Georges Lemmen, “Man Reading”
Tuesday
Today’s post is dedicated to “Sparky” Edgin, my freshman and junior English teacher at Sewanee Military Academy. Sparky died after suffering for years from Alzheimer’s, and I’m so glad that, while he still had his faculties, I told him that he was the best teacher I ever had.
I didn’t attend SMA because of the military, which I detested. I went there because it was the best school in the area, the local public high school not being accredited. After spending a dream year in France, I suddenly found myself plunged into the world of hazing, drills, Saturday morning inspections and Sunday afternoon parades. I was desperately unhappy.
But when Sparky had us read The Iliad and then The Odyssey, I realized that the school could be survived after all. I was proud that I could name all the gods and warriors and distinguish between them, including the two Ajaxes (the greater and the lesser). I liked third year even better as we worked our way through a survey of British literature. To this day I can remember discussing:
Beowulf
Chaucer’s General Prologue and The Miller’s Tale
Doctor Faustus
Hamlet
She Stoops to Conquer
“Modest Proposal”
Poems by Sidney, Donne, Milton, Herrick, Pope, Grey, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Noyes, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas
Heart of Darkness
Pygmalion
Short stories by Maugham, Saki, and Mansfield
Above all, I will never forget Sparky’s passion for the Romantic poets. I felt bolstered by the fact that someone else cared about the things I cared about. His classes gave me the first inkling that I wanted to be an English professor when I grew up.
Since he’s the one who introduced me to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” I share here the concluding epitaph. “Sparky” was not a youth when he died, and while he had a humble birth (“humble,” which he pronounced “umble,” was one of his favorite words), he would go on to get a PhD and become a college professor. In other words, unlike Gray’s subject, he was ambitious and far from forgotten.
It’s true that “Melancholy mark’d him for her own.” Sparky could be gloomy at times. But what I remember most was his enthusiasm. I’m sad that he’s gone but relieved that he is no longer giving tears to Misery.
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav’n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,
He gain’d from Heav’n (’twas all he wish’d) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.