INTRODUCTION
Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was born in St. Louis, Missouri but moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania as a child and lived in town for a dozen years. During that time, she worked for nearly four years as a business teacher at the Carlisle Indian School. The celebrated football player, Jim Thorpe, was one of her students. During World War I, Moore moved to New York City, worked at the New York Public Library, and became a poet. Moore served as an editor of the Dial, a leading literary magazine, during the 1920s and became well known a modernist poet. She won several prizes, including the Pulitzer. “The Student” first appeared in Poetry magazine in 1932 with the subtitle: “Part of a Novel, Part of a Poem, Part of a Play.”
The Student
“In America”, began
the lecturer, “everyone must have a
degree. The French do not think that
all can have it, they don’t say everyone
must go to college.” We
incline to feel, here,
that although it may be unnecessary
to know fifteen languages,
one degree is not too much. With us, a
school – like the singing tree of which
the leaves were mouths that sang in concert –
is both a tree of knowledge
and of liberty -,
seen in the unanimity of college
mottoes, lux et veritas,
Christo et ecclesiae, sapiet
felici. It may be that we
have not knowledge, just opinions, that we
are undergraduates,
not students; we know
we have been told with smiles, by expatriates
of whom we had asked “When will
your experiment be finished?” “Science
is never finished.” Secluded
from domestic strife, Jack Bookworm led a
college life, says Goldsmith;
and here also as
in France or Oxford, study is beset with
dangers – with bookworms, mildews,
and complaisancies. But someone in New
England has known enough to say
that the student is patience personified,
a variety
of hero, “patient
of neglect and of reproach” – who can “hold by
himself”. You can’t beat hens to
make them lay. Wolf’s wool is the best of wool,
but it cannot be sheared, because
the wolf will not comply. With knowledge as
with wolves’ surliness,the student studies
voluntarily, refusing to be less
than individual. He
“gives his opinion and then rests upon it”;
he renders service when there is
no reward, and is too reclusive for
some things to seem to touch
him; not because he
has no feeling but because he has so much.