Word: bard
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...politicians, burbling over how to educate the underclass, would do well to stop by Room 56 this week, as Rafe Esquith's fifth-grade class mounts its annual Shakespeare play. There are few costumes--mainly T shirts inscribed with an image of the Bard under the words WILL POWER. Most of Esquith's 29 pupils are classified as gifted or high achievers, but that hardly guarantees success in an environment where poverty and gangsterism are endemic. Some of his incoming students this year "didn't know two times three," he says. "Four of them couldn't write a sentence...
...extent to which this poet or bard can be called a Christian has prompted much scholarly disagreement. He alludes to the Old Testament and expresses a monotheistic religious faith: "Almighty God rules over mankind/and always has." But the characters in the poem behave according to a moral code in which loving one's enemies and hoping to be redeemed in heaven figure not at all. As Beowulf prepares to fight his second monster, he announces his credo: "It is always better/to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning./For every one of us, living in this world/means waiting...