¶ … student" by Josephine Miles is a teacher's reflection on a nameless student. This student is intelligent and dutiful in his work, but is often forgotten in class, even by the teacher, except when other students need help with work. The poem is focused on the theme of how people we see everyday, such as our fellow classmates or students, are only familiar strangers if we do not make an effort to get to know them. "Who is that student pale and importunate? / Whom I have left with a heavy burden and forgotten all about?" The poem begins with the devise of a series of rhetorical questions. This causes the reader to enter the teacher and speaker's mind, to ask the same questions she asks of herself, as she lays, awake at night, thinking of the student: "Who wakes me as I fall asleep, asking/What I want done with the job now that the year's over." Although she knows the student's name, perhaps, she knows she does not know his true soul. Thus, the poet's use of questioning, as the speaker of the poem begins to doubt her abilities as an instructor.
The poet goes on in the second stanza to try and fail to answer the questions of the first stanza, continuing in the poem's cool, impartial, yet questioning tone as she remembers "And indeed I remember now he has been doing all my work, / Setting up the experiments, kidding the bystanders, / Puzzling the problems, and I have forgotten him/Till now too late, and must wait until morning." Clearly, this is a hard working student who is solicitous to others, but whose own social and emotional needs are often ignored.
The poet's inability to know the student ends the poem in its third stanza, as once again the poet asks rhetorical questions of her unsettled mind. "Who is he? My thought which I deny until the dark, / or one literal person I have now forgot/Who, early in the alphabet, recited/More than I could learn until tonight?" The poet is a teacher, this last stanza suggests, who takes an alphabetical role call, notes the performance of her best students, but does not really get to know them as people and cannot address their emotional needs.
Thank you very much.
