The Introverted Poem: Sister Michael Geraldine

I have to think the good nuns who taught me for eight years during the sixties had received some sort of training, but how much and of what quality I don’t know. Pedagogy was not particularly the thing in those days. Accordingly, neither were such systematized and restrictive notions as professional protocols, best practices, standard methodologies, codes of ethics, and, well, you know. Kids I’m now quite sure were ADHD quickly came to know themselves as “bad,” and kids with processing issues as “stupid.” A kid who was having trouble at home and was too depressed to get his or her homework done might improve if scolded for it and/or slapped about the face and head. A methodological assumption the nuns adhered to, if put into words, seemed to be that the ends justified the means, and that’s because the ends were of a high moral provenance. In children The Good manifested as quietness, stillness, rapt attention, and above all obedience. High grades, it was believed, usually followed from such behavioral felicities, and deservedly so, even if the compliant child’s mastery of the subject matter wasn’t in every instance clear.

There were a number of happy consequences with regard to this lack of standardization in the sisters’ work with us, all of which boiled down to the fact that every nun was different in her teaching approach. This lent some diversity to our school day. Some were even nice to us from time to time, especially if another of their wimpled compatriots happened not to be walking past the classroom door or the Mother Superior happened not to have the P.A. turned on in listening mode.

Sister Michael Geraldine, for instance, if she wasn’t having one of her days, could be downright congenial, not just to goody-goodies like me but to all sixty-three of us in our six or seven rows of between nine and eleven desks per. Sister had fat cheeks and a healthy unibrow under a broad shiny forehead. Her lips were always a bit chapped-looking and, alas, she did have a mole or a boil or something on the left jowl, as well as tufty nostrils and metal-rimmed specs. When she was in a bad mood, of course, these features were not of the most complimentary sort. When she was of good cheer, though, which was more often than not, the same features became oddly generative of a kind of radiance as she graciously endowed us at recess with “a few extra minutes, children, in which to masticate your snacks.” 

Because like the rest of her crew sister had but a tentative grasp of what has come to be thought of as “developmentally appropriate” teaching methods she was quite sure that by using words like “masticate” from time to time, as well as phrases like “in which to,” she was enhancing our verbal intelligence in the areas of both vocabulary and grammar. This supposition applied in her mind to the development of our theological understanding, too, in the cultivation of which she was not at all averse to laying words like “transubstantiation” on us or, in chalk-talk discussions about angels, specialized terms like “Orders” and “Dominions,” all of which my fifth grade mind for some reason clasped unto its bosom and ruminated over endlessly.

I honestly believe Sister Michael’s work in this regard, unprotocol’d and unstandardized as it was, had a profound effect on both my cognitive development and my verbal imagination. Sister’s teaching about spiritual matters was inspired with the complexities of medieval theology, as well as the mystical valences of the quasi-hermetic traditions that had somehow found their way into her soul. She was unprofessional enough to have little sense of there being boundaries between her experience of the materials and her presentation of those materials to us. This fact meant that she exercised a level of generosity that consisted not so much of an imposition of her adult self on us as of an invitation to us to partake in her own honest struggles and achievements in the realm of understanding.

One of Sister Michael’s great loves was poetry. She rightly considered poetry to be as much an aural as a conceptual art and therefore required us to memorize and recite, grading our recitations not simply according to the extent to which we stumbled through verses or not or got words wrong but also according to how deeply we felt the lines as evidenced by the singsong-y liveliness of our performances.

In preparation for recital day, which was usually a Friday, Sister would devote at least two class periods to reading the week’s poem to us herself, explaining complexities we couldn’t have been expected to appreciate, then encouraging us to discuss with her what the poem was “really about.” Poems, she often explained, were “shy” about their deeper meanings and feelings. In this sense, they were what she called “introverted.” We didn’t know what “introverted” meant, but we got her drift. Poems kept to themselves until we found a way to draw them out, to reveal their most intimate truths.

