When You Say Dylan....

From time to time I see a patient in the emergency department, usually a youngster, whose name is Dylan.  On each such occasion I am reminded of a verse:

“I knew a man, his brain so small,
He couldn't think of nothin' at all,
He's not the same as you and me,
He doesn't dig the poetry.
He's so unhip, that when you say Dylan, 
He thinks you're talkin' about Dylan Thomas, 
Whoever he was. 
The man ain't got no culture."

- from "A Simple Desultory Philippic" by Paul Simon

Rich in irony and allusion, as is true for so much of Simon's poetry-as-song-lyric, this song was recorded in the mid sixties, a time when popular culture would have brought most quickly to mind the name Bob Dylan.  Folk-rock insiders recognized several references to that Dylan in Simon's lyric.  

In a recent conversation I mentioned this to a physician colleague, an intelligent, articulate man who seems well educated but did not know who Dylan Thomas was.  Sigh.  I knew the profession was on the wrong track when the Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) was changed (30 years ago) such that its content, once broad, was limited to science and mathematics.

I told him a bit about this Welsh-born poet whose public readings made him quite popular in 20th-century America.

Some weeks later I picked up a chart and walked into a room to see a patient who had been sent from a nursing home.  He was demented, said the nursing home record, and coherent conversation with him was rarely possible.  I introduced myself:

"Hello, Mr. Blake.  I'm Dr. Solomon.  How are you feeling today?"  His eyes opened.  He looked at me as if he realized I had said something but he was unable to process it. His nurse told me she hadn’t been able to get him to answer any questions.  Then I noticed, as I glanced at his chart, that his name was William Blake.

I leaned over and said, “Tiger, tiger, burning bright.”

He looked at me, eyes widening in surprise. “I haven’t heard that poem in years.”

During the rest of his visit he seemed much more animated. I challenged the ED staff to find out why those words meant something to him. Google yielded the answer, as it so often does nowadays.

But save for Google there was no spark of recognition, no distant glimmer, no dredging of the depths of memory from a long-forgotten poetry class. Are there no more English teachers willing to rage against the dying of the light and try to instill in their students a lifelong love for words on a page as an art form?

And so I found myself there on the sad height, regarding the youth whose minds will not blaze like meteors because they do not know Bob Dylan from Dylan Thomas from Thomas Aquinas.

We are always hearing about how important it is to read to our children. Someone should read poetry to Mr. Blake at the nursing home every night. Imagine what it could do for his quality of life.