Page 16 - English

geography, mathematics, and so on, and left in that incomplete state;
no, there’s machinery for clarifying and expanding their minds. They
are required to take poems and analyze them, dig out their common
sense, reduce them to statistics, and reproduce them in a luminous
prose translation which shall tell you at a glance what the poet was
trying to get at. One sample will do. Here is a stanza from “The Lady
of the Lake,” followed by the pupil’s impressive explanation of it:

Alone; but with unbated zeal,
The horseman plied with scourge and steel;
For jaded now and spent with toil,
Embossed with foam and dark with soil,
While every gasp with sobs he drew,
The laboring stag strained full in view.

The man who rode on the horse performed the whip and an instrument
made of steel alone with strong ardor not diminishing, for, being tired
from the time passed with hard labor overworked with anger and
ignorant with weariness, while every breath for labor he drew with
cries full of sorrow, the young deer made imperfect who worked hard
filtered in sight.

I see, now, that I never understood that poem before. I have had
glimpses of its meaning, in moments when I was not as ignorant with
weariness as usual, but this is the first time the whole spacious idea
of it ever filtered in sight. If I were a public-school pupil I would put
those other studies aside and stick to analysis; for, after all, it is the
thing to spread your mind.
We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one might
say. As one turns the pages, he is impressed with the depth to which
one date has been driven into the American child’s head—1492. The
date is there, and it is there to stay. And it is always at hand, always
deliverable at a moment’s notice. But the Fact that belongs with it?
That is quite another matter. Only the date itself is familiar and sure:
its vast Fact has failed of lodgment. It would appear that whenever
you ask a public-school pupil when a thing—anything, no matter
what—happened, and he is in doubt, he always rips out his 1492. He
applies it to everything, from the landing of the ark to the
introduction of the horse-car. Well, after all, it is our first date, and
so it is right enough to honor it, and pay the public schools to teach
our children to honor it:

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