River Town by Peter Hessler Page B

line. We reviewed poetic terms and archaic language, and I divided them into groups and told them to put the poem in order. Even though I gave them the first line, I figured it was an impossible task; my goal was simply to make them struggle with the bare bones of the poem until its form felt somewhat familiar. But they were never suspicious of impossible tasks, which was part of what made it so easy to teach in Fuling. The students would work at anything without complaint, probably because they knew that even the most difficult literature assignment was preferable to wading knee-deep in muck behind a water buffalo. And so the groups studied their broken sonnets while I gazed out at the sampans and barges on the Wu River.
    Within an hour they had it. Some of the groups were merely close, but in each class there were two or three who nailed it:
    Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
    Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
    Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
    And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
    Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
    And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
    And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
    By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;
    But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
    Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
    Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
    When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
    So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
    And they understood the form of the poem; just as they had put it together, they could take it apart. They could scan its rhythm—they knew where the stresses were in each line, and they could find the inconsistencies. They read the poem to themselves and softly beat time on their desks. They heard the sonnet. This was something that few American students could do, at least in my experience. We didn’t read enough poetry to recognize its music, a skill that educated people lost long ago. But my students in Fuling still had it—nothing had touched that ability, not the advent of television or even the pointed devastation of the Cultural Revolution.
    As time went on it almost depressed me. The Chinese had spent years deliberately and diligently destroying every valuable aspect of their traditional culture, and yet with regard to enjoying poetry Americans had arguably done a much better job of finishing ours off. How many Americans could recite a poem, or identify its rhythm? Every one of my Fuling students could recite at least a dozen Chinese classics by heart—the verses of Du Fu, of Li Bai, of Qu Yuan—and these were young men and women from the countryside of Sichuan province, a backwater by Chinese standards. They still read books and they still read poetry; that was the difference.
    Verse never seemed to bore or frustrate them. The only stumbling block was language, the new vocabulary and the English archaisms, and with these they had infinite patience. We reviewed Sonnet Eighteen carefully, until at last we distilled it to the notion of poetic immortality, and I asked them: Was Shakespeare successful? Did the woman live forever? Some of them shook their heads—it was four hundred years ago, after all—but others hesitated. I asked them where the woman had lived.
    â€œEngland,” said Armstrong, who answered most of my questions.
    â€œAnd when was that?”
    â€œAround 1600.”
    â€œThink about this,” I said. “Four centuries ago, Shakespeare loved a woman and wrote a poem about her. He said he would make her beauty live forever—that was his promise. Today the year is 1996, and we are in China, in Sichuan, next to the Yangtze River. Shakespeare never came to Fuling. None of you has ever been to England, and you have not seen the woman that Shakespeare lovedfour hundred years ago. But right now every one of you is thinking about her.”
    There was absolute silence.