A version of the following essay about emeritus Baylor English professor Elizabeth Smith Githens first appeared in another publication. Githens died July 10, 2016, at age 96.

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By Elizabeth Vardaman (BA ’65, MA ’80)
Associate Dean for Special Programs, College of Arts & Sciences

November is the time for slowing down and storing up — nature tells us so. The heat has given over its fiercest bellow; fresh colors surprise us in the sumac and the tallow trees; the nights are growing longer, offering us circadian rhythms within which to prepare for the stillest season. Yet we rush on, out of tune with the south-bound, burbling sandhill cranes — busy people, working, serving, dealing with the challenges of a frightening international scene — while earth’s cornucopia of days tumble into gold and harvest moons shine.

I have overlooked autumn in a thousand places — the hawk that floats in deep blue sky over mown hay fields or the mix of light and shadow that leaves messages in the grass. But when I have stopped to smell approaching rain, to feel the wind, or to acknowledge the crunch of acorns under foot, I have often credited poetry with having prepared my eyes and ears for the wonder of it all.

The poets pay attention to the turning; they have been here before to lead the way. From John Keats we reap such images as the sun and autumn conspiring “To bend with apples the mossed cottage-trees, / And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core….”

W.S. Merwin reminds us “it was only as the afternoon lengthened on its/ dial and the shadows reached out farther and farther/ from everything that we began to listen for what/ might be escaping us and we heard high voices ringing/ the village at sundown calling their animals home/ and then the bats after dark and the silence on its road.”

A teacher made me safe to read such poetic lines. A professor at Baylor, a woman who loved words, ideas, and the mystery in language — I almost missed her! — introduced me to Hardy, Eliot, Auden, Housman, and Hopkins, among others.

No one is going to make a movie of it — we weren’t dramatic enough, and Mrs. Elizabeth Smith Githens never stood on a table — but I can still see my 1965 version of “Dead Poets Society” as clearly in my mind as if it were captured on a big screen: The students came in and sat down. The teacher prepared us to meet the great lyric voices of Modern Poetry. When she read a poem, we leaned into the moment as if we were participating in the only thing that mattered in the world. We wanted those lines etched in us. And they were.

Under the professor’s leadership, we flew ecstatically with Hopkins’ windhover, and we stood numb, our headpieces filled with straw, alongside Eliot’s hollow men. Day after day, we plowed the texts under her powerful direction. And in the process, we discovered poems that took the place of mountains, just as Wallace Stevens said.

Beyond rhyme and reason, complex questions rose and fell in that classroom. We began to feel at home with awe, pathos, love, tragedy, and contemplation. With the bells from the tower ringing us into our futures, we moved swiftly along, taking our poets in the ocher bindings with us. I still have that book. Just recently I saw the same edition under the arm of another faculty member here: “Yes,” he replied to my query, “I took the course under Elizabeth Smith, and Dylan Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’ has been my touchstone ever since.”

As others attest who are fortunate to have studied great ideas under intense, dedicated teachers, many of us in the early 60s were endlessly altered by Elizabeth Smith Githens. And when I hear another of her former students, such as Ambassador Lyndon Olson, crediting her for profoundly affecting him —- well, it is as if one has instantly sealed a friendship for life. Isn’t it beautiful, the way bands of students exist across the decades, perhaps never knowing one another but always feeling, somehow, that we are wrapped in ties that bind our hearts in shared experiences at Baylor. It is as if having taken a course under a particular professor entitles us to membership in a special club. For some, it was the Packard Physics Fraternity; for others it was the bonds forged in the classroom of a great historian.

Homecoming seems always more memorable if there is a chance to pay our respects to one of those great men and women whose scholarship in and love for a particular subject became the catalyst for our lifelong devotion to that field. I have dreamed of organizing a reunion not just by the year one graduated, but by the classes that changed us. How many would crowd into Elizabeth Smith Githens’ room, with copies of that special book, A College Book of Modern Verse, still tucked under their arms. Teach us again, Mrs. Smith! Instruct us in who to read and how to proceed! Cast your spell on us so that we will be conscious of the words, the wonder!

Instead, most alums are not able to attend Homecoming, much less have long conversations with those they adored at Baylor. We must solace ourselves in fleeting reminiscences from wherever we find ourselves in Dallas or Denver or St. Louis or…

This autumn, I will pay my respects to my undergraduate education by taking long walks on late afternoons through the rain of fawn and lemon-colored leaves, listening to them tick, like the season’s clock, as they crisply hit the streets. If time permits, I will stroll as far as the creek and watch the rush of gurgling water race off to who knows where. Standing there, I might study the texture of the bark of a young willow or smell the smoke from a backyard grill nearby. Creatures will come and go. Children’s voices and their games of touch football will float on the air.

Turning toward my house, I will watch one of those amazing Texas sunsets, where crimson and fire pour through what Robinson Jeffers has called the “rifts in the screen of the world.” And maybe I will quote lines to myself from one of the poems I learned from Mrs. Smith Githens. Hopkins, I think, yes: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God./ It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”

The spirit level refilled, I will wind my way back through the neighborhood and into our home through the library door. Jim will look up from a biography of Genghis Khan and probably ask, “Where in the world were you?” And I will reply, “Just walking with Elizabeth Smith Githens.” Then taking liberty with a line from Philip Levine, I will probably add, “Nearly forty years. Yet I remain ‘warm still in the fire of her care.’”