You could travel up the Blue Nile
with your finger, tracing the route
while Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.
Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan.
That for an hour, then a skittle of milk
and the chalky Pyramids rubbed into dust.
A window opened with a long pole.
The laugh of a bell swung by a running child.
How involving is the inclusiveness of the pronoun ‘you’ as an opening invitation to the world of excitable imagination? This is a world of improvisation and imaginative freedom where things are not bounded by rigid concepts of conventional reality. The trust and acceptance of the teacher’s special world and words, transforms the local into the exotic, the panoramic world beyond the daily limitations of the school room.
The reader wants to travel up the ‘Blue Nile’, they want to sample the preciousness of such a magical excursion. As I have said elsewhere on the blog, Duffy entices the attention of the reader as a truly successful pedagogue, through the sensory flexibility of her writing. All our senses are involved in this journey and each time I reread the poem I am tempted to take out my finger and start to touch paper. Wonder and bodily sensation made one here! And whilst our fingers are finding our way across new worlds we can also hear the assured, knowledgeable voice of Mrs Tilscher herself baptising our ears with hypnotic spells of places far far away from our conventional homes.
How God like Mrs Tilscher is…the pyramids extinguished for a skittle of milk! This ironically heightens the wondrousness of Mrs Tilscher’s class.Its transience makes it still more wonderful and alluring. Perhaps we could even ( at a later stage of our reading) liken Mrs Tilscher’s imaginative excursions and constructions to those ‘caves of ice’ built by Kubla Khan in Coleridhge’s poem of that name. Space and sound combine here in a perfect evocation of a very special past; a past where spaces of the imagination are fed and expanded through the passion and imagination of Mrs Tilscher. What a compliment indeed!