Rafter of Satan

You gotta love those poetry explication exams in undergraduate English classes.

I was a sophomore at the University of California at Riverside, when I finally figured out how to truly read a poem. All this time I had been reading poetry on the surface level—appreciating its music, identifying its poetic devices, evaluating its structures—but I had never really understood how to explore the layer underneath the language.
I have to acknowledge my English teacher, Professor Kimberly Devlin, a James Joyce scholar who made me fall in love with Joyce, and Jane Austen, and Emily Dickinson. She broke it down, everything from Dubliners to Emma to “Safe in their alabaster chambers.” She taught me how to look beyond the text to connect with history, politics, society and religion—the contexts and environments that inform the creation of literature. Suddenly it became clear: words on the page were not just words on the page.
This was especially revealing when it came to reading poetry. I was amazed by all the information that could be extracted from a single line, and all the discussion that could take place around it. I began to recognize poetry as a skill and to respect the poet’s awesome ability to compress a universe to the size of the fist, which a reader could then open up, inhabit and explore.
Since then, every good poem I read looks three-dimensional because it contains “depth.” And every weak one looks “flat”—no different than an ink blot staining a clean piece of paper. An indifferent thing, to be seen and then be quickly forgotten.
As my eyes opened, I also had to suffer though my friend’s inability to cross over. He took the class with me and he was absolutely hopeless. Though we didn’t keep in touch after college, I do wonder after all these years if he was turned off to poetry forever after the catastrophe of our final exam.
We had to explicate a few poems, including the Emily Dickinson piece mentioned above. After submitting the final, we commiserated out in the hall.
“That was tough,” he said.
“It was,” I agreed.
“I was especially stumped by that Dickinson poem. I had a hard time trying to fit the devil into it,” he said.
“Devil?” I asked. “What devil?”
“You know,” he said. “In the line: ‘Rafter of Satan.’”
¡Joder! No pity for the dude, since we were allowed to bring dictionaries. For your amusement, I present here the opening stanza of Dickinson’s “devil” poem:
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning
And untouched by Noon—
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection—
Rafter of satin,
And Roof of stone.
I wish every student came across a teacher like the one I had, one of many, actually, but Professor Devlin stands out because she was so engaged with the literature. I could tell she admired it, and this admiration was contagious. I wanted to learn to read the way she did, and I believe that she taught me how. Thank you, Prof. Devlin, wherever you are!
You know, I don’t think we acknowledge our important teachers as often as we should. Go ahead, give some love. Who made a difference in your poetry world?