September, the First Day of
School
By Howard Nemerov
My
child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the
first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave;
he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind
me how
I cried before that door a life
ago.
I may have had a hard time
letting go.
Each fall the children must
endure together
What every child also endures
alone:
Learning the alphabet, the
integers,
Three dozen bits and pieces of
a stuff
So arbitrary, so peremptory,
That worlds invisible and
visible
Bow down before it, as in
Joseph's dream
The sheaves bowed down and then
the stars bowed down
Before the dreaming of a little
boy.
That dream got him such hatred
of his brothers
As cost the greater part of
life to mend,
And yet great kindness came of
it in the end.
A
school is where they grind the grain of thought,
And grind the children who must
mind the thought.
It may be those two grindings
are but one,
As from the alphabet come
Shakespeare's Plays,
As from the integers comes
Euler's Law,
As from the whole, inseparably,
the lives,
The shrunken lives that have
not been set free
By law or by poetic phantasy.
But may they be. My child has
disappeared
Behind the schoolroom door. And
should I live
To see his coming forth, a life
away,
I know my hope, but do not know
its form
Nor hope to know it. May the
fathers he finds
Among his teachers have a care
of him
More than his father could. How
that will look
I do not know, I do not need to
know.
Even our tears belong to
ritual.
But may great kindness come of
it in the end.
The poem is about a father who is taking his son to school. The
feelings of a father who is about to push his son into the outside world and
the young one who is about to put his first step into the world of independence
are well depicted. Until now, the child has remained in the protective family
environment under the careful eyes of family members. By entering the class
room door, he will be on his own. The father is worried about his son that how
will he take this. At the same time, he is hopeful as well that his son will
come through. Here, the poet uses the biblical allusion of prophet joseph’s
dream. Just as the dream of Joseph got him the hatred of his brothers and he
had to go through a lot of hardships before eventually becoming the king of
Egypt. In the same way, the father knows that his dream of seeing his son as a
success will have its bearings on his son but he hopes that great kindness come
of it in the end.
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