Commencement Convocation Address, May 21, 2006

Dean Jon Butler:
It gives me great pleasure to introduce today's convocation speaker, Marie Borroff, Sterling Professor Emeritus of English, who is a noted writer, critic, poet, and teacher.

A 1923 graduate of the University of Chicago, Professor Borroff also earned her master's degree there. She taught English at Smith College before studying at Yale for her Ph.D., receiving it in 1956. After temporary positions at both Smith and Yale, Professor Borroff became a permanent member of Yale's English department in 1960, and she was tenured in 1962. She was named professor in 1965, the William Lampson Professor in 1971, and Sterling Professor in 1993. She was the first woman ever to receive tenure in the English Department at Yale, and the second woman to be tenured at the University.

During her more than 40 years with the University, Professor Borroff has held many administrative posts, serving as associate chair of the English department twice, director of graduate studies in English, and director of the division of the humanities.

Although she retired from full-time teaching in 1995, Professor Borroff continues to teach.- most recently an undergraduate seminar this spring in Yale College. She is a winner of the William Clyde DeVane Medal, given by the Yale Phi Beta Kappa chapter for outstanding teaching.

Professor Borroff's scholarly interests are English poetry (especially medieval and twentieth century) and philology. She achieved renown for her verse translations of the Middle English poems "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "Pearl," as well as her 1962 book "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A Stylistic and Metrical Study." In addition, she is a much published and highly respected literary critic, and a critically acclaimed poet. One reviewer, commenting on Borroff 's 2002 book of poetry,/ Stars and Other Signs,/ called her "the purest American poet since Wallace Stevens," with a "high lyric calling." Most recently she published a collection titled Traditions and Renewals: Chaucer, the/ Gawain/-Poet, the Beyond (2005).

And finally- especially relevant to her presence here today, in 1996 the Graduate School awarded Professor Borroff the Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal, our highest honor. Let us welcome Professor Marie Borroff.

Professor Borroff:
If I intended to address you today about the long-term trajectories of your careers, I would say what I have said in the past to a number of your predecessors: “Do the work that only you can do, and leave the rest to Fate.” I still consider that good advice. But what I want to talk about today is not the long haul but the continuity of living that unfolds as, day by day and hour by hour, we create the future. It is an uphill slog that I privately call the glass mountain, and I want to commend to your attention three skills, or faculties, or tools, that are helpful as we try to meet our daily quota of ascent. Each has many names; the names I have chosen for this occasion are attention, detachment, and gaiety.

The faculty of attention might be visualized as a searchlight mounted on a swivel. Such a device is in the possession of every one of us. Since we own it, we should be able to control it completely, but in use it proves refractory: the light we train on the chosen object tends to grow feeble, like a flashlight battery wearing out, or, worse, it veers off in unanticipated directions. The poet William Butler Yeats wrote “Hands, do as you’re bid: Bring the balloon of the mind That bellies and drags in the wind Into its narrow shed.” All of us struggle with that balloon as we do the kind of work we do, confronting the written page or, more laborious still, the blank one. But attention matters at least as much in the human interactions that take place away from the desk. The French mystic Simone Weil said that the most important thing of all is the ability simply to ask another person “What are you going through?” To ask, and mean the question fully, and give our full attention to the answer.

If attention bears down, detachment rises up. When we have it, as they say in space travel, we have liftoff. If attention is centripetal -- concentric in that it involves concentration -- detachment operates as a widening circle: the higher our point of vantage, the wider it becomes. From that rising vantage-point we see ourselves, first life size, then gradually growing smaller. With increasing detachment, the heaviness of gravity gives way to levity.

I am reminded that Yeats, the poet I quoted earlier, also said that “Wisdom is a butterfly and not a gloomy bird of prey.” That’s an insight I value greatly, yet I think that the gradient from information to knowledge to understanding to wisdom involves a changing balance between gravity and levity, such that gravity – the bearing down of attention -- prevails at first and levity – detachment from the work of paying attention and the achievement that results from it – becomes more and more important. Eventually we have to drag the balloon of the mind back out the shed and ride upward with it so that we see the world in all its vastness and ourselves in all our insignificance.

My definition of gaiety is perhaps a bit eccentric. I mean by it the capacity to take pleasure in the continous inundation of the individual human consciousness by change in a world beyond our control -- something like the pleasure of standing in the ocean and laughing as the big waves break over our heads. Thinking about this kind of gaiety, I think not of Yeats but of Wallace Stevens, in particular his indispensable poem “The River of Rivers in Connecticut.” By the river of rivers, Stevens meant the incessant flow of consciousness – what he would have called imagined reality – that accompanies our lives. He begins his poem by invoking “a great river this side of Stygia,” – that is, distant from the realm of the dead adjacent to the river Styx. He goes on to say, “In that river, far this side of Stygia, The mere flowing of the water is a gayety, Flashing and flashing in the sun,” and since the river is local as well as universal, belonging to Connecticut as well as to the cosmos, he adds a touch or two of local color: “The steeple at Farmington Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.”

Stevens was in his seventies when he wrote “The River of Rivers in Connecticut.” It is obvious that this third faculty, or gift, that I am talking about has little or nothing to do with the unthinking high spirits of a puppy or a small child. It belongs rather to those old enough to have seen misfortune and endured affliction and yet retained their zest for life. I think of the gaiety of Mozart, writing music for the comically amorous duet of Papageno and Papagena, in The Magic Flute, only months before his death. Or we might contemplate the gaiety of the great Japanese master of painting and drawing, Hokusai, who at seventy-five, having produced literally thousands of sketches, wrote that he had finally “learned a little about the real structure of nature, of animals, plans, trees, birds, fishes, and insects” (quoted in Michener, p. 20), and that he hoped that by the time he became a hundred and ten everything he drew, “be it a dot or a line,” would be alive. He signed this statement “Old Man Mad about Painting.”

Or, lest we become awestruck and stiffen into a solemnity inappropriate to this occasion, let me quote a bit of gaiety from the later poetry of Robert Frost – who knew, if any poet ever did, how to season gravity with levity: “It is nothing to me who runs the Dive. Let’s have a look at another five.”

Gravity, levity, gaiety.  I hope the years to come will see you working attentively when you need to, remembering to pay attention to the other people in your lives, viewing your own accomplishments and honors with detachment, combining gravity with levity in due proportions, and contending successfully, at least part of the time, against a world that will do its best to squeeze the gaiety out of you.  And, if I may repeat the advice I referred to when I began, I urge you to do the work that only you can do, and leave the rest to fate.

Marie Boroff, the Sterling Professor Emerita of English.