Fully experiencing a poem had generally to do with what she called its “similes” and “metaphors,” its use of something called “personification,” or the way it often emphasized words through the deployment of an obscure gimmick called “alliteration.” Of course, these terms were always popping up in some matching test or other, and nice Sister Michael could be quite devious in the way she set them up, Column B almost always containing more definitions than there were terms in Column A. Her multi-choice sections, too, were complicated by choice E, which was usually “None of the above,” or sometimes “Both A and C.” Despite the questionable thinking behind such an approach when considered from the point of view of creativity, imagination, and those sorts of things, a few of us got pretty good at understanding what sister meant when she used these terms. Accordingly, this made us feel we were not, thank God, stupid. It also made us like poetry despite its shyness, or maybe because of it. There was something rewarding, even generous, about sussing out not only what a poem said but also what in its shyness it didn’t say. Even introverts, Sister conveyed to us, want to be understood.

Sister's favorite poet seemed to be Robert Frost. She loved two of his poems in particular, “The Road Less Travelled” and “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The latter was the more moving to her because, especially as she read it, it was decidedly the darker one. The former took place on a sunny day and featured healthy patches of grass, leaves “no step had trodden black,” and a wood that was not dark but yellow. Its metaphorical dimension, too, was “teachable,” ie., obvious in that it bordered on allegory. If a poem must be considered shy, well, this one wasn’t that shy. It was a bit of a talker, really, and Sister was content to allow it to say what it seemed to be saying about the virtues of independence and non-conformity.

This may have been because in her mind the non-conformity involved was that of one who chose a life of faith and moral rectitude rather than common sinfulness. Perhaps, too, that was why the poem’s assertion that the path that was “grassy and wanting wear” therefore had the “better claim” stood strong in her mind against the further observations that “the passing there/Had worn them really about the same,” or that “both that morning equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black.” The speaker’s sigh in the poem has much to do with the realization that he’ll never be able to try the other path, and the “difference” he notes at the end is itself but “sigh-able,” related perhaps to a certain sense of the loneliness of the speaker’s subsequent life-journey. These tonal and explicatory mitigations did not seem to enter into Sister’s mind during her unfolding of the poem’s meaning, only a feeling almost of self-satisfaction, as if she herself had taken the road less travelled—which, metaphorically, as a nun she had—and was the better for it in terms of her soul’s estate.

*

Despite Sister’s benevolence towards her fourth-grade minions, she did have, as I’ve mentioned, her ‘days.’ We knew immediately after the eight o’clock bell and the Our Father and Hail Mary and the Pledge of Allegiance that it was one of her days by how the mole, the chapped lips, the unibrow all combined to emanate darkly as framed by her wimple and black veil. Her jowls seemed heavier and droopier. Her eyes behind their metal spectacles were grey-enameled when she looked up at us and puffy-lidded above dark-veined pouches when she cast them down to the book splayed open in her hands, which seemed no more interesting to her, the book, than a double-handful of sawdust. Although violent usage was not generally an element of her methodology, on these days she might address a fidgety kid with an acid tone, might even yank a cowlick or two as she patrolled up and down the aisles. On such days, too, she might neglect to endow us with extra mastication time at the end of recess.

To be sure, Sister’s ‘days’ happened to her, and us, mostly in the dark of winter. They were usually accompanied by lowering skies outside, rain, sleet, even snow, the sort of snow that happened in the afternoon and differed markedly from ‘snow day’ snow or even early dismissal snow by virtue of its wetness, its failure to set, its lack of fluff, its dropping straight down from the sky instead of wafting, swirling, gliding. On those days the long fluorescent tube lights above us were kept on and buzzing. The shades were pulled almost all the way down. The tight-latched jalousy windows rattled from time to time in their tracks. Raincoats, scarves, knit hats, book bags, and snow boots crowded the ‘cloakroom’ alcove along the back wall, the compound mass of them so great that often the track doors couldn’t be slid across and properly latched.  The air itself was stuffy, grimy, rancid with kid-stink, and the radiators banged away, roasting the chalkdusty atmosphere of the classroom. The green linoleum floor was wet, muddy, scattered here and there with twigs or moss, street grime. Books dropped, sneaks squeaked, papers rustled. Sneezes were tectonic and wet, their spray-plumes elongated, laden.

