Worlds of Wanwood

Many years ago I started a column (The Asylum) in the Christian Educators Journal.  It featured a high school faculty lounge with a continuing set of characters.  I was teaching in the English department of Calvin College, and after a few columns I asked a colleague to join me as co-columnist.  Often we would co-write a column, but sometimes we took turns.
The piece that follows is an excerpt of a column I wrote during the fall season back some thirty years ago.  The falling leaves during the last week reminded me of it.
It focuses on the Bible teacher, John Vroom, whose teaching at Omni Christian High has not gone well, especially on this particular morning. Tom Graham, a brilliant student, again made him feel uncomfortably inadequate and even defeated. He found himself empty of authority. 

On this blue Monday morning, John Vroom entered the Asylum like a phantom lost in space.  He dropped into his chair and sagged there, staring into nothing.
Outside, the early winter sun reflected brightly off nature’s overnight dusting of snow. 
Inside, Vroom remained oblivious to the scene and the sounds just outside the room window. 
But there, under the large oak tree that in summer shaded Omni’s faculty room, Lucy DenDenker and her English class had gathered. 
The students crowded around Lucy, some holding up a wet handful of fallen leaves whose flaming orange and bright yellows had long ago turned into muted browns and blacks. 
A few students pulled themselves up onto the lower branches, a thin layer of snow cascading down as they climbed higher. 
The class grew quiet as Lucy’s clear voice began to recite:

            That time of year thou may’st in me behold
               When yellow leaves. or none, or few, do hang
               Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
               Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

On the inside of the slightly opened window, John Vroom floated within a dark bubble, where he heard and saw nothing.

            In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire
               That on the ashes of his youth doth lie…

Lucy’s voice, husky with emotion now, reached the rhyming couplet:

            This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
               To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

It was the next voice that penetrated John’s stupor and activated his senses:

            Margaret, Rachel, Susan, Stanley—are you grieving
               Over Omni’s oak unleaving?

Vroom stirred, his eyes focusing now on the mahogany table he’d been staring at.

            Ah, as the heart grows older
               It will come to such sights colder
               By and by, not spare a sigh
               Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
               And yet you will weep and know why.

John Vroom knew that voice.  As if released by a coiled spring, he leaped up and sprang toward the window. 
Lucy DenDenker, surrounded by her students, stopped him. 
The students’ faces, solemn and attentive, stopped him.  He followed the upward gaze of some, and then he too saw where the voice was coming from. 
Tom Graham, perched halfway up the oak, face serious and intent, delivered the next lines of his version of Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall”:

Now no matter, class, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Now not only his senses but John’s mind began to refocus as the last lines floated down:

            It is the blight we were born for,
               It is Margaret, Kenneth, Janet, Robert that you mourn for.

A breeze stirred through the oak’s bare branches, scattering more feathery flakes across the schoolyard, some briefly flashing their bright crystals in the November sun. 
Quietly, Lucy’s class gathered and began to move back toward their classroom. 
Quietly, John Vroom stood by the window and waited for the light to reach his darkened soul.