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Teach This Poem: “October” by Evalyn Callahan Shaw

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Teach This Poem, though developed with a classroom in mind, can be easily adapted for remote learning, hybrid learning models, or in-person classes. Please see  our suggestions  for how to adapt this lesson for remote or blended learning. We have also noted suggestions when applicable and will continue to add to these suggestions online.

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The following activities and questions are designed to help your students use their noticing skills to move through the poem and develop their thinking skills so they understand its meaning with confidence, using what they’ve noticed as evidence for their interpretations.  Read more about the framework upon which these activities are based .

• Warm-up:  Quickly write or draw what comes to mind when you think of autumn. Share your ideas with a partner or small group.

Before Reading the Poem:  Listen to the song “ October Song ” by Amy Winehouse. What words or phrases from the song stand out to you? How might this song compare to what you wrote or drew at the beginning of class? 

Reading the Poem:  Silently read the poem “ October ” by Evalyn Callahan Shaw. What do you notice about the poem? Note any words or phrases that stand out to you, or any questions you might have.

Listening to the Poem:  Enlist two volunteers and listen as the poem is read aloud twice, and write down any additional words and phrases that stand out to you. Or, you can listen to an audio recording of the poem.

Small Group Discussion:  Share what you noticed about the poem with a small group of students. Based on the details you just shared with your small group and the resources from the beginning of class, how does the poem compare to the song and your writing/drawing. What is the tone and mood of the poem? What makes you say that? 

Whole Class Discussion:  Which two rhyming lines are your favorite? Why? What do you think about the line “Zigzag across the yellow sky” and how it doesn’t rhyme with any other lines? Many poets and writers write about October. Why do you think that this is such a popular time of year? What does this poem say about autumn? 

Extension for Grades  7-8:  (Teachers, cut up the twenty-one lines of the poem and distribute them evenly to students. It is okay to duplicate lines.)  What does October mean to you? Try writing a poem that uses one of the lines from the poem. Create an illustration or photo to accompany your poem. Share your poem and image with your classmates in a gallery walk. 

Extension for Grades 9-12:  As discussed in the lesson, October is a popular topic for writers. Choose one poem from  this list of October poems .  (Teachers, you might want to pre-select the poems and put students into discussion groups.)  How does this poem compare to Callahan’s? Why do you think that fall is such a popular theme for writers? Share your thoughts. 

“The timing of color changes and the onset of falling leaves is primarily regulated by the calendar as nights become longer. None of the other environmental influences – such as temperature, rainfall, food supply – are as unvarying as the steadily increasing length of night during autumn. As days grow shorter, and nights grow longer and cooler, biochemical processes in the leaf begin to paint the landscape with Nature's autumn palette.” Read more of “ Science of Fall Colors ” by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service.

Personification :  is the endowment of inanimate objects, animals, or abstract concepts with animate or human-living qualities.  Read more .

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — October Sky — “October Sky”: Book Analysis

"October Sky": Book Analysis

• Categories: Literature Review October Sky

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

Words: 623 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

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Life in a small community, passion and perseverance, mentorship and supportive relationships, historical context and space exploration, the power of education.

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Analysis of Poem in October by Dylan Thomas

This poem analysis is divided into three parts – context, rhyme scheme and rhetorical devices, and themes.

Context: This part of the poem explanation focuses on the context of writing ‘Poem in October’. It is well known that Dylan Thomas had been writing and publishing poetry since his adolescent years. Hence, at thirty, he was already well into his poetic career. He had moved from the small fishing village of Swansea to London, and later to America. In his upwardly-mobile trajectory, however, he had always regretted leaving Swansea behind. ‘Poem in October’ arises out of these very feelings of regret. When he says that the change in weather is what has prevented him from spending entire birthdays in Swansea, he is not really talking about a physical change in the skies. He is talking about the fact that his situation in life had changed, forcing him to move out of his native town and go on to what he had then perceived as sunnier pastures.

Rhyme Scheme and Rhetorical Devices: ‘Poem in October’ is written in free verse. The sentences that Thomas writes are long and stretch on from one to the next, and the next, and so on. Often an entire stanza consists only of one sentence. However, this does not hamper the reading of the poem. It is quite melodic in its own way, and it is a joy to read it aloud.

