James

James is the poetry professor whose teaching turns the narrator’s first formal encounter with poetry into a lesson about attention, instinct, and interpretation. His role in the memoir is brief but consequential: he treats a beginner’s questions as worth asking, models how a poem can be heard differently when read aloud, and invites the narrator to explore Yiddish poetry across languages. The encounter offers her not only a new field of study but also a way to think about how meaning is made and how instinct may be trusted.

Identity and Introduction

James teaches poetry in the adult summer program at Sarah Lawrence College. Before meeting him, the narrator has already decided, after looking at the syllabus, that she will take his class. She has long wanted to read poetry, understand it, and talk about poets, but has never known anyone who could guide her into the subject. At the open house, she asks whether her lack of previous study will be a problem and whether she should prepare. James reassures her that many students begin with little knowledge. His answer makes the conversation itself feel like a privilege to her, marking a contrast with the educational limits she has known.

The narrator remembers James through particular details: neat salt-and-pepper hair standing up over a tall forehead, a slight gap between his front teeth, and a long, lean frame in a preppy knit sweater and jeans she associates with riding in New England. His voice is slow and rich, like honey pouring from a spoon. These details do more than sketch his appearance; they register the narrator’s sense that he looks and sounds like someone who belongs among poems. Her impression is admiring, but it is also a beginner’s act of recognition: she imagines a reader of poetry before she has yet learned how to read it herself.

Teaching Wordsworth

The class begins with William Wordsworth’s “Anecdote for Fathers,” which James reads aloud. The narrator hears reverence in his delivery and finds that his manner changes how the words reach her: each seems to open into a world of meaning. She initially regards the poem’s language as flowery, though its rhymes strike her as tight and even, and its stanzas as densely formed. The story appears simple: a father walks with his son, who chooses the green seashore over the wooded hills of a farm because there is no weather vane at the shore. James asks the class to consider why that explanation moves the father and whether it truly accounts for the boy’s preference.

James’s method makes the poem’s small detail—not an abstract statement, but the absent weather vane—something to examine. He explains that nothing in a poem is casually included: if a detail catches the reader’s attention, it is there for a reason. For the narrator, this becomes her first fundamental lesson in poetry. A poem is not a transparent story to be passed over once its basic action is understood; its choices invite deliberate attention. At the same time, James’s questions do not close interpretation down. They make the apparently simple scene more puzzling and give the class a way into that puzzle.

His reading of the poem also unsettles the assumption that explanation and logic are always the highest forms of understanding. James presents the boy’s choice as a lesson in what children can teach adults, and in the possibility that life does not always require a reasoned account: instinct and feeling can matter in their own right. The narrator recognizes this as a lesson she did not expect to find in Wordsworth. Looking back, she connects it to her own childhood tendency to trust her gut, even when restraint might have seemed more logical, and to her recent decision to attend college. She cannot know how long she will be able to remain or what the education will bring, but she understands her choice as an impulse she has decided not to rationalize away.

Poetry, Gender, and Language

When the narrator calls Wordsworth’s writing flowery, James responds with amusement and explains that poetry in Wordsworth’s time was a man’s world. However ornamental the poet’s language might appear, it was still understood as men’s work and could not simply be dismissed as feminine. James offers to continue the discussion in individual conferences, held weekly after class to talk about each student’s work and research. The narrator is struck by his apparent ease with his masculinity: he can take it for granted rather than fear it being taken from him. His comment leads her to wonder whether the strict divisions between men and women in her community exist partly because masculinity is treated as something that can be threatened.

In a conference after class, James asks whether she has read Yiddish poetry. She is surprised that such poetry exists. He tells her that there are many Yiddish poets, most translated into English, and suggests reading both versions to see how well the language translates. The exchange extends his teaching beyond the poem assigned in class. He does not treat the narrator’s unfamiliarity as a reason to stop; instead, he points toward a body of work and a comparative question she can pursue. The suggestion also connects her new education to a language and cultural inheritance that her life in the Satmar community has not made available to her as a subject of literary study.

Narrative Role and Significance

James appears in a concentrated sequence around the narrator’s entry into college: she chooses his course, meets him at the open house, hears him teach Wordsworth, and speaks with him in conference. The memoir supplies no wider account of his life or teaching career, so his significance lies in these specific encounters. He is a teacher who makes room for the novice while giving her tools—close attention to deliberate choices, questions that complicate a simple reading, and permission to consider instinct alongside reason.

The episode’s importance is not that James resolves the narrator’s larger conflicts. Rather, his class gives form to a way of approaching them. The poem’s boy follows a preference that cannot be fully explained by the reason he offers; the narrator, in turn, recognizes that her own decision to study poetry has also begun as an impulse. James’s lesson links literary interpretation with her emerging confidence in her judgment. His invitation to read Yiddish poetry in both the original and translation further makes learning an act of comparison: language can travel, but the differences between versions remain worth noticing. In the memoir, James thus represents a brief but meaningful opening into study, interpretation, and the possibility of trusting a choice before its consequences are certain.