After dropping my daughter off at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, for debate camp, twenty years ago (yikes) I went exploring campuses for a return to school for a second master’s degree, this one in literature.
I was in the mood for New England.
I wanted to find the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont’s Green Mountains. It was named for the gently arresting mountain over the next ridge north from the mountaintop campus.
Robert Frost held court here for years and years, before his death in 1963. His farmhouse is just down the road.
I’d like to go by
climbing a birch tree.
And climb black branches up a
snow-white trunk
Toward heaven,
till the tree could bear no more
-from Birches, 1913*
An hour after leaving Jesse in Burlington I found Hwy 125, the magical, winding road from the town of Middlebury up to Bread Loaf. The drive brought tears: the rush of water over the rocky Middlebury River, the twisting road up the mountain. the smell of fresh pine and log fires.
Arriving at the top of the mountain, I pulled over at The Robert Frost Forest marker. I got out of my car and wandered a bit. I couldn’t believe it. The man also reading the marker must have thought I was crazy as I babbled my joy.
Pilgrimage.
Finally, Bread Loaf. I pulled into the large grass & gravel lot beyond a giant pine grove.
From a distance, I heard the hum of students conversing at wooden tables and rustic Adirondack chairs, set between ochre-colored cottages. Air thick with learning vibes.
Very tempting to return. Strong sense I will. I want to be part of this.
I returned the following summer. Bread Loaf, a 5-summer commitment, gave my life new direction and an acknowledgement of my intellect. My brothers were brilliant scholars. However, being female in my family at that time meant going off to college to find a husband. By the time I graduated, though, I was expected to burn my bra. It was confusing. I thrived at Bread Loaf, in fact receiving one of only a few named Bread Loaf scholarship awards. Prominent literary scholars left their universities to come teach at Bread Loaf in the summer in intimate ‘barn’ classrooms.
Dear Jennifer Green-Lewis, a professor at George Washington University during the regular academic year, had nominated me:
“Susan has turned out to be one of those rare and unexpected gifts to the seminar—an amused and amusing student who has been completely absorbed in the work and whose writing has moved from strength to strength. She was always prepared and read widely, with avid interest. She wrote lucidly and with sophistication. Her final paper on Marriage as Dance in Virginia Woolf’s writing was lively and original, occasionally threatening chaos, and yet finally righting itself; ambitious (she drew on a wide range of critics and theorists) and yet thoroughly down to earth. These words also describe her.”
Classes, intense reading, research papers–nothing more besides stimulating conversation at dinner with others. Idyllic nights of study, refreshing mountain breezes replenishing my soul.
The woman at the far left was at Oxford the same summer as I, and we traveled together throughout Wales at the end of term. I just had to visit Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey. She was game.
Enjoy the first 18 lines of Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey:
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.**
Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
These lines could be about returning to Bread Loaf each summer.
After five summers, I did it!
Thank you, beloved Bread Loaf. I long to return.
*Birches, 1913. *
*https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches
** Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. 1798. WIlliam Wordsworth, 1798. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45527/lines-composed-a-few-miles-above-tintern-abbey-on-revisiting-the-banks-of-the-wye-during-a-tour-july-13-1798
