“Well, Tom,” I said, “have you made it out?”
“I can’t say I have, sir. I’m afraid I’m very stupid, for I’ve tried hard. I must just ask you to tell me what it means. But I must tell you one thing, sir: every time I read it over—twenty times, I daresay—I thought I was lying on my mother’s grave, as I lay that terrible night; and then at the end there you were standing over me and saying, ‘Can I do anything to help you?’”
I was struck with astonishment. For here, in a wonderful manner, I saw the imagination outrunning the intellect, and manifesting to the heart what the brain could not yet understand. It indicated undeveloped gifts of a far higher nature than those belonging to the mere power of understanding alone. For there was a hidden sympathy of the deepest kind between the life experience of the lad, and the embodiment of such life experience on the part of the poet. But he went on:
“I am sure, sir, I ought to have been at my prayers, then, but I wasn’t; so I didn’t deserve you to come. But don’t you think God is sometimes better to us than we deserve?”
“He is just everything to us, Tom; and we don’t and can’t deserve anything. Now I will try to explain the sonnet to you.”
I had always had an impulse to teach; not for the teaching’s sake, for that, regarded as the attempt to fill skulls with knowledge, had always been to me a desolate dreariness; but the moment I saw a sign of hunger, an indication of readiness to receive, I was invariably seized with a kind of passion for giving. I now proceeded to explain the sonnet. Having done so, nearly as well as I could, Tom said:
“It is very strange, sir; but now that I have heard you say what the poem means, I feel as if I had known it all the time, though I could not say it.”