It was on just such an afternoon that Sister set out to explore with us the intricacies of “Stopping By Woods.” It was part of a ‘unit’ that also included, believe it or not, six of the seven stanzas of Keats’s nightingale ode, the expunged stanza being the “Darkling I listen” one with its suicidal ideation. Sister had just spent several weeks teaching us the other stanzas of that poem, taking particular delight some days in its “draught of vintage,” its “Provençal song” and “sunburnt mirth,” its harkening after “the true, the blushful Hippocrene.” This latter she spent a whole forty minute period rhapsodizing over by way of explicating its origins in myth and its significance in “ancient times.” On her less happy days she had fulminated a bit over the woods as representative of what she called the dark night of the soul. The “viewless wings of poesy,” she said, were not enough. You needed faith. Whereupon she remarked extensively if morbidly on “perilous seas in faerie lands forlorn,” performing the closing stanza’s adieus with saturnine aplomb.

Most of this, as you might guess, being developmentally inappropriate with regard to her nine-year-old tutees, went over our heads, but it had an effect. It created in our souls, perhaps, an area that was itself a kind of woods, not bright and yellow as in “The Road Not Taken” but, well, dark, empty. There was in it a single bird’s manic singing. It contained the poet’s “sole self” accompanied by a tolling bell and one of those words—forlorn—which sounded as sad as it turned out to be when Sister defined it for us. This dark wooded place was inside us but we weren’t in it, not yet. Our post lunch recess souls were fresh from playing games in the back of the room or flipping baseball cards for keepers, or talking passionately around wads of soft pretzel about last night’s episode of “Mayberry R.F.D.” There were passing but important agreements or disagreements still quite alive in our minds and they were far more vital to our sense of self than existential issues, loneliness, the dark night.

Nevertheless, when on yet another of Sister’s not so cheerful days we began our consideration of “Stopping By Woods,” we were primed for the darkness she happened to find in Frost’s poem. This was especially so not only because it was an unusually overcast and sleety day but also because the Mother Superior had come over the P.A. system that morning to announce that Father Mott had died. None of us knew who Father Mott was, being too young to remember the seven years or so during the fifties when he’d ministered to our parish, but we’d known he’d been someone important by the fact that Sister Michael had her handkerchief out and was lightly swabbing at her eyes under her pushed-askew spectacles. The rest of the morning had been taken up by an impromptu mass in the church, which adjoined the school building. The solemnity of this event made a powerful impression, especially the sight of some of the toughest nuns we knew wiping away tears as the psalm rang out about the true shepherd who would lead us all through the valley of darkness.

It came out later that Father Mott had taken his own life, done himself in with rat poison or something in his room in a Baltimore rectory. We found this out not from the nuns, who would never have divulged such a detail, but from each other on the street between games of two-touch, say, as we guzzled down Frank’s Black Cherry Wishniak or Hires Root Beer. Someone’s parents knew someone in the archdiocese who knew someone who knew someone else in the Baltimore rectory, and the story was now public. The rat poison might have been an add-on in transitio from mouth to ear somewhere along the line, but he had definitely killed himself, we were sure of that, as were our matter-of-fact parents, some of whom had read about it in a particularly indiscreet obituary in one of the local papers.

As sipping my root beer I mulled over this news, I realized that the nuns had possessed this information from the get-go. This led my nine-year-old brain to a sudden understanding as to why Sister had later that afternoon found such darkness in “Stopping By Woods.” I have no idea today whether she knew Frost himself had considered suicide at least once in his life, choosing not a wood for the event but a swamp—the Okefenokee, to be specific. I also don’t know to what extent she was or could have been aware of various shadings in Frost’s childhood, including brutal abuse at the hands of his father and a morbid spell cast by his mother’s life-long religious mania. There were instabilities and institutionalizations in his family, three of them—his sister Jeannie, his daughter Irma, and his son Carol—quite close to Frost himself. Carol committed suicide in 1940, and Jeanie and Irma were both committed to mental hospitals by Frost himself, whose wife Elinor also suffered from depression. That Frost had been, as he puts it in another poem, “one acquainted with the night” is perhaps as massive a poetic understatement as has ever surfaced in the great river of lyric expression, as was his admission in “Desert Places” that he held within himself an increasingly “blanker whiteness of benighted snow.” My sense, though, is that Sister’s reading of “Stopping By Woods” that afternoon was informed as much by Father Mott’s demise as anything else, along with what I now suspect were her own bouts with depression and loneliness.

