I learned the word harbinger when I was in seventh grade.  My teacher Miss Nonnie Bowman introduced me to the word and to the idea that poetry is serious stuff. Up to the time when I was in Miss Bowman’s class, I suppose I had thought poetry was mainly just Jack and Jill went up the hill stuff that I could take or leave.  I had assumed that it didn’t matter, and she taught me that it does indeed matter.  I remember her for other reasons, but that’s not the point of this writing. I realized much later that she was unusual not because she was a woman with nerve enough to smoke in public in an Arkansas basically Baptist town, but that she thought it was important to teach a bunch of twelve-year-olds the importance of knowing the signs that tell people what’s coming next before it actually happens. It may be that she told us what a prelude is, but I don’t remember it if she did; but I remember harbinger. 

Miss Bowman gave me a special assignment, one that she said was just for me.  She handed me a book of poems and turned the page very deliberately to John Keats “Ode to a Nightingale.”  She said, “All I want you to do is come back tomorrow and tell me what Keats is talking about.”  So I went home with my special assignment, and I remember finally figuring out that “thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,” was a bird; but I couldn’t make sense of “Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird” a couple of stanzas later. 

The next day Miss Bowman told me that all she wanted me to do was find the bird, the nightingale, in the poem.  She said it wasn’t important for me to know the rest of the meaning of the poem until I was older.  She talked with me about how poetry works.  I remember she said that poetry has a special job to do but that the very sound of a poem is enough of a reason for its existence... that meaning often comes later after we’ve become attracted to the sound of it.  Then she gave me another poem to read for the next assignment.  It was John Milton’s “Song on May Morning.”  She said she wanted me to pay attention to the lines, “Now the bright morning-star, Day’s harbinger, / Comes dancing from the East, and leads with her / the flowery May, who from her green lap throws / The yellow cowslip and the pale primrose.”  

She said she wanted me to come back the next day to tell her what harbinger meant. I remember she said she was going to trust me not to look up the word in the dictionary or to ask anybody what it meant.  She said she wanted me to find what it meant in the poem... so I did; and her obvious gladness that I had “got it” was one of the best gifts any teacher ever gave me.

I never see trees blooming in February without remembering Miss Bowman and thinking how good it is to know spring is coming... and I try to remember and be grateful to her for teaching me something very important about learning... and teaching.