A s summer wanes in Central Park, I remember winter of a year ago, when I taught Old English for the first time in a decrepit Tudor hall on Lexington Avenue. During one class session, a little gray mouse hesitated under a student’s desk, while a broken window let in the February air. My students and I snuggled in our scarves and recited Beowulf. When spring came that year, we all sat in the park and discussed Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Prize speech, “Crediting Poetry.” The mouse hid in a hole beneath the chalkboard.
Working at an underfunded public university, I am reminded by the Anglo-Saxon elegies that life holds meaning only after long struggle — a message that has taught me not only to tolerate austerity with stoicism, but actually to embrace austerity as a form of luxury.
The Anglo-Saxons knew that they lived in a Dark Age. In a fragment now called “The Ruin,” one scop sang of Roman artifacts left in a land overrun by barbarism. “Gebrocen to beorgum,” the skald lamented, “broken to debris,”
wurdon hyra wigsteal
westen staþolas
brosnade burgsteall.
Betend crungon
hergas to hrusan.
(their defenses destroyed,
the halls hollowed out,
the burgs broken, and
those who could repair it
laid in the earth.)
Things fall apart, but the scop binds the broken burgs back together by the power of his poetry. He weaves the wreckage into one re-enchanted world.
As my students and I read, New York City falls apart. The subway system, overburdened and bankrupt, breaks down daily, and Hunter College’s derelict elevators and dilapidated escalators add further delays to students’ commutes. Sometimes the abysmal conditions rob me of my capacity for joy. Like Grendel snarling at the beautiful songs of Heorot, I refuse to take pleasure in my work as a scholar of literature.
In my office, which I share with other part-time faculty members, the customary “How are you?” often elicits a lugubrious response from my colleagues. “I’m tired,” one professor yawns. “I have so many papers to grade,” gripes another. I recall Ælfric, the 10th-century abbot who asked his student, “Wille ge beon beswungen on leornunge?” (“Will you be flogged into learning?”) Tenured and adjunct alike, we complain about the dingy desks, the confounding computers, the wearisome wages, and the mice. Once, we could have crafted these lamentations into alliterating podics. Now, we stylize our beefs with critical theory.
We organize our courses around society’s ills. One professor teaches students about the racism inherent in Miley Cyrus’s appropriation of twerking. Another professor campaigns to educate students about the academic labor market. Hoary like Hrothgar, we forget the universality of shaking one’s ass, and we burden the youth with our grievances. But I find consolation in the supposed stability of verb paradigms. I teach my students Anglo-Saxon conjugations with an excerpt from Ælfric’s Grammar, which explains that anyone with knowledge "þone do nytne oþrum mannum” (“should use it for the benefit of other people”).
When I come into the office one morning I find a pile of glass, gebrocen to beorgum. Shards block the doorway. Two professors sit at their desks reading. “A lamp fell yesterday,” one mutters, lost in a poststructuralist parlor game. I find the janitor and borrow a broom and a dustpan: The janitor and I are secret sharers. She always smiles as she cleans the English department. Before winter break she decorated her mop-cart with poinsettias — a testament, I believe, to the human will to adorn this weary world. Maybe class status can condition affect. The janitor performs jolly Christmas cheer, while the professors perform misery. Perhaps society has constructed academics to grumble and gripe; perhaps an insidious ruse of power coerces the janitor’s happiness. But, as a working-class guy from the Appalachians, I feel a kinship for the janitor, and I feel little empathy for my colleagues.
For one thing, my brother-in-law (a wood-hick high-school dropout shingle-layer) recently taught me that the word “colleague” sounds utterly pretentious. (“If my buddies at work heard me call them that!”) And my grandmother (a hospital janitor who mopped up guts from operating tables) always told me that she couldn’t complain, because she felt lucky to have a job. And my father (a car mechanic) hates professionals with a lumpen rage. These folks taught me to love austerity — because it inspires innovation and keeps one humble. They taught me, accordingly, that I should pity the middle class, whose prosperity fosters wimpy constitutions, and that I should pray for the rich, for whom it’s harder than a camel through a needle.
This world-eschewing wisdom I hear in the words of Hrothgar, who reminds Beowulf that, great as he is, he’s certain to die. Beowulf, after all, isn’t a complicated, tragic figure — he’s just the star quarterback who wins the big game. And the poem isn’t just a heroic epic, it’s ultimately also a poignant elegy. So, when my faculty union recently threatened to go on strike, I didn’t believe the “class struggle” hype. Maybe academic administrators really are wicked monsters, and maybe labor activism can serve as an invitation to greatness. But we’ll all pass away like Beowulf and the Spear-Danes.
H ailing from a postindustrial wasteland, I feel austerity as homey and romantic, a Wild West of opportunity. Some kind of conservatism runs in my blood — even after 10 years in New York City, even after the peer-reviewed articles on queer theory — a conservatism not political but poetical. My childhood kept me near the soil, in a land of cornfields and coal mines, in a family where we chopped down trees to heat our home and saved money by eating squirrel potpie. Those experiences schooled me in elemental reality — about the facts of manual labor, the seasons, the life cycle — facts obvious enough to the Old English poets, but hidden from the late-modern, post-human, social-constructivist English department. And so, I understand why many Americans see the professoriate as spoiled and corrupt, as pampered radicals who use taxpayer funds to subsidize left-wing causes, and who don’t know how to sweep up broken lamps.
Somewhat unlike the folks back home, I believe in poetry, I believe in what Seamus Heaney called poetry’s “power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values.” This power pushes my co-workers forward in their commitment to teaching and my students in their commitment to study. This power adorns a janitor’s mop-cart with a symbol of neighborliness. This power inspired the Old English poets to see how suffering can inspire courage, heroism, and beauty.
But this year, my Beowulf course was canceled. The governor of New York State, Andrew Cuomo, seems like no great ring-giver, and the college has endured severe budget cuts. As the 11th-century Bishop Wulfstan preached, "ðeos worolde is on ofste & hit nealæcð þam ende” (“this world is in haste and it nears the end”). The university crumbles. But even in the face of destruction — even despite elemental realities, like the cold February air pouring through a broken classroom window, or me sitting alone now in Central Park, remembering my old course — poetry teaches us that, hunters and gatherers of values, we can still make our lives meaningful.
A.W. Strouse is a poet who teaches medieval literature at Hunter College of the City University of New York.