[Carol Taylor]

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<tr><td>After Christmas
to my old English teacher and friend

A lady through and through, gentle, refined,
retired school teacher, bookishly inclined.
Her Scottish voice is musical and low,
her gestures are deliberate and slow.
Asperity and kindliness express
her twinkling humour. One would never guess
that poverty and modesty prevent
complaints or any word of discontent.
Pride keeps her isolated with her pain;
a life of frugal effort to remain
dressed neatly and respected at her school,
observing both the spirit and the rule.
Her friend died long ago, she lives alone
connected to the world by telephone.
She answers: "Thank you I am very well".
The callers know that she will never tell
them if her health is failing. When, one day,
she said her foot was painful, deep dismay
was felt by those who knew she must be ill.
To mention it at all would nearly kill
this lady with her dignified facade.
Admitting weakness was extremely hard.
How did the doctor tell her that her foot
will be removed just like a worn out boot?
The doctor wants to amputate before
gangrene sets in. In vain did friends implore
her to obey his counsel. But she said,
"I’ll wait till after Christmas to be dead".
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At first sight, this poem looks like a sad, low-key tribute to a virtue less admired today than in the past: stoic attention to appearance, the "stiff upper lip." The language is faintly antiquated, as befits the theme, and the rhetoric is so marked it's almost excessive, especially the use of parallelism, with adjectives and nouns often appearing in evenly matched pairs.

But look again: a second reading negates the uncritical affection suggested by the title and the language of the poem, as when the foot that must be amputated becomes "a worn out boot." Then other phrases begin to leap out: "dignified facade," that crisp "Thank you I am very well!" and the use of the prim passive voice in "deep dismay/was felt..." as well as the inconsistency between "she will never tell..." and the fact that she does, after all, finally tell, by means of conspicuous understatement, the news that causes her friends--"in vain"--to "implore" that she obey the doctor's counsel.

She won't, of course: she prefers to die decorously, after the holidays, and announces it with staunch finality.

Is this sly criticism of a conventional figure--almost a caricature of the poor but honorable schoolmarm--who is proud, quietly angry, and self-reliant to the point of arrogance? If it were not for the loving epigraph, I would read it that way, but that epigraph gets in the way of such a reading and leaves me wondering whether the speaker's praise is genuine, playfully ambivalent, humorous, or unwittingly harsh. Help, anyone?

A grammatical problem: verb tenses are inconsistent, shifting from past to present and back.

~Rhina

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