Friday
School has already opened in some states (Tennessee) and has yet to open in others (Maryland) so I’ve split the difference by choosing today to honor the occasion. Jonathan Swift’s mention of a laggard schoolbody in “A Description of the Morning” has always fascinated me.
“Description of the Morning” gives an account of the early hours when the day is starting to rev up. To be sure, in some instances activity is ending rather than beginning: a few gentlemen are returning home after a night of debauchery, the maid Betty is stealing from her master’s bed, and thieves working for the jailer sneak back to prison. But in other areas, the servants are up and about, the chimney sweep is looking for a work (Blake undoubtedly knew this poem), and a homeless woman is screeching.
The final couplet captures my attention because of how it joins bailiffs and schoolboys. It’s as though the guardians of law and order are judging those who are late for school:
Now hardly here and there a hackney-coach Appearing, show'd the ruddy morn's approach. Now Betty from her master's bed had flown, And softly stole to discompose her own. The slip-shod 'prentice from his master's door Had par'd the dirt, and sprinkled round the floor. Now Moll had whirl'd her mop with dext'rous airs, Prepar'd to scrub the entry and the stairs. The youth with broomy stumps began to trace The kennel-edge, where wheels had worn the place. The small-coal man was heard with cadence deep; Till drown'd in shriller notes of "chimney-sweep." Duns at his lordship's gate began to meet; And brickdust Moll had scream'd through half a street. The turnkey now his flock returning sees, Duly let out a-nights to steal for fees. The watchful bailiffs take their silent stands; And schoolboys lag with satchels in their hands.
The schoolboys bring to mind the sarcastic teacher in the Mother Goose rhyme “A Dillar, A Dollar”:
A dillar, a dollar, A ten o'clock scholar, What makes you come so soon? You used to come at ten o'clock, And now you come at noon.
I’ve mentioned Blake, and just as he has poems about abused sweeps, so he has a poem about miserable scholars, with stanzas such as the following:
But to go to school in a summer morn, —
O it drives all joy away!
Under a cruel eye outworn,
The little ones spend the day
In sighing and dismay.
In Swift’s view of the world, anarchy is unleashed upon the world at night, leading to overly stringent watchfulness during the day. To the satirist Swift, humans never get the right balance.
The good news is that schools have improved so that my grandchildren are actually excited about attending. It helps that, to invoke a song I remember from first grade, kids are no longer “taught to the tune of the hickory stick.”
