Ode to Teachers

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).