#I'm pretty sure no high school English courses in my town covered pre-19th century British poetry

[mystacoceti]

The first day of class, after fifteen minutes of initial class business, in that cool green room with its white Venetian blinds, the professor—in his blue suit and his black tie—launched into a listless and, indeed, not very clear account of the adventures of Una, her dwarf, the Red Cross Knight, and Fedessa and her alter ego, Duessa. When, after twenty minutes, he reached a breathing point, I raised my hand.

He called on me, and I said: “I’ve noticed that the rhyme scheme of the nine-line Spenserian stanza is identical to the rhyme scheme of Francois Villon’s eight-line ballade stanza—except for the extra alexandrian Spenser adds at the end to form the concluding couplet. Spenser’s stanza is just a ballade stanza written in pentameters, with an extra hexameter. Did Spenser purposely take his stanza from the medieval French form and modify it—or is the similarity an accident?”

Leaning against his desk, the professor looked at me.

Now, I’d expected one of three answers to my question: Either, “Yes. He did.” Or, “While, yes, it might look that way, actually he didn’t.” Or, “That’s an interesting point. It’s possible. But, frankly, we don’t really know”—before he got back to his dreary detailing of the plot of The Faerie Queene’s “Book One.” Honestly, I didn’t expect him to take more time with it than that.

But what, after the count of five, he said, was: “I don’t think you can ask questions like that in this class.” He said it with a sympathetic smile, too. At this distance, I really don’t believe he was trying to intimidate me.

Nevertheless I was taken aback: “Why not?” I asked.

Here he chuckled openly. “Well, for one thing—” he pushed himself up from the desk against which he’d been leaning—“I doubt there’s another student in here who’s ever even heard of a Spenserian stanza before.”

Now, the man had been talking about Spenser for half an hour. No, he had not mentioned the nine-line stanza form in which Spenser wrote his epic. (He hadn’t mentioned “allegory,” either.) But I’d just come through four years at the Bronx High School of Science, a public New York City high school. The high school English curriculum for the entire city—indeed, for the state—was set by the New York State Board of Regents. For better or for worse, it had included Spenser. We had read the first book of The Faerie Queene in my sophomore year of high school. What’s more, my sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Levy, had made the entire class memorize the rhyme scheme of the poem’s stanzaic form—and, along with that of both the Petrarchean and the Shakespearian sonnet, as well as octiva rima, she’d tested us on it to make sure we knew it. I knew that Science was a better high school than most, but I was not prepared to believe it was that much better. While I was willing to accept that most of the students in the class could not reel off the Spenserian’s ababbcbcc rhyme scheme (and probably did not know Villon’s ababbcbc ballade stanza—identical, save one c shorter), I wasn’t prepared— in 1960—to believe that no one in the class had ever heard of a Spenserian stanza before.

“Oh, come on,” I said.

“You don’t believe me?” he asked. “All right.” He looked out over the class. “Raise your hands. How many of you have heard of a Spenserian stanza?”

I looked around, watching the students look around themselves. At least three students started to raise their hands, but seeing that no one else did, let them fall back to their laps. Some of the students snickered. I also realized that one very tall, very thin black girl two seats away looked at me, perfectly wide-eyed, when I’d started to talk.

From the front of the class, the Professor smiled, shrugged, and turned Midcentury 195 up his hands: Quod errat demunstrandum, his smile and empty hands declared.

I sighed and sat back. For the class’s concluding five minutes, he went on with his dreary plot synopsis. But, at the bell, as we left the room and stepped into the hall, the same wide-eyed young woman said to me over the top of her books with a perfectly engaging smile (quite as friendly as the professor’s): “You better keep quiet, now, or you’re gonna have him thinkin’ we know something—and get us all in trouble!”

Though it may not be true in a comparable class today (when full professors more and more rarely even see freshmen; and when which professor studied with whom is no longer a part of the standard university catalogue information), I am still sure that—in September 1960—at least half a dozen kids (including that girl) had heard of a Spenserian stanza before, even if they didn’t know precisely what one was.

from “Midcentury: an essay in contextualization”, Samuel R Delany