Illustration: Recently my wife and I watched a film from 1989 that starred Robin Williams entitled Dead Poets Society. Williams plays an inspiring English teacher at a boys’ preparatory school. The boys are high school-aged young men, laboring to discover who they are, who they are meant to be, ravished by hormones and ambitions, etc. Anyway, Williams, their English teacher, connects with them on not just cerebral levels but he is gifted at connecting with them emotionally, spiritually, and viscerally. He is one of those teachers we sometimes receive once in a lifetime, a teacher who makes the world rich in color, the one who makes love poems not something to memorize for the exam but who makes you discover that beautiful poems are friends and lovers. Williams’ skills in pedagogy make all the difference, to use Frost’s language.

There’s a scene where Williams chooses Todd, an introverted cerebral boy, to “sound [his] “barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world.” In other words, Todd is to shout as if he were trying to get someone’s attention in Perth, Australia but he’s standing in Toledo, Ohio. Todd’s got to dig deep, if you will, and discover that passion of which he is capable but also afraid. Eventually, however, through some difficult growing pains, Todd begins to learn the lessons his English teacher is laboring to teach him and the other pupils. It has to do with seeing what is there but having the courage to actually see it rather than run from it.

What a Whitman Poem Has to Do with Today: The American poet Walt Whitman served as a nurse in America’s Civil War. Whitman was a rather colorful individual and I do not care to get into his bio here, but I do want to include a poem from him and see if you might connect what Whitman was driving at in this war poem from 159 years ago and events you see unfolding today. Here’s “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”:

A line in long array where they wind betwixt green islands,

They take a serpentine course, their arms flash in the sun—hark to the musical clank,

Behold the silvery river, in it the splashing horses loitering stop to drink,

Behold the brown-faced men, each group, each person a picture, the negligent rest on the saddles,

Some emerge on the opposite bank, others are just entering the ford—while,

Scarlet and blue and snowy white,

The guidon flags flutter gayly in the wind.

The images are straightforward enough. Cavalry troops are crossing a water barrier, a ford. Their course is “serpentine’’—a rather interesting word choice, is it not? We behold horses, men with tanned skin, and we see flags (guidons) fluttering. It’s a scene that freezes motion via precise language.

Questions: Is it possible that we’re once again amidst a cold Civil War in America and the West? Is it possible that tribalism is rearing its head? Is it possible that theological and philosophical sides have their guidons out front (hint: the symbolism of flags/heraldry is not to be underestimated), and that they’re demanding allegiance? Is it possible that sides are mounting like cavalry, maybe not in the form of horses, but in the form of legislation and force? You see, folks, if you have been blessed with a teacher who can help open your eyes to see what’s before you, you will be moved. It will change you, hopefully for the better, hopefully to choose the right and good ways, rather than the ways that lead to death (Proverbs 8:36).