Fog and Clarity

           On Monday morning, I woke to a “freezing fog”; that’s what the weather report on the radio called it.  It was a perfect description for the air that was suddenly visible and for the delicate ice crystals that had settled on every branch and twig, and even on the prairie grass around the lamppost in our front yard.  The cold I have had all week had just begun its stay in my body, and I felt a kinship to the haze outside: my mind felt foggy, and my insides were freezing. 

            The next morning, I was rereading Adrienne Rich’s poem “To the Days” (http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php?date=2001/02/09), one of my favorite poems of all time.  I was preparing for my Women in Literature class that afternoon.  The first line of the second stanza, “Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity” is lovely, as is the image in the next, “coffee and bread with sour plum jam.”   I felt fortunate that this was my work, is my work, to help students appreciate and analyze such sensory, evocative language.  That morning, I was also grateful for my copious notes on the poem; my mind was still foggy, and the day ahead was going to be long and full.

            At one o’clock that afternoon, I met my students in our classroom, where the sun streams in from the south, a luxury on a campus where some classrooms have no windows at all, and those that do are not always a source of light.  We spent over an hour on that one poem, discussing each line and all it evoked.  As always, I gained new insights, too.  When the class ended, the last student to leave chatted with me as she packed up her books.  She had been telling her advisor about this class, she said, and her advisor had remarked, “But I thought you didn’t like poetry.”  “I didn’t,” she had replied, “but I understand it now, and I love it.” 

At the end of class the previous week, after we had discussed poetry by Elizabeth Bishop and Anne Sexton, another student said to me, almost as an aside, “I didn’t like these poems before we discussed them.  I didn’t know what they were about.  Now I really like them.  I understand them.”  She had contributed to the discussion that day, and I hadn’t noticed that she was confused, so her comment came as a surprise to me.  A surprise and a gift. 

            This Tuesday morning, discussing the line about “Fog in the mornings,” the students talked about the weather the day before and all the metaphorical meanings of fog.  Apparently they felt a “hunger for clarity,” too, and it was satisfied.