شرحThe Lesson (د.بسمة)

[left]The Lesson

Your father's gone, my bald headmaster said.
His shining dome and brown tabacco jar
splintered at once in tears. It wasn't grief.
I cried for knowledge which was bitterer
than any grief. For there and then I knew
that grief has uses - that a father dead
could bind he bully's fist a week or two;
and then I cried for shame, then for relief.

I was a month past ten when I learnt this:
I still remember how the noise was stilled
in school-assemply when my grief came in.
Some goldfish in a bowl quietly sculled
around their shining prison on its shelf.
They were indifferent. All the other eyes
were turned towards me. Somewhere in myself
pride like a goldfish flashed a sudden fin.





This poem is suppose to be about sadness which is the logical feeling you must have when you hear that your father is no longer alive in other words "is dead", but in my narrow opinion this poem has far significances from that. It is about the loss of innocence, the cruelty of children, and last but not least the desire for pride and attention.

The first stanza tells us how that kid receives the news of his father's death in a very strange way. That he didn't cry out of lamentation over the loss of his father, but he is crying only because he thinks that this is the thing he must do and also out the feel of being ashamed, here some people may ask why he would be ashamed of the death of his father? The answer will be cleared at the end of the paragraph. Afterwards we discover that the ten years old kid is thinking how to get benefit from the death of his father { For there and then I knew that grief had uses – and he meant by this that a father dead could bind the bully’s fist a week or two} This statement tells us that this child is “bullied” at school, and that he knows that the they would not pick on him for some time out of sympathy. And here I concluded that he cries for “shame”, probably because he’s disgusted at the fact he’d even think of benefiting somehow from his father’s death.

At the second stanza we can understand that the kid is no longer a child he is growing up now, but he is going back to that time when he was a 10 years old and got the news of his father's death. He tells how was the reactions of the other people in the school after hearing such news they were indifferent to his grief and that's why he compares himself to a gold fish.

The God fish is being used in a very clever way, it shows how the poet is a brilliant. In their first usage, the goldfish are indifferent to the boy’s grief. In their second usage, however, he compares the pride he feels to a goldfish. Why? I think it is because the boy and the goldfish are the only things in the assembly hall that are isolated. Everyone else is looking at him, a mass blur of faces. The goldfish does not care, and it is set aside from the crowd. In a way, he and the goldfish are in the same position.


At the end we have to show our admiration to the great personification of grief through the poem. First, we see him ashamed for not grieving; his first thought is that he will be exempt from bullying for a few weeks. In the second paragraph, he explains how his “grief came in”, almost as if it had walked into the assembly hall like a person. Once again, grief is overshadowed, but this time by pride.