If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
They seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.
Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
That kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
My thumb as a bookmark,
Trying to imagine what the person must look like
Who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
Alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Students are more modest
Needing to leave only their splayed footprints
Along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
Fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.
The next two stanzas cover the marginalia of school children, a familiar image to high school and college English students. This stanza covers less enthusiastic students, who seem to just copy down what their teachers say about certain passages.
Marginalia