This poem explanation would be incomplete if no mention were made of Thomas’s intentional lack of punctuation. For example, in the third line of the sixth stanza , Thomas remembers how he, as a child, would spend much of his time in “the woods the river and sea”. The fact that the poet does not use any commas implies that in childhood, all of nature was a single entity to him, and he did not separate out its various elements, but rather enjoyed the whole of nature in a single go without any interruption. As a result, the Thomas of his boyhood had formed a kinship with any and all elements of nature.

Alliteration and personification are two rhetorical devices used by Thomas. He uses alliteration, for example, in the second line of the fourth stanza when he writes “And over the sea wet church the size of a snail”. He personifies water, trees, climates, summertime, mystery, and joy, by endowing these non-living things and abstract emotions with human qualities. All of his personification serves to bring up visual images in the mind of the reader, such as that of the summertime listening to Thomas in his boyhood when he whispered all his joys into the trees, stones, and fish.

Themes: This part of the poem analysis focuses on three themes – the primacy of sound, childhood as a time of innocence, and alienation in adulthood. Right from the first stanza, hearing is privileged over sight and the other senses by Thomas. It is the sounds of the sea , not the sight of Swansea that draws him out of his sleep and takes him outside into the lap of nature. It is the whistling of the blackbirds that fascinate him when he is on the hillside. In fact, the blackbirds are actually invisible to him, since they are all huddling together in the bushes that line the road he is taking up to the hill . About childhood, he remembers it as a time characterised by the hearing of various tales and legends. As a child, he had desperately wanted nature to hear of his joy.

When talking about his boyhood, he thinks of it as a time that is characterised more by emotion than by reason. In his very remembrance of it, he cries, and his heart is touched. He had, as a child, loved nature and even talked with its various elements. Of course, it is not rational to talk to a non-human subject, but he does so anyway. This is because, in his innocence, he does not distinguish between nature and man . He regards nature as his friend, and since his joy is derived from nature, he tries to share that joy with nature itself.

As a poet of the modernist era, Thomas was aware of the effects of the so-called progress from agriculture to industry, from rural to urban areas. He had also had to move from Swansea to London to achieve financial stability. However, contemporary man’s alienation from nature bothers Thomas. On his thirtieth birthday, it is this alienation that triggers his return to Swansea, and colours his reminiscences. By returning to his native village, he tries to return to the years he had spent there with his mother, in close proximity to nature. This is how he hopes to keep countering the aging process again and again – by returning to childhood, to innocence, to nature.

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Other works by Edward Thomas...

The flowers left thick at nightfal… This Eastertide call into mind th… Now far from home, who, with their… Have gathered them and will do nev…

THE rock-like mud unfroze a littl… Ran and sparkled down each side of… Under the catkins wagging in the h… But earth would have her sleep out… Nor did I value that thin gilding…

WHEN first I came here I had ho… Hope for I knew not what. Fast be… My heart at the sight of the tall… Or grass and yews, as if my feet Only by scaling its steps of chalk

f I were to own this countryside As far as a man in a day could rid… And the Tyes were mine for giving… Wingle Tye and Margaretting Tye, - and Skreens, Gooshays, and…

The Combe was ever dark, ancient… Its mouth is stopped with brambles… And no one scrambles over the slid… By beech and yew and perishing jun… Down the half precipices of its si…

I never saw that land before, And now can never see it again; Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar Endeared, by gladness and by pain, Great was the affection that I bo…

Old Man, or Lads-Love, - in the… To one that knows not Lads-Love,… The hoar green feathery herb, almo… Growing with rosemary and lavender… Even to one that knows it well, th…

NOW first, as I shut the door, I was alone In the new house; and the wind Began to moan. Old at once was the house,

The forest ended. Glad I was To feel the light, and hear the hu… Of bees, and smell the drying gras… And the sweet mint, because I had… To an end of forest, and because

WHAT does it mean? Tired, angry,… No man, woman, or child alive coul… Me now. And yet I almost dare to… Because I sit and frame an epitap… ‘Here lies all that no one loved o…

