I was 24, just back from my Army tour in Korea, where I’d been a rifleman, a wireman, a pioneer in ammunition, and a voice radio operator for the officer directing the offense in the Iron Triangle, and I was gearing up for my freshman year at Boston College. It was much like starting life over again. I’d finished my tour in Korea writing for the Stars and Stripes and divisional and regimental papers and working on poetry — ostensibly — when I could, driven to words by my Irish grandfather, who all my early life had read Yeats to me.
Letters of our real world in Korea I sent to my father’s work address, to keep them away from my mother, who had waited three years for her older son, my brother, to return from the wild Pacific of World War II. Those waiting years weighed on me daily as a schoolboy — the rush for mail, the sight of thin blue service envelopes, my father’s carefully chosen summary reports of my brother’s easy life on the sun-drenched Pacific islands with the strangest names, most of which were from my brother’s imagination, with never a named battle site.
I had registered at BC before Army induction, got in a day of class — to ensure a place for myself on a future date — and left for Asia and the war, all the while planning on coming back. I was lucky, did come back, went off to school, and spent three and a half years thumbing back and forth from home in Saugus as a brown-bagger, my treasury of hitchhiking stories building by each venture on the road.
And all during that time away from school, I had been writing poetry in my odd hours, on strange hills, in quiet reserve area tents beside a stove in winter, or under stars or moon on peaceful nights. It would be a wise professor’s perception of my work that would hit me in the face.
That freshman English composition professor wanted on his desk from each student every Friday morning 20 pages of writing on anything — “but try to make it interesting,” he admonished, warmth and expectation in his words. “On Monday, I’ll read the three I think are best prepared or best written or are ahead of all others, or perhaps show some keenness in word choice.”
Each Monday thereafter, one of my papers made the morning hit list.
Just a few weeks into the semester, after reading my work at the head of the class, still sitting comfortably on the edge of his desk, the professor summoned me to his side and said, “Please see me after class in my office.”
Away from the classroom, strong as echoes reverberating off metal, I could hear Professor John Norton reading certain passages, highlights, the language glowing on his lips, coughing his cigarette cough into paragraphs, posing his hand between belt and self, sitting on the edge of his desk dressed in a gray sport jacket, nodding at the words leaving his mouth, his voice alive, the tower bell ringing at the end of class.
When I reached his office, he tossed an open book at me across his desk — “Humanistic Poetry” — and, pointing at the open page, said, “Have you ever read that poem?” It was “Shot Down at Night,” by John Frederick Nims.
The words stunned me. The poem stunned me. The growth of silence stunned me. His grin stunned me. On the spot, at the moment of some taste of magic, my life and its aims did a 180 degree turn, flopped over, and said a new start was in order.
Norton had read something I wrote that he liked. Had seen something he liked. I was in special company. He lit another cigarette, nodded, smiled. “You ought to give it a go,” he said, the smile broader, the exhalation spiraling away like a bird in flight. The short procedure was much like a commission ceremony: I had been called and directed.
I have recited that poem by John Frederick Nims to so many audiences I cannot count them, and I keep finding in it the endless pleasure, the expectation of the next poem of my own. I can mark that day, the hour, the temperature, the wind at leaves with those foundational words:
A boy I knew,
Arm gold as saddle-leather, lakeblue eyes,
Found in a foreign sky extravagant death.
Dreamy in school,
Parsed tragic Phaëthon and heard of war,
Arose surprised, gravely shook hands, and left us.
His name,
Once grey in convent writing, neat on themes,
Cut like erosion of fire the peaks of heaven.
The Arab saw
Strange flotsam fall: the baseball-sounding spring,
The summer roadster, pennoned with bright hair,
The dance at Hallowe’en,
The skater’s kiss
At midnight on the carillons of ice.
It was Nims who said it, from the mouth of another man, in a warmed-over classroom at Boston College, with word about a boy not home yet from yet another war, whose lakeblue eyes light a photograph I know more than 60 years later as though the boy sits on my mantel eyeing me, John Norton’s voice accosting me in the old classroom.
Oh, what time then when I found it true that happiness often depended on sadness, partners in all of this.
Tom Sheehan is in his 96th year and is the author of 54 or 55 books. He lives in Saugus, where he was named Man of the Year in 2022.