Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:
I had justly earned my reputation as the most successful sleepyhead in class by dozing off virtually undetected in all my pre- and post-lunch classes in the first year and was hunkering down for my usual nap that afternoon. I also hated poetry then. I did not like the structure that forced words into lines and found the rhyming silly. So my teacher was up against circadian and attitudinal issues of teenage proportions. But she read on undeterred.
The breezy call of incense-breathing morn, The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed, The cock’s shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
From a distance of 32 years, her name escapes me even as her reading of this poem remains very vivid. All thoughts of slumber were arrested. She had whisked me to the countryside of England, but it was not the bucolic picture of giggling, corsetted ladies under their wide-brimmed hats and dandy gentlemen in tights astride their horses. Rather it was a somber landscape peopled by lowly peasants. And there has been a death among them. The early stirrings of empathy grew in my 15-year-old heart.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn, Or busy housewife ply her evening care: No children run to lisp their sire’s return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share,
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