She was right about the poem, I think, even if her rightness was due to personal and communal circumstances entirely external to it.   That is, although her critical method, like her teaching and that of her peers, was idiosyncratic, in this instance it was successful as an exegesis of both the meaning and the beauty of the poem, a beauty that on this of all days she felt at times to the point of speechlessness, even tears. In fact most of her attention to it was to the sounds, performatively—the preponderance of long vowels, many of them in the dark lower or mid frequencies; the contrast between the ‘k’ sounds attendant upon the horse’s bell-jingling confusion and the ‘s’ sounds evocative of the falling snow; the internal rhyming in the third stanza of ‘sound’ and ‘downy,” ‘sweep’ and ‘easy’; and, above all, the poem’s steady iambic pulse, which seemed to take over Sister’s body as she read, nodding her whole torso with each strong-stressed syllable.

The music of the poem caused her to feel its sadness along with her own: the mystery of the lovely, dark, deep woods, the almost childlike incomprehension of the horse, even the absence of the woods’ owner, evocative in the poem’s context of, shall we say, the non-immediacy of what is often thought of as divine clemency. Then of course the sonorous repetition of the poem’s final assertion, which can be taken as a two-fold affirmation both of life’s responsibilities and of the fascinating oblivion of the woods as they fill with snow. Because Sister’s rendition, along with her commentary, was so caught up with the tonal and musical effects of the language—because, that is, in her own sadness she felt the poem’s dark beauty so deeply—she failed even to consider its metaphorical workings. She simply felt it, and we did too, some of us, in our fifth-grade souls so much more like the horse’s than Sister’s or the speaker’s. Shy or not, the poem lived and throbbed. It didn’t break. Its introversion, without being violated, was turned extroverted, and this was because it was performed with an almost existential sense of its implied meanings.

This, I’d venture, is one of the remits of lyric poetry—truth==specifically the existential truth of our passage on earth, the truth that every moment we live involves, whether we are conscious of it or not, a decision to go ahead and live the next one. This decision is the provenance of a kind of faith. It requires an apperception of life’s essential goodness as informed both by our experience of the natural world and by our investment in relationships, in community. Whatever else Sister taught us that day, I think we all felt to one degree or another this truth. Upon the final “sleep,” Sister actually closed her eyes for a moment as if herself sailing off to an undiscovered country from whose bourn . . . Then, opening up again, she levelled her gaze on all sixty-three of us splayed before her in our inappropriate metal-and-wood desks down crowded rows and aisles, the goodie-goodies, the “chatterboxes,” the “stupid” ones, the “bad” ones, the ones with runny noses or dirty fingernails, faces, necks.

“Miles to go,” she said.

Then: “You, children."

And again: "You.”

The bell rang, but there was no hubbub of packing up.

Not right away, that is.

*

There are two reasons I’ve spent so much time describing Sister Michael Geraldine’s poetry teaching. One is that her exposition of Frost’s little poem took on a great deal of importance to me as I grew up and remains a kind of touchstone for my own creative process. Her ability to bring her emotional and spiritual life to a poem and at the same time allow the poem’s emotional and spiritual energies to resonate with hers amounted to an understanding of the lyric mode that many editors, publishers, academicians, and ideologues, for all their sophistication of thought and method, don’t have. This is in part because they consider the study of poetry a kind of ‘specialty,’ their hard-won professional positions being predicated on the assumption that they themselves are adepts, masters successfully initiated several times over into the arcania of theory and critique. Since poets themselves frequently compose within the expert and authoritative purview of such persons, they are likely to conceive of themselves as writing for them instead of for someone as unwashed and profound as Sister Michael was. Frost wrote for her, though, as for everybody else: working people, college folks, young and old, city and country. Many a GI killed in the world wars was discovered to have brought Frost’s poems into battle with him in his knapsack. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, though, Frost’s road has been the one less taken.

