The History Teacher

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1991

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

As a Postmodern poem, “The History Teacher” is written in free verse, with no strict form, meter, or end rhyme. The poem has 22 lines broken up into six stanzas: a quatrain, a couplet, another quatrain, a tercet, and two final quintains. These inconsistent stanza breaks suggest the uneven pacing of the teacher’s course and his dismissal and underemphasis of historical violence.

Despite the initial humor of the puns, the poem is not written for the amusement of his readers or for children. The lack of rhyme supports Collins’s more serious purpose. A rhymeless poem is not sing-song; the poem is not meant to entertain children but to persuade adults. Collins makes frequent use of enjambment, or the lack of punctuation at the ends of lines that allows the lines to flow together. In this poem, the effect is to make the poem sound more like prose. By emphasizing poetic traits, the reader focuses instead on the narrative and Collins’s thematic points. Because Collins does not follow traditional poetic conventions, Collins underscores his goal to challenge mainstream ideas surrounding education, children, and violence.

Allusions

Understanding the poem’s allusions is key to understanding Collins’s irony and thematic commentary. Allusions are references to things outside of the poem that the poet expects his reader to recognize. Throughout the poem, Collins alludes to six historical events. They start off rather innocuously with the Ice Age and Stone Age. The low-stakes revisions the history teacher makes are simply humorous to the reader. But as the poem continues, the allusions become more violent. By recognizing the brutality of events like the Spanish Inquisition and the Boer War, the reader understands Collins’s commentary on the history teacher’s actions. His revisions are no longer humorous jokes, but rather dangerous erasure. By depending on readers’ outside knowledge in these allusions, Collins underscores how important an accurate education is.

Puns

The history teacher’s historical revisions are all based on puns. A pun is a joke that plays on different possible meanings of a word or on words that sound alike with different meanings. Initially, these puns are light-hearted and humorous. Jokes about the Ice Age being chilly are harmless. Yet Collins slowly shows how these puns are dangerous in their inaccurate revisionism. While the Boer War does sound like the Bore War, making this change obscures the lessons about colonialism from this historical moment. This erasure has contemporary ramifications, as the forces that lead to this war and the effects of this war still inform modern life. If students do not learn about such historical moments, they are doomed to repeat and perpetuate them.