Stephen
Spender (1909-1995) was an English poet and an essayist. He left University
College, Oxford without taking a degree and went to Berlin in 1930. Spender
took a keen interest in politics and declared himself to be a socialist and
pacifist. Books by Spender include Poems of Dedication, The Edge of Being, The
Creative Element, The Struggle of the Modern and an autobiography, World Within
World. In, An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum, he has concentrated on
themes of social injustice and class inequalities.
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Far far from gusty
waves these children’s faces.
Like rootless weeds,
the hair torn round their pallor:
The tall girl with
her weighed-down head. The paper-
seeming boy, with
rat’s eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir
Of twisted bones,
reciting a father’s gnarled disease,
His lesson, from his
desk. At back of the dim class
One unnoted, sweet
and young. His eyes live in a dream,
Of squirrel’s game,
in tree room, other than this.
On sour cream walls,
donations. Shakespeare’s head,
Cloudless at dawn,
civilized dome riding all cities.
Belled, flowery,
Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map
Awarding the world
its world. And yet, for these
Children, these
windows, not this map, their world,
Where all their
future’s painted with a fog,
A narrow street
sealed in with a lead sky
Far far from rivers,
capes, and stars of words.
Surely, Shakespeare
is wicked, the map a bad example,
With ships and sun
and love tempting them to steal—
For lives that slyly
turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless
night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped
through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass,
like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and
space are foggy slum.
So blot their maps
with slums as big as doom.
Unless, governor,
inspector, visitor,
This map becomes
their window and these windows
That shut upon their
lives like catacombs,
Break O break open
till they break the town
And show the children
to green fields, and make their world
Run azure on gold
sands, and let their tongues
Run naked into books
the white and green leaves open
History theirs whose
language is the sun.
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