The History Teacher

The speaker is omniscient and unidentified. Their subject is a nondescript history teacher. They have access to both the teacher’s interior thoughts and to things of which the teacher is unaware. As a result, there is a distance created within the poem. This distance between speaker and subject allows the reader to think critically about the teacher’s motivations and actions. Collins does not explicitly condemn the history teacher; the speaker’s word choice and voice remain impartial and neutral. Instead, the reader must use the events of the narrative to come to a conclusion.

The poem opens with the speaker describing the teacher’s internal motivations. He is “[t]rying to protect his students’ innocence” (Line 1), though his actions are presented as quite humorous at the start of the poem. Yet from the beginning, Collins suggests that this motivation is silly and foolish as the initial historical sugarcoating are of innocuous and inoffensive events.

The teacher’s punning on historical events’ names creates a humorous tone. His first revision is to reimagine the Ice Age as the “Chilly Age” (Line 3).