Because my earliest exposure to poetry was through the prism of Sister Michael’s soul, though, I bore within me not only the incantatory magic of Frost’s poem but also a kind of living proof that poetry could and should be meaningful to everyone, not just adepts. Since I went through the various sorts of academic mills that most poets nowadays travel through, I had to rediscover this important fact. The rapprochement was made easier by the vivid memory of Sister Michael’s rendition as well as by the fact that, since I’d been required to memorize it, the poem had lodged itself in what you might call my soul. Its music and imagery became a kind of refuge when, three years later, not long after my mother had died suddenly in my seventh grade year, I took to visiting at all times of the day and even the night a local woods along a creek. I was an eighth grader now and the nuns in their odd wisdom oblivious of “best practices” had agreed to the pastor’s desire to appoint me, as one of the older and more experienced acolytes, to lead the funeral crew over in the church. This meant that I got to re-experience my mother’s funeral along with someone else’s as often as twice a week throughout my eighth-grade year. I suspect the nuns, along with Father Hennesy, thought it would be good for me to understand that my loss was not unusual, that it was endemic to the human condition and comprehensible only through ritual exertions of the received faith. This was not necessarily an unworthy lesson for me to receive, but the repetitive exposure to the deaths of so many faithful individuals, evocative as it was of that of my own extraordinarily faithful mother, caused me to wander a bit theoretically and psychologically from the notion of faith-as-palliative.

Psychologically, one might say, I stepped off the paved street of communal assumptions into sylvan darkness, peaceful enough for its lack of doctrinal traffic, but dark nevertheless, and worrisome, uncharted. I sometimes recited “Stopping By Woods” to myself on those lonely wanderings. This, especially in snowy weather, made for quite an intense experience of its music and language. The memory of Sister’s sadness, my own loss, the snow, the bare and silent trees, the occasional deer staring at me from some thicket or other, all these things brought the poem alive in my imagination. It was some years later, in college I suppose, that I understood from a critical standpoint that the poem itself, taken in its entirety, was almost as metaphorical as “The Road Not Taken.” On my lonely sylvan walks, though, I felt the metaphor without articulating it to myself, felt the tug of oblivion but also, and as strongly, the tug of those paved streets. I had miles to go yet. Sleep would be nice. I could lie down right there in the snow and fade into nothingness, escape my grief once and for all. But no. I’d carry on.

Frost’s experience, his decision, as made in the voice of the poem’s speaker, became my own whenever I recited the poem to myself, which I continued to do as I grew into young adulthood, whether on those lonely woodland wanderings or in my high school years, tromping along the rundown streets of North Philadelphia to the elite Jesuit prep school the nuns had worked tirelessly to get me admitted to with high standing and a scholarship to boot. It was a constant reference point, the poem, not because it was a source of joy or because somehow it erased my mother’s death and my attendant grief, but because it somehow reminded me of who I was.

In many ways I, like Frost or Sister Michael, had been stricken and wounded by life itself, every moment of which if fully felt without reference to the future or the past was indeed beautiful, and every moment of which was nullified by the coming of the next one. I was aware, as I really shouldn’t have had to be at that age, of the Keatsian dilemma of my own existence. I had loved my mother unconditionally when she had lived, and that had been my experience of life’s joy and life’s beauty. The loss, then, was also unconditional and that became life’s heaviness, the burden of it.

I carried that burden in almost a physical way, slouchily, long-hairedly, my moodiness, as it were, round-shouldered. But I carried it, because that’s who I was. I did so in the knowledge that what I was carrying was as beautiful as it was heavy. It comprised the beauty of the moment, the darkness of loss, the importance of those miles.

 [TC1]