[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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[Robt_Ward]

Rhina,

If I were to approach the poem as a psychiatrist might, I'd take the epigraph as indicative of the conscious intentions of the poet; i.e., to him/her this poem is "simply" a poem of praise, even of admiration. I understand (and see) the udnercurrents you've revealed, but I doubt the poet "intended" them. I think they tell us a lot about the poet's unresolved feelings about the teacher, what she represents, but it's not my sense that they are consciously a "part of the poem."

I could be wrong, of course....

(robt)

[Carol Taylor]

Robt, I'd take it a step further and assume that the poet might well be frustrated by her refusal to get treatment and by what he considers her excessive pride that won't allow her to accept help, and that while he disparages her stubborness he still loves the teacher. This rings entirely true to me. I see such phrases as the "worn out boot" as being borrowed from the lady herself.

Carol

[Margaret Moore]

Found the portrait so blurred by the abstractions in the second quatrain that the later lines failed to hold my attention. So I'm ill-equipped to answer Rhina's poser.
Margaret.

[grasshopper]

I feel the affection towards the teacher - of course the narrator is saddened by her pride and stubbornness about taking medical advice, but I feel it is accepted as part of the woman's nature. My suggestion for the poem, and I offer it diffidently as I know the author is extremely fierce (lol!) is to perhaps think of trimming this section, to maintain the focus on the woman herself. To me most of this passage is unnecessary exposition.

'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.'

What effect would it have on the poem, to move more swiftly, even abruptly, to the shock of the doctor's advice?

Regards, Maz

[Maggie Porter]

I agree with Margaret. This poem starts pretty well although a bit droll and gray like the marm. Then it dwindles, asks a rhetorical question that actually doesn't have a rhetorical answer (How did the doctor tell her that?) and then it gives us a usual final line, one that would be expected...and no. It just fizzles.

[Janet Kenny]

Rhina,
You are right about the tenses. I want to use several tenses but I have handled them badly. I hope to fix that.

I'd like to explain a little about this poem. I submitted it on an impulse. I had other poems which would probably have been better received but I wanted to test this in the water.

The subject of this poem has been strongly entwined with my family and school life. I liked her, but for a short time was in the humiliating position of being a charity child whose boarding school education was paid for by her companion, my teacher aunt. I was always in trouble at the boarding establishment of that school and the relationship became very tense. She was my senior English teacher at that same school.

We resumed our good relationship after I left school. She is an admirable woman who is almost proud of her self-denial. She is one of those people who carry a surrounding pool of quietness with them.

Rhina must have spotted the inner tension in my poem which comes from the act--almost of betrayal--of writing about this character who lives in a small New Zealand town which is more like an English village. Very proper and polite and extremely conservative. During my most rebellious phase I used to refer to the "eagles' nest in Cranford."

Maggie,there is great drama iin that last line but you have to understand that culture to know that.

Janet

[Janet Kenny]

Robert, Carol, Margaret and Maz,
Thank you for commenting on this difficult poem. I must have taken some hallucinogen to post it in this contest.

Robert, it is a simple poem of praise but the history shows all the same. I had a difficult childhood. Didn’t we all? You must have been inside my head
Appreciated,
Janet
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Carol,
Yes I feel frustrated at her refusal to take the doctor’s advice--she regards “bodies” as something it’s better not to mention. And I do love the person in the poem, with impatience and admiration.
The “worn out boot” was my phrase but very much in her no nonsense voice.
Thank you.
Janet


Margaret,
This was one of the first poems you commented on. I rather wondered why you bothered when there were so many good poems? But I appreciate your honesty.
best,
Janet

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Maz,
Despite my ferocity I truly appreciate your comments. I will look to see if I think anything can be cut without disturbing the picture. I felt that the whole point of the poem was to establish the character in order to contrast the brutality of the decision.
Many thanks,
Janet

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Janet, I love having your response to my comments and everyone else's! And thanks, too, for the openness with which you've revealed the history of this poem. I find it amazing how poems manage to tell more than we thought they would, and sometimes more than we wanted them to. It's as if they had an agenda of their own, inherent in the nature of the writing process, and indifferent to our own conscious wishes. I've had the experience many times of writing what a I intended to be a poem of praise--or forgiveness, or what have you--only to have the reverse of the intended feeling--the thing that needed forgiving in the first place--crash the party and refuse to leave.

The tension in your poem belongs in there, and I wouldn't touch it: it deepens and validates an experience, a relationship being remembered, precisely by not "cleaning it up," but only conveying the wish that it could be remembered as entirely "clean," as maybe nothing human can be.

I think one of the things I love and treasure about poetry is its habit of truth-telling, its stubborn way of dealing, not with the flat places that are easy to walk on, but with the cracked places in memory that are hard to navigate, like this one.

[Janet Kenny]

Rhina
I just reread your wonderful tribute to Frinkus. You stayed on track there. But Frinkus didn't make you feel bad
With appreciation,
Janet