to speak, of a cock, that had brought her romance and love and marriage.
While working on her master’s degree, Daphne held a teaching assistantship. She was paid an insignificant sum of money to teach beginning literature to freshman students. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning at eight o’clock and again at nine o’clock (while the professors with tenure slept late) she taught poetry, essays, and short stories to freshman students who were not especially interested, but who were required to take basic English in order to get a degree in anything at all. She went into herteaching determined to make her students love the language, determined to open to her students the ethereal, majestic, magical world of fiction.
The poetry in the fat text chosen by powers above her was arranged chronologically. The first poem she chose from the text was one written in the fifteenth century. It was brief, and very easy to read. And, as Daphne told her class, it was wonderfully subtle and clever! She read it aloud:
I have a noble cock,
Who croweth in the day.
He maketh me rise early,
My matins for to say.
I have a noble cock,
Whose breed is nothing low.
His comb is of red coral,
His tail of indigo.
His eyes are shining crystal,
Rimmed all around with amber;
And every night he perches
Within my lady’s chamber.
“You see how devious the poet is,” Daphne (enraptured by her own sensitivity and by anything written in the fifteenth century) said to her students. “Now, what does he say in the first stanza that the cock does? Why, he wakes his master up. Of course that is what a rooster does, but we can imagine this as a pet rooster, a beautiful bird with a comb of coral and an indigo tail, who crows in the morning and wakes up his master. Why does he love his rooster so much? Why is this rooster so special, so
noble
? What is the poet trying to tell us by innuendo? What does the poet tell us in the last stanza? Where does the rooster go to sleep at night? ‘In my lady’s chamber’! So you see, the poet is subtly, inventively, telling us that he is sleeping in the bedroom of his ladylove—the rooster who wakes him in the morning goes to sleep at night in ‘his lady’s chamber.’ It is the indirectness of poetry, the clever sidestepping of it, the sneakiness of it, if you will, thatoften gives poetry its power. The poet is writing a love poem to his lady, but instead of praising
her,
he is praising an object that is related to her and to the fact that he is sleeping in her room.”
On and on she went, while her students stared down at their books, strangely quiet that day. She began to wonder if she had embarrassed them, because they said nothing. She went on from that poem to other love poems by Donne and Shakespeare, and was just beginning Andrew Marvell’s
To His Coy Mistress
when the hour was up. She taught the next period—the same subject, the same poetry (with the same strangely numbed reaction on her students’ part)—and then, when her class was over, she walked down the long hallway to the private lounge where the faculty and staff, including the lowly T.A.s, gathered for coffee and quiet conversation.
She was just outside the door to the lounge when she heard such an explosion of laughter that she paused. If the room was full of men, and only men, she wouldn’t go in. There were only three other female T.A.s, and she often felt timid around the male T.A.s when they were in their group, laughing with their low voices, gesturing extravagantly, bellowing out their opinions, fighting over their explication of
The Waste Land
like bulls butting for territory. She listened for the sound of any moderating female voice. What she heard was:
“… Gawd, I stood outside the door for fifteen minutes without taking a breath. I couldn’t believe my ears! ‘I have a noble cock’! I have a noble
cock,
and she thinks he’s talking about a
rooster
! Those kids must have peed down their legs with laughter
While working on her master’s degree, Daphne held a teaching assistantship. She was paid an insignificant sum of money to teach beginning literature to freshman students. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning at eight o’clock and again at nine o’clock (while the professors with tenure slept late) she taught poetry, essays, and short stories to freshman students who were not especially interested, but who were required to take basic English in order to get a degree in anything at all. She went into herteaching determined to make her students love the language, determined to open to her students the ethereal, majestic, magical world of fiction.
The poetry in the fat text chosen by powers above her was arranged chronologically. The first poem she chose from the text was one written in the fifteenth century. It was brief, and very easy to read. And, as Daphne told her class, it was wonderfully subtle and clever! She read it aloud:
I have a noble cock,
Who croweth in the day.
He maketh me rise early,
My matins for to say.
I have a noble cock,
Whose breed is nothing low.
His comb is of red coral,
His tail of indigo.
His eyes are shining crystal,
Rimmed all around with amber;
And every night he perches
Within my lady’s chamber.
“You see how devious the poet is,” Daphne (enraptured by her own sensitivity and by anything written in the fifteenth century) said to her students. “Now, what does he say in the first stanza that the cock does? Why, he wakes his master up. Of course that is what a rooster does, but we can imagine this as a pet rooster, a beautiful bird with a comb of coral and an indigo tail, who crows in the morning and wakes up his master. Why does he love his rooster so much? Why is this rooster so special, so
noble
? What is the poet trying to tell us by innuendo? What does the poet tell us in the last stanza? Where does the rooster go to sleep at night? ‘In my lady’s chamber’! So you see, the poet is subtly, inventively, telling us that he is sleeping in the bedroom of his ladylove—the rooster who wakes him in the morning goes to sleep at night in ‘his lady’s chamber.’ It is the indirectness of poetry, the clever sidestepping of it, the sneakiness of it, if you will, thatoften gives poetry its power. The poet is writing a love poem to his lady, but instead of praising
her,
he is praising an object that is related to her and to the fact that he is sleeping in her room.”
On and on she went, while her students stared down at their books, strangely quiet that day. She began to wonder if she had embarrassed them, because they said nothing. She went on from that poem to other love poems by Donne and Shakespeare, and was just beginning Andrew Marvell’s
To His Coy Mistress
when the hour was up. She taught the next period—the same subject, the same poetry (with the same strangely numbed reaction on her students’ part)—and then, when her class was over, she walked down the long hallway to the private lounge where the faculty and staff, including the lowly T.A.s, gathered for coffee and quiet conversation.
She was just outside the door to the lounge when she heard such an explosion of laughter that she paused. If the room was full of men, and only men, she wouldn’t go in. There were only three other female T.A.s, and she often felt timid around the male T.A.s when they were in their group, laughing with their low voices, gesturing extravagantly, bellowing out their opinions, fighting over their explication of
The Waste Land
like bulls butting for territory. She listened for the sound of any moderating female voice. What she heard was:
“… Gawd, I stood outside the door for fifteen minutes without taking a breath. I couldn’t believe my ears! ‘I have a noble cock’! I have a noble
cock,
and she thinks he’s talking about a
rooster
! Those kids must have peed down their legs with laughter
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