Thurber: Writings & Drawings by James Thurber

Author:James Thurber [Thurber, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978159853312-5
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2013-11-05T22:22:00+00:00

Here Lies Miss Groby

MISS GROBY taught me English composition thirty years ago. It wasn’t what prose said that interested Miss Groby; it was the way prose said it. The shape of a sentence crucified on a blackboard (parsed, she called it) brought a light to her eye. She hunted for Topic Sentences and Transitional Sentences the way little girls hunt for white violets in springtime. What she loved most of all were Figures of Speech. You remember her. You must have had her, too. Her influence will never die out of the land. A small schoolgirl asked me the other day if I could give her an example of metonymy. (There are several kinds of metonymies, you may recall, but the one that will come to mind most easily, I think, is Container for the Thing Contained). The vision of Miss Groby came clearly before me when the little girl mentioned the old, familiar word. I saw her sitting at her desk, taking the rubber band off the roll-call cards, running it back upon the fingers of her right hand, and surveying us all separately with quick little henlike turns of her head.

Here lies Miss Groby, not dead, I think, but put away on a shelf with the other T squares and rulers whose edges had lost their certainty. The fierce light that Miss Groby brought to English literature was the light of Identification. Perhaps, at the end, she could no longer retain the dates of the birth and death of one of the Lake poets. That would have sent her to the principal of the school with her resignation. Or perhaps she could not remember, finally, exactly how many Cornishmen there were who had sworn that Trelawny should not die, or precisely how many springs were left to Housman’s lad in which to go about the woodlands to see the cherry hung with snow.

Verse was one of Miss Groby’s delights because there was so much in both its form and content that could be counted. I believe she would have got an enormous thrill out of Wordsworth’s famous lines about Lucy if they had been written this way:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye,

Fair as a star when ninety-eight

Are shining in the sky.

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