Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, MAGISTER LINGUISTICUS, by FRANCIS CLAIBORNE MASON


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

MAGISTER LINGUISTICUS, by                    
First Line: His feet became too feeble for the stair
Last Line: "he strove with bits of words until he died."
Subject(s): Language; Words; Vocabulary


His feet became too feeble for the stair
And so they found him out a lower room
Where sophomoric clatter never came
Along the musty academic hall
And set up there his tall, discolored desk
Beside the blackboard. There he sat and taught
His group of meek, stoop-shouldered graduates,
Mouthing the accents of a dozen tongues
And writing out their symbols on the board:
"The Indo-European root stands thus . . .
Whence came the Sanskrit . . . so, the Latin . . . so;
And next by consonantal change we have
It thus . . . the Old High German and the Norse;
Today a word or two sums up the tale
In common talk . . ." Slowly his palsied hands,
Like twisted roots of dwarfed, storm-riven trees
That clutched the blackened, prehistoric soil
Where once the Gothic hunter shook his spear
And Attila lashed forth his Huns to war,
Traced characters uncouth, dark roots of words,
And from the fragments of forgotten speech
Drew mystic laws of language, setting up
His letters, like tin soldiers in a row
Invincible to ordinary minds.

The continent had left its double mark
Upon him, in the heavy knotted scarf
And high, stiff colar, with the wings turned up,
(Style of old Leipzig and of Heidelberg)
And in the faded wrinkle of a scar
Along his chin, from student-duel days
Before the classroom corner was his throne.

He faced the sunset through his latter years
As rugged as a cloistered Gothic tower
Above some weather-grey monastic shrine
That sepulchered old books of learned lore,
Long treasured, till the archway crumbled in
Where time crept under, gnawing at the stone.

Strangers who pass the cemetery wall
See only that the barren earth gleams bare
And ashy where the flowers have slipped away
To dust, and there is none to read aright
Within the bookish college fireside gleam
Unwritten epitaphs: "He held the chair
Of German for a score of placid years
And taught and labored at Philology,
Sucking emotions from the parts of speech;
He told romantic tales of errant nouns
And found adventure in the alphabet
Where others saw it not, and mightily
He strove with bits of words until he died."





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