September 11,2001 Comments

Original included a footnote-not about Yeats, but the special context of the mesmerized classroom, which first readers would recognize. Scene: Small Writing About Literature class, University of Hartford. Thirty-three percent of students at the University of Hartford come from the New York City area, 2.5 hours away, including seven in class that day, one of whom lost a mother, another an aunt. ONLY conversation that day was hallway request by a young man to keep his cell-phone turned on because his father was missing. [Later found safe.] The real and surreal were compounded; it would take a chapter of prose to describe, including the ironic analogies of Yeats's awakened nightmarish creature Slouching toward Bethlehem. Note: I slouch into my class-thefirst line adumbrates the atmosphere. Diction in poem changed at least 20 times, mostly to simplify. Never intended as a quick read. The accordion time-frame necessary to move within a) real-time shock, b) Yeatsean allusions, c) lost innocence, etc., slides over tenses and does not address Yeats's supposed vatic lines; the poem was next on the syllabus, and the forewarn and forsake (meter-friendly) words would not ill-fit a professor whose personal reaction (colloquial fists) is hidden from students and confessed only in the last line. Impossible stuff for a sonnet, but sometimes we are obliged. I stick by forsake because the students (19-20) were transfixed by constant replay of NYC as hometown or nearby-metropolis in crumbling panic. [Learned later that the sound was locked-off all classroom TVs as campus policy. It was eerie beyond fiction. Whether indignant desert birds (symbolically) were silver airliners slicing into the Twin Towers is ultimately up to the reader to get or, alas, look at the allusions. It remains undoable or unfixable years later. Exegesis was simplified out, but planisphere crept in from a poem by Marvell to describe how a globe is flattened in order to be represented on maps. Yeats's notion of cyclical history was not at stake, but how the ceremony of innocence was lost beyond the rescue of words.