TALL nettles cover up, as they h… These many springs, the rusty harr… Long worn out, and the roller made… Only the elm butt tops the nettles… This corner of the farmyard I lik…

There was a weasel lived in the su… With all his family, Till a keeper shot him with his gu… And hung him up on a tree, Where he swings in the wind and ra…

t stood in the sunset sky Like the straight-backed down, Many a time - the barn At the edge of town, So huge and dark that it seemed

Not the end: but there’s nothing m… Sweet Summer and Winter rude I have loved, and friendship and l… The crowd and solitude: But I know them: I weary not;

Half of the grove stood dead, and… Little more than the dead ones mad… If they led to a house, long befor… But they welcomed me; I was glad… Scarce a hundred paces under the t…

A Sand County Almanac

Aldo leopold, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

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16 October Poems

• October Poet: Edgar A Guest Days are gettin' shorter an' the air a keener snap; Apples now are droppin' into Mother Nature's lap; The mist at dusk is risin' over valley, marsh an' fen An' it's just as plain as sunshine, winter's comin' on again. The turkeys now are struttin' round the old farmhouse once more; They are done with all their nestin', and their hatchin' days are o'er; Now the farmer's cuttin' fodder for the silo towerin' high An' he's frettin' an' complainin' 'cause the corn's a bit too dry. But the air is mighty peaceful an' the scene is good to see, An' there's somethin' in October that stirs deep inside o' me; An' I just can't help believin' in a God above us, when Everything is ripe for harvest and the frost is back again.

• In The Month Of October Poet: Catherine Pulsifer In the month of October, a season's tale unfolds, As nature's palette shifts, vibrant colors behold. The weather turns cooler, a crispness fills the air, Leaves cascade like confetti, a dance without a care. Children's hearts aflutter, counting days with glee, Anticipating Halloween, a night of mystery. The sun's rays wane, as twilight gently sweeps, Shorter hours of daylight, as the world slowly sleeps. October's charm enchants, a magical embrace, A symphony of change, in this transient space. With each passing day, a glimpse of nature's art, October's beauty whispers, etching memories in the heart.

• The Tenth Month Poet: Catherine Pulsifer, © 2020 October, the tenth month of the year Some hate it, others think it's dear The heat of the summer is done In the sky sets high the sun. But we know what is coming next October's coolness puts it in context Winter will soon be upon us But enjoy the fall without fuss. The colors of October bring Beauty to the trees and things The sunsets against the trees at night Shine the most beautiful light October is the month of harvest We pray and hope for the largest We give thanks to God above A time of year to feel His love.

• Clear October Morning Poet: Edmund Clarence Stedman No clouds are in the morning sky, The vapors hug the stream, Who says that life and hope can die In all this northern gleam? At every turn the maples burn, The quail is whistling free, The partridge whirs, and the frosted burs Are dropping for you and me. In the clear October morning.

• October's Symphony Poet: Catherine Pulsifer In October's realm, nature's brush unfurls, Bringing forth hues that enchant boys and girls. Autumn's palette paints a splendid scene, A miracle of seasons, vibrant and serene. Brilliant colors burst, like fireworks in the sky, Golden, red, and orange, catching every eye. Each season brings a gift, a part of nature's plan, But October's beauty, a masterpiece at hand. Embracing change, we witness nature's art, A reminder of miracles, etched in every heart. October's symphony, a visual delight, The magic of the seasons, an awe-inspiring sight.

• October's Here Poet: Catherine Pulsifer October's here, oh what a sight, Leaves ablaze with colors so bright. The air is crisp, the breeze is cold, A month of change, I'm ready to behold. Pumpkin patches and apple pies, Halloween costumes in our eyes. Excitement twirls within my heart, October's a month to celebrate.

• October Poet: Eloise A. Skimings The flowers are drooping one by one, The wheat is garner'd, the work is done, The vines are wither'd, their race is run, October. The waves are angry on Huron's breast, The song birds have flown to homes of vest, The trees in crimson and gold are drest. October. The summer light is waning fast, Tlie sultry winds become a blast, The autumn frost a blight has cast, October. Let us then work for a home above, A haven of everlasting love, Where truth will find the treasure trove, October.

