It Didn't Take Much...

...last night, to remind me why I entered college as an English major. (It also didn't take much to remind me why, by the end of my first year, I had abandoned that major. One class, English Literature to 1660, made me realize that being a music major would actually be a really good thing!)

Last night, I opened my copy of Vocabulary, Spelling, Poetry II, one of the books I learned from during 8th-grade English; and I was transported back in time, completely swept away to another world--a world of spelling lists...and vocabulary definitions...and in the back of the book, poetry. Ahhhhhh! Bliss!!!

I love words. I love them! The power they possess, the beauty they display, the look of them, the rhythm of them, their pattern when I type them on the keyboard, the feeling of finding exactly the right words to convey a thought or feeling, the experience of reading someone else's words and having that "aha!" moment of connection when I realize that they have expressed precisely what is in my head. What could be better?

Maybe the fact that I love words so much is the reason for the length of my blog posts. I visit some sites--Anna's or Lisa's--and find perfect gems there: a beautiful picture (or two or more) and a fitting caption that succinctly describes or adds to the picture. It's glorious. But I can't seem to do that! And so I ramble on...and on...and on.

My dad, who prints out all my blog posts because my mother likes the feel of "real" pages in her hands :), occasionally reminds me of how many pages I'm up to now. It's a lot, but I can't imagine cutting any of them out!

Anyway...speaking of rambling...what was my point (oops, got carried away by wordiness again!)? Oh yeah, my love of English. Besides the really exciting stuff like vocabulary and spelling lists, do you know what else I loved in school? Diagramming sentences. It's true: I took great pleasure in sentence diagrams. It's all so nice and neat. You know exactly where the predicate goes, and the adjectives hang down, and it all makes such perfect sense. What fun! :)

You know what I found out my freshman year of college though? We didn't diagram sentences. Shocking, I know. And we didn't write spelling lists 10 times or have crossword puzzles that quizzed our vocabulary knowledge either. No, instead we had to read stuff like Beowulf...and analyze it...and write deep papers about it. It was too much for me. Suddenly, spending countless hours in a practice room with just me and a piano...and memorizing numerous pieces of music so well that the worst case of nerves couldn't shake the music from my head...and performing publicly every few weeks of the school year suddenly seemed much, much easier. :)

Oh, this is ridiculous. I've got to go to bed. But before I do, one last jewel of a poem that was in the back of my 8th-grade English book (and which I had to memorize but, sadly, do not currently have memorized...perhaps the only poem from my childhood which I still have memorized in its entirety is The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear!). I remember so clearly how, as we studied it, my heart leapt in response to these words and the emotion behind them. It still moves me to this day.

Crossing the Bar

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.