Dead Poets Society
The pioneer dies upon the high altar of ideals
“We read and write poetry, not because it’s cute.
We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled with passion.
Medicine, law, business, engineering — these are noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life,
but poetry… beauty, romance, love — these are what we stay alive for.
The questions of self, of life, keep recurring. The unfeeling multitudes stream past; cities teem with ignorance.
What meaning can be found in living among them — self, life?
The answer is: because you are here.
Because you are here, because the great play continues, and because you may contribute a verse.”
The yellowed alumni photographs in the display case, those young faces frozen within their frames, resemble butterflies pinned to specimen boards — perfect, silent, forever holding the poised-wing posture society expects. The “Carpe Diem” Keating scrawled on the blackboard’s edge was always hastily wiped away by the student on duty.
When Neil placed the thorn crown of A Midsummer Night’s Dream upon his head and pulled the trigger in that snowy night, I felt I understood his decision — but I could not accept that he deserved such an ending. This boy who loved theater, who loved literature, used death to complete the most ferocious rebellion against his father’s tyranny.
At the story’s end, Todd — once the most timid of them all — becomes the first to stand upon his desk. Forced to sign the confession, yet unable to bury their ideals, they are not rebelling when they rise onto their desks. They are bidding their ideals a final farewell. Poetry can awaken numbed senses, and death, too, can sometimes awaken the regimented soul.
When the students stand on their desks to gaze out the window, when Todd recites his verses at the cliff’s edge — in these moments, they clearly become fledgling birds attempting to break free from iron cages. And the reality is this: most of us ultimately become Mr. Gromer, prisoners tangled in conjunctions, wandering the labyrinth of “however” and “moreover,” forgetting the twilight dying outside the window.
I cannot deny that an unbridgeable chasm lies between the ideal and the real. The road to poetry and distant horizons demands a solid material foundation. When we temporarily compromise for survival on the path toward our ideals, when we have finally earned the ticket to our distant shore through our own labor — will the ideal still be within its expiration date?
Each of us is a specimen torn between two kinds of time: the precise ticking of the clock face, and the irregular tremor within the chest. The former teaches us how to become qualified cogs in the social machine; the latter, in the depths of night, keeps reminding us: you have verses yet unfinished. In this cruel, rational, materialistic society, the idealist always seems naive — always misunderstood.
The pioneer dies upon the high altar of ideals. When every deed is weighed on the scale of utility, how can the soul remain light?