A Short Fable
John Butch Preston
My name is Ted. What if you were back in high school and, like a lot of other students, you’re just waiting for the final bell to ring. But it is a good school with a good reputation. The principal is an attractive older woman, a strong authoritative woman who’s been there a long time and takes her job seriously. You sometimes see her looking out her doorway into the hall, and you can tell by her keen penetrating eyes that she is keeping a close watch on everything. She seems nice, but they say you don’t want to end up in her office for some disruption you might have caused. Her name is Mrs. Pelosi,
Now image that your homeroom teacher as well as your tenth grade English teacher is Mrs. Clinton, whom most students refer to as Miss Hillary. You notice right away that she looks the part of an English teacher—excellent posture, nicely dressed and personable. You notice she enunciates her words with just the right inflection in order to keep your attention. You sense she’s a smart woman but so what! You groan when she gives out a reading assignment, and now that she’s covering the English Romantic Poets you could care less. What do Lord Byron and those guys have to do with you anyway.
Then to beat it all, she starts reading this poem called “ Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats. It bores you so you look out the window and daydream about the new Mustang convertible your father is going to buy for your sixteenth birthday. After that you start poking the student in front of you in the back of his neck with the point of you pencil to amuse yourself.
He tells on you but you strongly deny doing it. You get sent to Principal Pelosi’s office. You know not to tell her a lie, because if she finds out—and she will—you’ll really be in trouble. So, you are forced to tell her the truth.
But telling the truth to Principal Pelosi is not the truth that John Keats is talking about in the poem; it is a different kind of truth, a higher truth to live by. If you’d have listened in class you would have heard this poetic fact that ends the poem: “BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY—THAT IS ALL YE NEED TO KNOW ON EARTH, AND ALL YE NEED TO KNOW.”
What Mrs. Clinton and Keats were trying to get you to understand is, that in witnessing the beauty of the arts there is a Divine Truth, which governs all and trumps all—God’s dream for us. But regrettably for you, you were only dreaming about that new Mustang and nothing else. You not only failed English but you failed yourself and all of us as well.