• October Arrives Poet: Catherine Pulsifer October arrives with all of its charms, Color paints the landscape, causing hearts to warm. As leaves fall gently with each passing day, There's a special day that cannot be kept at bay. Children start counting down for Halloween night, Preparing costumes imaginations take flight. Trick or treat they say, as October draws near, Excitement fills the air, for the children dear.

• October - What Can Compare Poet: Sterling Brannen October is a pleasant time; The foliage is so sublime, And there's a briskness in the air What with October can compare? Though fainter are the solar glints, Thought fainter, too, the floral tints, Though month-end finds the trees quite bare, What with October can compare? In town and country, forest, field, Is garnered kindly Nature's yield. The harvest urges thankful prayer. What with October can compare?

• October Poet: Lillian E Curtis Joyous, sunny days, so bright and clear, But, oh, how short a time they last! For ere we dream their close is near, Summer has joined the past: While we rush on, nor dream that summer's done, We're greeted. by the rays of autumnal sun. Swiftly the days have glided by, That have passed beyond recalling, Withered and blighted the flowerets lie, The autumn leaves are falling; And over many a gorgeous Nature-painted scene, October's gold and amber stream.

• When The Leaves Are Turning Brown Poet: Elizabeth Akers Allen Never is my heart so gay In the budding month of May, Never does it beat a tune Half so sweet in bloomy June, Never knows such happiness As on such a day as this, When October dons her crown, And the leaves are turning brown. Breathe, sweet children, soft regrets For the vanished violets; Sing, young lovers, the delights Of the golden summer nights; Never in the sunnier hours On my way such radiance showers As from heaven falls softly down, When the leaves are turning brown. Braid your girdles, fresh and gay, Children, in the bloom of May; Twist your chaplets in young June, Maidens, — they will fade full soon; Twine ripe roses, July-red, Lovers, for the dear one's head; I will weave my richer crown When the leaves are turning brown.

• October Poet: Paul Laurence Dunbar October is the treasurer of the year, And all the months pay bounty to her store; The fields and orchards still their tribute bear, And fill her brimming coffers more and more. But she, with youthful lavishness, Spends all her wealth in gaudy dress, And decks herself in garments bold Of scarlet, purple, red, and gold. She heedeth not how swift the hours fly, But smiles and sings her happy life along; She only sees above a shining sky; She only hears the breezes' voice in song. Her garments trail the woodlands through, And gather pearls of early dew That sparkle, till the roguish Sun Creeps up and steals them every one. But what cares she that jewels should be lost, When all of Nature's bounteous wealth is hers? Though princely fortunes may have been their cost, Not one regret her calm demeanor stirs. Whole-hearted, happy, careless, free, She lives her life out joyously, Nor cares when Frost stalks o'er her way And turns her auburn locks to gray.

• October's Bright Blue Weather by Helen Hunt Jackson O sun and skies and clouds of June And flowers of June together, Ye cannot rival for one hour October's bright blue weather; When loud the bumblebee makes haste, Belated, thriftless vagrant, And goldenrod is dying fast, And lanes with grapes are fragrant; When gentians roll their fringes tight, To save them for the morning, And chestnuts fall from satin burs Without a sound of warning; When on the ground red apples lie In piles like jewels shining, And redder still on old stone walls Are leaves of woodbine twining; When all the lovely wayside things Their white-winged seeds are sowing, And in the fields, still green and fair, Late aftermaths are growing; When springs run low, and on the brooks, In idle, golden freighting, Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush Of woods, for winter waiting; When comrades seek sweet country haunt By twos and twos together, And count like misers hour by hour October's bright blue weather. O sun and skies and flowers of June, Count all your boasts together, Love loveth best of all the year October's bright blue weather.

