Duverger, “The Naughty School Children”
Returning to the state where I was raised, I’d forgotten how early Tennessee’s school year begins. Although it may still seem like summer to many, school has already been underway a week, with August 6 the first day back. This makes Blake’s poem “The Schoolboy,” which I shared two years ago, particularly apropos. Here’s what I wrote then.
Reprinted from August 24, 2016
The children and teachers in our Maryland county public schools started school yesterday so here’s a William Blake poem to mark the occasion. Think of it as a protest against bad schooling rather than against all schooling. After all, education at its best taps into our natural love of learning and enlivens rather than deadens. A good teacher is worth his or her weight in gold.
Blake, however, saw many M’Choakumchilds (to borrow the figure from Dickens’s Hard Times), which is why he inveighs against people and systems that nip young buds before they can blossom. “The Schoolboy” appears in Songs of Experience and shares themes with “The Chimney Sweeper” (“They clothed me in the clothes of death,/And taught me to sing the notes of woe”) and “The Garden of Love” (“And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, /And binding with briars my joys and desires”). The image of the bird in the case, meanwhile, shows up in “Proverbs of Hell”: “A Robin Redbreast in a Cage/Puts all Heaven in a Rage.”
May all of us who are teachers keep our eyes on the prize–which is to nourish young people.
The Schoolboy
By William Blake
I love to rise in a summer morn,
When the birds sing on every tree;
The distant huntsman winds his horn,
And the skylark sings with me:
O what sweet company!
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.
Ah then at times I drooping sit,
And spend many an anxious hour;
Nor in my book can I take delight,
Nor sit in learning’s bower,
Worn through with the dreary shower.
How can the bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?
How can a child, when fears annoy,
But droop his tender wing,
And forget his youthful spring!
O father and mother if buds are nipped,
And blossoms blown away;
And if the tender plants are stripped
Of their joy in the springing day,
By sorrow and care’s dismay, —
How shall the summer arise in joy,
Or the summer fruits appear?
Or how shall we gather what griefs destroy,
Or bless the mellowing year,
When the blasts of winter appear?