The Purity of Pure Despair

I was a professor at a liberal arts college in the midwestern United States in the 1980’s. My students were the privileged caucasion children of the north shore of the Chicago and other such places who’d come our ‘Athens on the Prairie’ for four years seasoning. They didn’t care much about philosophy or history or any other scholarly endeavor. Mostly they were interested in exercising their libidos. Ahh youth.

I’d been a tenured professor since 1962. I’d witnessed the Kennedy years, the post-Kennedy years, the age of Aquarius, the Era of Suspicion, the Ford Administration, and everything else. Nothing could prepare me for the worthless generation that came in during the Reagan years. Vain. Pretentious. Uncaring. Unintellectual. All of it I was sure was true.

Each Friday Intro to Modern Poetry class, I could smell the dregs of Busch Light and Jim Beam emanating from the pores of my so called students. Pretty sorority twits twirling their hair. Hungover giggling ball-cap wearing fratos surreptitiously spitting tobacco juice into Coca Cola cans. No one read. No one prepared. No one volunteered a goddamned thing in class.

Late on an unusually warm day in April, the cruelest of all months, I had had just about enough.

“All of you, are goddamned near-worthless. I have stood before you these past three months of this semester trying to impart some basic appreciation of the poetry of the modern age to you. My efforts have been met with contempt, boredom and laughter. You have insulted me and the artists I have presented you. No one has read the material. No one here has had one intelligent or heartfelt thing to say!”

The class looked up at me slack-jawed. I watched their expressions searching for a hint of remorse. Of indignation. Of protest. Of hurt feeling. I saw nothing.

This only made me angrier. “I have been wasting my time talking to you . . . assigning you readings that I thought would make you better people. I have hoped against hope that sooner later someone would have something intelligent to say. Something to contribute. You have consistently and repeatedly disappointed me.”

The faces looked back at me, unmoved.

“So I am finished with all of you and your shallowness. I am finished! I’m leaving this room and you can all leave too. You can go back to your BMWs your pot and your beer and your afternoon fuck sessions with your so called boyfriends and girlfriends. You can do whatever the hell you wish … like you will for all of your lives! But before you do, each of you will take out a piece of paper and you will write the name of one goddamned poem that we have talked about this semester. One damn poem, that has meant more to you than a bong of beer, a lay, or a line of coke! One damn poem! That’s all I demand!! If you can do that, then color me surprised!! Good day!” I stormed out of the room.

In thirty minutes, I returned to room to collect the submissions. There they sat. A pile on my desk. What I found astonished me.

There were twenty students in class that day. One student said a poem by Emily Dickenson. Two chose a Walt Whitman. There was a selection of Emily Bishop. There were two William Carlos Williams nominations. The other fourteen all chose the same poem.

In a Dark Time — Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;   

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,   

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!   

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.   

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,   

Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!

A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,   

And in broad day the midnight come again!   

A man goes far to find out what he is—

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,   

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.   

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,   

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.   

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,   

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

I sat at my desk and stared at the pile of papers. It could not have been a coincidence. I felt ashamed of myself and how I had spoken to those children.