Yanking the chain – Byron and Blake

A Non-trad student, that was me.

When I went back to school as a non-trad student (meaning old), I had a professor who was losing control of his classes. By that, I mean, he couldn’t keep the thread of his lectures. He wandered from topic to topic, reacting defensively when another student asked him what his ramblings had to do with Blake and Byron, who were the subjects of the only class I ever took from him.

The Byron and Blake class was one of the many classes in the English department taught to both high-level English majors (like me), and grad students (not like me). The grad students had to turn in an additional paper and an annotated bibliography. My friend Denise and I exchanged scribbled notes that mocked one grad student who kept drawing parallels between the Romantics and the Beats. Everything inspired him to draw long verbal comparisons, especially Beats-with-Blake, which is silly because Blake was his own visionary self, not really part of the Romantics (was he supposed to be their Kerouac? I can’t remember. Maybe he was their Ginsberg). Nothing could stop the discourses of this young man.

Okay, but at least he talked a bit about Blake, which was more than the professor did. He just kept going on about Byron. Our teacher loved Byron, but aside from the professor’s insistence on saying “Don Joo-ahn” (apparently that is the correct way to pronounce the title of Byron’s masterwork) I wasn’t learning much. In fact, that was nearly the sum total of what I absorbed about this poem.

I was not the only person feeling baffled by how little I was actually learning. I was 39 when I took this course as an undergraduate, but not the oldest person in attendance. There were several 65+ auditors in the class. One of them actually said out loud what most of us were thinking, words to the effect that she’d taken this class because she’d heard that our professor was an expert on Blake and Byron, but she was still waiting for evidence of that. “I took this class for your brilliant insights, and I’m getting nothing.” It was brutal. It was also true. I want to audit classes next year, and I wonder if I will ever be so pointed.

She was frustrated, and she was only auditing. Those of us who had paid money to take the course as part of our degree requirements were probably more frustrated, because we were expected to produce papers on these Romantic legends. How? I’d turned in exactly one paper in this class, a close reading paper on Byron’s poem, “Darkness.” There is so much meat in this poem that I certainly didn’t need an instructor to explain it to me. It’s long, but I’m putting it here because it reminds me of our present day situation of toppling institutions, billionaire oligarchs, and climate disaster.

Read if you’d like, or not–if not, you’ll need to scroll.

Darkness, Lord Byron

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation; and all hearts

Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light:

And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,

The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,

The habitations of all things which dwell,

Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum’d,

And men were gather’d round their blazing homes

To look once more into each other’s face;

Happy were those who dwelt within the eye

Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:

A fearful hope was all the world contain’d;

Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour

They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks

Extinguish’d with a crash—and all was black.

The brows of men by the despairing light

Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits

The flashes fell upon them; some lay down

And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest

Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil’d;

And others hurried to and fro, and fed

Their funeral piles with fuel, and look’d up

With mad disquietude on the dull sky,

The pall of a past world; and then again

With curses cast them down upon the dust,

And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d

And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,

And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes

Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d

And twin’d themselves among the multitude,

Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.

And War, which for a moment was no more,

Did glut himself again: a meal was bought

With blood, and each sate sullenly apart

Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;

All earth was but one thought—and that was death

Immediate and inglorious; and the pang

Of famine fed upon all entrails—men

Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;

The meagre by the meagre were devour’d,

Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one,

And he was faithful to a corse, and kept

The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay,

Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead

Lur’d their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,

But with a piteous and perpetual moan,

And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand

Which answer’d not with a caress—he died.

The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two

Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies: they met beside

The dying embers of an altar-place

Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things

For an unholy usage; they rak’d up,

And shivering scrap’d with their cold skeleton hands

The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other’s aspects—saw, and shriek’d, and died—

Even of their mutual hideousness they died,

Unknowing who he was upon whose brow

Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,

The populous and the powerful was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.

The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirr’d within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d

They slept on the abyss without a surge—

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The moon, their mistress, had expir’d before;

The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe.

And this is one of Byron’s shorter poems. Doesn’t it seem prescient? Or am I just recovering from watching “Eddington” last night? Maybe one day I’ll dig out the cardboard box that holds my college papers and read what I had to say about this dark litany, but there is another paper in that box more germane to this story, so back to the story we go.

Well, then. Anyway…

As the deadline for our final project approached, I became angry. Aside from his short works, Byron was doing nothing for me. The instructor would rhapsodize about how people would line up on the docks to get the latest installment of Don Juan, but that didn’t inspire me to read any more than the assigned passages. I found nothing in those to inspire a thesis. A topic was needed, so I decided to educate myself on Blake, because the professor had spent so much time on Byron, Blake had barely been mentioned.

Off I went to the PSU library. I researched, made notes, turned over motifs I’d noticed, wondered what to make of them that could be supported by criticism without recapitulating someone else’s ideas wholesale. I produced a final paper on Blake’s chain imagery. I was especially proud of this paper because I had gotten nothing out of the class. Whatever I’d written, I’d found on my own.

But wait. There’s more.

As relieved as I was to be done with this embarrassment of a class, it wasn’t over yet. We would receive our final grades in person, at a one-on-one meeting with the professor. My mood was slightly truculent as I went to his office and sat down.

I intended to tell him how hard it had been to learn anything in his class, but I didn’t have a chance. He began to talk about what a difficult quarter it had been for him. He’d been in denial about how deeply his lack of hearing had affected his teaching. He’d misheard or missed much of what his students had to say, and knew it had affected his teaching. He planned to get hearing aids, but after he read the class evaluations, he was so discouraged that he’d considered retirement.

He lay a hand on my paper. “But when I read a paper like yours, I know I’m still doing a fine job. I have to be, if my students are producing work of this caliber.”

I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I nodded, and left with my A.