Mamacita says: I first encountered this poem when I was in the third grade in my favorite teen girl detective series – Judy Bolton, of course! (Nancy Drew is but a pale substitute. . . .) After the Bolton family moves into the neighborhood’s resident haunted house, Judy’s brother Horace recites this poem, frightening some of Judy’s more timid friends but NOT, of course, Judy herself. It’s a beautiful poem, because some hauntings, you know, are themselves beautiful: not scary at all.
I also love this poem because of its richness of vocabulary. I love a piece of writing that makes me look up a word; it’s like a challenge.
Haunted Houses
All houses wherein men have lived and died
Are haunted houses. Through the open doors
The harmless phantoms on their errands glide,
With feet that make no sound upon the floors.
We meet them at the door-way, on the stair,
Along the passages they come and go,
Impalpable impressions on the air,
A sense of something moving to and fro.
There are more guests at table than the hosts
Invited; the illuminated hall
Is thronged with quiet, inoffensive ghosts,
As silent as the pictures on the wall.
The stranger at my fireside cannot see
The forms I see, nor hear the sounds I hear;
He but perceives what is; while unto me
All that has been is visible and clear.
We have no title-deeds to house or lands;
Owners and occupants of earlier dates
From graves forgotten stretch their dusty hands,
And hold in mortmain still their old estates.
The spirit-world around this world of sense
Floats like an atmosphere, and everywhere
Wafts through these earthly mists and vapours dense
A vital breath of more ethereal air.
Our little lives are kept in equipoise
By opposite attractions and desires;
The struggle of the instinct that enjoys,
And the more noble instinct that aspires.
These perturbations, this perpetual jar
Of earthly wants and aspirations high,
Come from the influence of an unseen star
An undiscovered planet in our sky.
And as the moon from some dark gate of cloud
Throws o’er the sea a floating bridge of light,
Across whose trembling planks our fancies crowd
Into the realm of mystery and night,—
So from the world of spirits there descends
A bridge of light, connecting it with this,
O’er whose unsteady floor, that sways and bends,
Wander our thoughts above the dark abyss.
Mamacita says: Some people don’t like quotations. “They’re not original!” or some such, blahblahblah. I like a good quotation. They make me more original. A good quotation is a thought made sharable.
You might have noticed that all of these quotations have something to do with the letter “A.” I’d insert a Sesame Street remark here, but I don’t want to get political.
Mamacita says: Remember that anecdote about the young bride whose husband asked her why she cut the beef roast in half before she put it in the pan?
unless it was made with Velveeta.
excellent, although it didn’t sit well with administration. She spoke about high school ‘graduates’ for whom a diploma was nothing but a piece of paper that connoted untruths. She spoke about how an employer should have the right to assume that a diploma pretty much guaranteed literacy and general competence. She spoke about all the money big corporations were having to shell into remedial programs for employees who had diplomas, pieces of paper that represented four years of showing up and not much else. She spoke about how businesses would really appreciate a diploma that told the truth: that if a student had been graduated out of respect for really trying, the diploma should say so, discretely of course, but in terms that the business world would be able to interpret. If the student was just going through the motions of graduation for self-esteem’s sake, the diploma should say so. And if the diploma was rightfully earned because the student had become fully literate and generally competent and had genuinely and individually and truthfully learned how to care for himself/herself in the world in general, the business world should be able to see that kind of diploma and interpret it for what it was: a real diploma.
My friends are mostly lawyers, musicians, writers, speakers, businesspeople, and other educators. Before the edict went out, I often had one of them come to my classroom and talk about what they did all day, and then the students would ask questions. Silly me, I really thought it was helpful.
Apparently, it was unfair to other students if one group got to have a speaker and others didn’t. I suggested that other teachers could just as easily invite a speaker into their classroom, too, but nobody else cared to go to the trouble, so I couldn’t, either.
from an ant colony.
Mamacita says: There will always be students who have no idea of their standing in a class; honestly, when a student says to me, “How am I doing in this class? What’s my average?” I want to scream. Even if he is computer-illiterate (and if so, he won’t make it at the college level, sowwy) all he has to do is check his folder. All graded work is supposed to be kept in there, and if he’s that anxious to know his standing, he can add up his scores and average them on paper. Sheesh. Of course, if there are no graded papers in his/her folder, I’m going to guess that he/she isn’t doing all that well. In my class, you have to show up and do the work and TURN IT IN if you want to pass. I’m unreasonable like that.
