teaching was the last time I went through Brit lit, but all I had to do was see the first line, "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright," and I was lost in all of this.

I know, I know--life goes on. Things change. Just give me a few minutes to lament.