Ode to the Passage of Time

I’m about to teach a unit on Romantic poetry by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. There are many other noteworthy Romantic poets, but these four stand out for me as favorites, not only because I love their poems, but also because their poems remind me of some of the best moments in my life.

My mother introduced me to William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge when I was a girl. Mom was an English professor who shunned media other than the New York Times. She earned a PhD in Victorian Literature and I have her to thank for an almost intuitive connection with the words of 19th century writers. She read me the very strange “Kubla Kahn” by Coleridge and the image-laden “Tintern Abbey” by Wordsworth as I fell asleep in my parents’ bed.

In contrast, I learned to love Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats not by listening but through teaching their poems to boys at Collegiate School in New York in the late 1990s. My students were surprisingly receptive to the messages in such formidable odes to autumn, to a grecian urn, to a nightingale, and to the west wind. Working closely with my English department chair Susan, who meticulously annotated each and every poem for us to use in our respective classes, I gleaned deep and lasting understandings of the Romantics that serve me to this day.

Upon realizing this past weekend that I would need to brush up on my lesson plans for class this week, I panicked for a minute before remembering that I am an almost religious keeper of notes and past learning. I pulled open the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet and plucked out my folder on 19th century poetry. Inside, I found pages and pages of photocopied notes on William, Samuel, Percy and John. Interspersed among my own much neater notes from long ago were notes written in the dark black, looping letters that I will always cherish — my mother’s — followed by notes penned in precise, thin lines. These were Susan’s notes, her annotations on “Bright Star” by Keats and her rivers of questions cascading down the side of Shelley’s “Ozymandias.”

I took a picture Susan’s notes on “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and texted it to her in Seattle, WA, where she now lives. And I thought about how much time, space, and thought had just been covered in the ten minutes I spent looking over my nearly 20-year old notes.

In revisiting the Romantics, and in preparing to introduce them to my students in 2016, I traveled back in time to the 1800s, to my mother’s graduate work, to my childhood, and to my early years as an English teacher. The legacy that words create is the legacy that I cherish most.