You Tell on Yourself

My 5th grade teacher, Mrs. Cornell, is one of the people who most influenced my love of literature, especially poetry. She had a deep passion for poetry, and had us commit to memory several poems, and not just of the Shel Silverstein sort. Some of the ones I remember most are Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" (which runs through my mind every time I drive through Oregon and see the lush green skyline), Joaquin Miller's "Columbus" (her other great passion was American History, particularly the story of Columbus), along with several passages from the scriptures, including 2 Nephi 9:41, which we repeated together on our last day of class with her (I attended a private LDS elementary school, of which Mrs. Cornell was the director).  I attended her funeral a few summers ago, and it was a joy and a privilege to celebrate the life of such an amazing, bright, passionate woman, a woman who influenced so many lives through her great gift of teaching. It is a testament to her abilities and to the power of words, especially when joined with music or poetic verse, that over 20 years later, lines of the poems she taught me in her 5th grade classroom, still pop into my mind. This morning, I found myself thinking through the stanzas of this wonderful poem:

Tell On Yourself... 

You tell on yourself by the friends you seek, 

By the very manner in which you speak, 

By the way you employ your leisure time, 

By the use you make of dollar and dime. 



You tell what you are by the things you wear, 

By the spirit in which you your burdens bear; 

By the kind of things at which you laugh, 

By the records you play on the phonograph. 



You tell what you are by the way you walk; 

By the things of which you delight to talk, 

By the manner in which you bear defeat, 

By so simple a thing as how you eat. 



By the books you choose from the well-filled shelf, 

In these ways and more, you tell on yourself; 

So there's really no particle of sense 

In an effort to keep up false pretense. 

Jamie Sidwell