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Symbols & Motifs
Sight and Recognition
Visual terms and images show up at several moments in the poem and are often associated with forms of knowing. Perhaps the most conspicuous of these is when the first stanza presents the moment of mutual recognition between the speaker and the teacher by centering on the image of “soft light” (Line 8), to which the speaker compares the latter’s smile. This initial simile sets up a number of other details equating knowledge with sight or vision. In Stanza 2, the teacher describes “certainties” as “neon” (Line 13), perhaps suggesting the glaringly lucent brightness of neon business signs, in effect playing on the old cliché representing an idea through a light bulb being switched on. In Stanza 3, the teacher formulates the result of the student’s potential act of collaboration and sharing as being an arrival at “new vistas” (Line 24). Vistas, a term describing both the view of a landscape and a mental attitude, comes from the Latin vedere, or “to see.” Returning to the teacher’s smile in the final stanza, the speaker groups it with a number of perceptual images in all of the senses, including visual figures like a “dog’s face” (Line 33), the “softness of sunrise” (Line 36), and “steady blessings of stars” (Line 37).
Assertion and Passivity
The speaker’s development over the course of the poem can be tracked through their gradual shift from a more passive to a more active and assertive state. Again, the first stanza establishes the pattern for the subsequent transitions, where Mora’s line breaks mimic the speaker’s evasive act of looking down to avoid the teacher’s gaze, before eventually raising her glance to behold the smile. In Stanza 2, the student’s own actions are largely out of public view, with the teacher exhorting and rallying their pupil to disclose more of their inner experience. Stanza 3 begins to initiate a shift through the student’s “reading and reread[ing]” (Line 16), with the repetition suggesting not only diligence but also a more proactive engagement with the learning process. The real pivotal moment comes, however, when the student raises their hand at the conclusion of Stanza 4, as reinforced both by the Mora’s rejection of other tokens of appreciation, like “flower[s]”, “note[s],” and “apple[s]” (Line 29), but also in the final stanza’s transition to a kind of denouement, a resolution and clarification that arrives after the main dramatic events of the plot have taken place. A clear indicator of personal initiative and agency, the student’s raised hand is the poem’s dramatic apex.
The Abstract and the Concrete
Many of Mora’s images blend abstract principles or ideas with concrete, sensuous images. Whereas both the principle/value, or the idea of goodwill and benevolence expressed through the teacher’s “smile” (Line 7) in the first stanza and its metaphorical counterpart in the figure of “light” (Line 8), are both relatively ethereal and airy phenomena, the final stanza’s catalogue of memories presents much more concrete images. The last two we get, “the smell of gingerbread” (Line 38) and “security of sweaters on a chilly day” (Line 39), are two of the most specific details that the poem offers. This specificity resembles the teacher’s highly wrought language in describing the “neon certainties, / thorny doubts, tangled angers” (Lines 13-14) in Stanza 2. The moment towards more finely worked phrases and images provides an indication of how the student’s passage into literacy opens them to a richer and more ample world of experience.
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