Background Knowledge

My brain refused to function Friday or Sunday evenings. Too long a day, with too much Day Job work, had drained the little grey cells. So I turned to poetry, including Shelley and Keats. “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Destruction of Senacherib,” and other works, some new to me, some old favorites.

You know, unless you really have a background in Greek mythology and Biblical stories, the poems don’t make nearly as much sense.

In Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” the poet assumes that you know the four winds of Greek mythology, and what a Maenad is, and where Baiae lies. The answers are: Boreas, Notus, Zephyrus, and Eurus; a female follower of Bacchus, and the Bay of Naples in Italy.

Keats goes a little farther. “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” requires you to be familiar with that edition, with Cortez and where Darian was, and Apollo. “Ode to a Nightingale,” starts with Lethe (the river of forgetting), and a dryad (forest spirit.) Along come Flora and Hippocrene (a spring that came from the steps of Pegasus and was claimed by the Muses), “Bacchus and his pards.” Pard meant leopard or sometimes tiger. Sometimes. Understanding all the images in “Ode to Psyche” means you know the myths around Cupid and Psyche, and the symbolism found in them.

If you were reading Keats, Byron, and Shelley in the late1800s, you likely did catch all those references, because you’d grown up learning Greek and Latin, and the classical myths. You also knew the Bible stories, and caught references from the King James Bible. Today we provide students with terms lists and references, because unless they are unusual, they probably don’t know all the Greek myths and the Bible. I stumbled on Shelley’s use of “this daedel earth,” meaning crafted and finely made, coming from the name of  Daedaelus. The word first appeared in English in the late 1500s. You’d know that Zephyr was the west wind, the best wind, and meant good times and fair weather. That Halcion days came when the Halcion birds nested on the waters, and the gods turned aside storms for the birds.

I had a semi-Classical education. I read lots and lots of mythology and legends growing up, read the King James Bible, and the stories of King Arthur. Later I read Ovid and the Aenead in Latin class, along with Martial’s epigrams. On my own I read Plato, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Aristotle, and a few other philosophers. I ended up giving myself a pretty good 19th Century education. I’m probably one of the last ones, because once the Internet came along, and computers before that . . . Everything changed. I was in a fast-closing window to the past, culturally. We just didn’t know it at the time.

This frustrates me a little, because I know that reading the great poets is a far richer experience for me than for my students. They don’t get all the references, can’t see what the poet is working towards unless we hold them by the hand and lead them. That takes the fun out of the reading.

Should we go back to the Victorian education system? No. Should we keep certain portions of it, and hold off on heavy tech use until students have a basic foundation of knowledge and cultural literacy? I believe so. The younger people (and older people) who don’t understand Western Civilization and what makes it so different are unwilling to defend it. They don’t know why protecting Keats’ nightingale is important, or why Andrea del Sarto sighed over Raphael’s art (Robert Browning, ‘Andrea del Sarto’).

A little Byron:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

   Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,

That host with their banners at sunset were seen:

Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,

That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

   For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,

And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed;

And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,

And their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!

   And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,

But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride;

And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,

And cold as the spray of the rock-beating surf.

   And there lay the rider distorted and pale,

With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:

And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,

The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.

   And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,

And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,

Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!

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