Friday, October 09, 2020

How would Yeats write about a 21st century female scholar?

I am now a bald professor with a grey beard.  I have now become the old cliché.  

I have an urgency to tell people who have met me only during the bald phase of my life that I used to have lots of hair. 

LOTS!  

And it used to be black.

But then in this strange life during a pandemic, we are told to mind our own business and stay away from people.  Strangers have been spared of my ranting!

Of course, it is all because of the male pattern baldness.  It is not my fault; shit baldness happens!

Here is W.B. Yeats beginning a poem with "bald heads" as if I need any reminder!  

How odd it is that the poem conveys to the reader that there is only one version of "the scholars"--bald men.  How does the clichéd old female professor look like then?

The Scholars
By W.B. Yeats

BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

They’ll cough in the ink to the world’s end;
Wear out the carpet with their shoes
Earning respect; have no strange friend;
If they have sinned nobody knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

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