Centrepiece Online | Summer/Fall 2000

Thoughts on Retiring

by Nils Peterson '54

I fell in love with poetry in my sophomore survey of English literature. Of course, I fell in love a lot that year in a quiet, introverted, incoherent way, and that class was filled with most of the young women of my year at KCW,* which made my usually irregular attendance unusually regular.

I was not a good student, though I was a good reader. So, though on probation at the start of the year, while the class began with volume one and worked forward from Beowulf, I started with volume two in modern literature and worked backward from Joseph Conrad, as I remember. Fortunately, we met in the middle, so I was able to pass both semesters with even a fairly decent grade. That middle consisted mainly of the love poetry of the 16th and 17th centuries, and I became intoxicated with words:

 

I loved in particular this last poem, Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," and, when later I came down with pneumonia, I memorized it as I lay in the Danville hospital rescued from the refrigerator of the SAE sleeping porch. In it, a man tries to convince a young woman to go to bed with him using the argument that the time of life is short and we must use it well. I can still quote it all, and I must confess to having tried out the argument using the poem a few times with no success whatsoever, but that's my fault and not the poem's.

There is one other thing that needs to be remembered here. The class was supposed to have been taught by Paul Cantrell, but he suddenly went off that year on leave. So, it was taught by Dorothy Darnell '42, a recent Centre graduate. And it turned out to our gossiping delight as the year progressed that she was dating Dean Jones, whom she later married. I find myself now wondering if her connection with Eros that semester somehow entered the poetry of my class and made it extra sweet. I like to think that.

Now that I am retired, I do hear "TimeÕs winged chariot hurrying near," and I want to use these next years well, traveling, writing, seeing my grandson, and, now and then, remembering my days at Centre.

A small footnote. One of the things I read the first semester along with the rest of the class was "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." I thought that I could at least attempt all of the questions on it. Miss Darnell asked, however, "What was the name of Sir Gawain's horse?" I thought the question so monumentally unfair, that when it became my turn to teach it, I asked the same question every time-not so much to get at my students (I was an easy grader, at least in my own eyes)-but as kind of a tribute to that life-changing class. Maybe like the way Jimmy Durante used to end his radio with "Good Night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are." Kind of a public, secret tribute.

The name of the horse, in case you've forgotten, is Gringolet. No one knows about Mrs. Calabash.

*Until 1962, Centre women lived on the campus of the old Kentucky College for Women, which had merged with Centre in 1926.

Nils Peterson '54 wrote this essay when he retired last year after 36 years of teaching literature and creative writing at San Jose State University in California. He adds that he heard from Dorothy Darnell Jones '42 last summer; she reports that she and "the good Dean" have had a long and happy life together.