It’s a sobering thought that I’ve had this passion for poetry for more than fifty years – that’s more than half a century! And I’m as just as fascinated now, if not more so, than when I was first introduced to its intricacies and mysteries by a wonderful English teacher called Michael Saville. His was the inspiration that led me into teaching, first at secondary and then at tertiary level. What made Michael Saville so different as a teacher – apart from the fact that he stood almost two metres tall and was always impeccably dressed – was that he taught us the skills involved in studying poems rather than "teaching" us only what the texts meant. He didn’t just show us how to identify the techniques of poetry, but also the ways in which poets used them and why they were effective (or not), as the case might be.
I was reminded of Michael Saville’s lifelong impact on my teaching and my creative work; I was reading a poem by W.H. Auden called "The More Loving One". If you’ve read this far, don’t panic; there’s no poetry lesson coming up! But you do need to know that the poem is about our relationship with the stars and what might happen if they gradually disappeared. I couldn’t help reflecting on how persistently we take the presence of the stars in the night sky for granted, even when we know some of the "stars" we can see are already long dead; it’s only their tiny glimmer that’s still making its arduous way to planet earth millions of light years later.
Auden’s final lines read: "If stars were to disappear and die/ I should learn to look at an empty sky/ and think its total dark sublime/ But that might take me a little time". I wondered how long it would take me to think of a totally dark night sky as "sublime". So I went outside and looked up at the stars. They were still there. I felt a tremendous relief. Nonetheless, I’d better check again tomorrow night. Just in case.
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