Illegibility and projection in Adrienne Rich's "In a Classroom"

In Adrienne Rich's "In a Classroom", a class discusses what poems say ("consonants") and do not say ("elisions"). But even as the unsaid becomes discourse, one student remains illegible to the teacher: "I look in your face, Jude, / neither frowning nor nodding, / opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table". While "slant" echoes Emily Dickinson ("Tell all the truth but tell it slant"; "a certain slant of light"), "motes" recall Christ's mote and beam, and the teacher's beam then projects a Dickinsonian paradox onto the mote of Jude's "presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking / What I cannot say, is me. For that I came."  (Andrew Shields, #111words, 6 March 2021)

 

In a Classroom

Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe, 215

 

Talking of poetry, hauling the books

arm-full to the table where the heads

bend or gaze upward, listening, reading aloud,

talking of consonants, elision,

caught in the how, oblivious of why:

I look in your face, Jude,

neither frowning nor nodding,

opaque in the slant of dust-motes over the table:

a presence like a stone, if a stone were thinking

What I cannot say, is me. For that I came.

 

1986