• October Poet: H. A. Laveley Into its lap the treasures of the year Are gladly thrown: the royal golden-rod, Fresh from the kind and gracious hand of God, Puts on a brighter garb, and far and near The wonders of the autumn hues appear; The balmy air with ecstacy is rife; All nature grows in plentitude of life, And breathes deep with the bounties of good cheer. The morning clouds are full of beauty, too, And dash their richest crimson o'er the scene, While in the range of sunset's purple view There glows the glory of its changing sheen - The tints of earth and sky forever new; The grandeur which forever rolls between!
• October's Design Poet: Catherine Pulsifer In the tapestry of time, October was designed, A month ordained by God, with purpose intertwined. Amidst autumn's embrace, His glory comes alive, Revealing His love through nature's vibrant dive. In October's touch, His grace begins to unfold, A season of reflection, where faith takes hold. Through changing leaves and gentle, cooling breeze, God's handiwork whispers, inspiring hearts to appease. For in this sacred month, His wonders we discern, A reminder of His power, from which we learn. October's essence reveals His creative art, A testament to His love, woven into every part. So let us praise the Creator as we journey through, October's sacred realm, God's blessings anew. For in this month, His presence is ever near, Guiding our steps, with faith that knows no fear.

• October Gave A Party Poet: Unknown October gave a party; The leaves by hundreds came, The Chestnuts, Oaks, and Maples, And leaves of every name. The Sunshine spread a carpet, And everything was grand, Miss Weather led the dancing, Professor Wind the band. All balanced to their partners, And gaily fluttered by; The sight was like a rainbow New fallen from the sky. Then, in the rustic hollow, At hide-and-seek they played, The party closed at sundown, And everybody stayed. Professor Wind played louder; They flew along the ground; And then the party ended In hands across all round.

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Like the hero of "October Sky,'' I remember the shock that ran through America when the Russians launched Sputnik on Oct. 5, 1957. Like the residents of Coalwood, W.Va. in the movie, I joined the neighbors out on the lawn, peering into the sky with binoculars at a speck of moving light that was fairly easy to see. Unlike Homer Hickam, the hero of "October Sky,'' I didn't go on to become a NASA scientist, or train astronauts. But I did read Willy Ley's Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel three or four times, and Arthur Clarke's The Making of a Moon. I got their autographs, too, just as Homer sends away for a signed photo of Werner von Braun.

That first shabby piece of orbiting hardware now seems like a toy compared to the space station, the shuttle, and the missions to the moon and beyond. But it had an impact that's hard to describe to anyone who takes satellite TV for granted. For the first time in history, man had built something that went up, but did not come down--not for a long time, anyway. Sputnik was a tiny but audacious defiance of the universe.

"October Sky'' tells the story of four boys in a poverty-stricken corner of Appalachia who are determined to build their own rocket, and help get America back in the "space race.'' It's seen through the eyes of their leader, young Homer Hickham ( Jake Gyllenhaal ), who sees the speck of light in the sky and starts reading the science fiction of Jules Verne . Homer is a good student, but math and science are his weak points. He knows he needs help, and breaks all of the rules in the school lunch room by approaching the class brain, an outcast named Quentin ( Chris Owen ).

They talk about rocket fuel, nozzles, velocity. Two other boys get involved: Roy Lee ( William Lee Scott) and O'Dell ( Chad Lindberg ). Their first rocket blows a hole in the picket fence in front of Homer's house. The second one narrowly misses some miners at the coal mine, and Homer's dad John ( Chris Cooper ), the mine supervisor, forbids further experimentation and confiscates all of the "rocket stuff'' from the basement. But the kids labor on, in an isolated patch of woods, building a shelter to protect themselves from exploding rockets. They talk a machinist at the mine into building them a rocket casing of stronger steel, and they use alcohol from a moonshiner as an ingredient in the rocket fuel.

The tension in the movie is not between the boys and their rocket, but between the boys and those who think that miners' sons belong down in the mines and not up in the sky. Homer's father is not a bad man; he fights for the jobs of his men, he rescues several in a near-disaster, he injures his eye in another emergency. He wants Homer to follow in his footsteps. The mine may seem an unhealthy and hateful place to some, but when John takes Homer down for his son's first day on the job, his voice glows with poetry: "I know the mine like I know a man. I was born for this.'' The high school principal ( Chris Ellis ) sees the job of the school to send miners' sons down to the coal mine. But a young teacher ( Laura Dern ) tells Homer she feels her life will have failed if some of the kids don't get out and realize their dreams. Then there's a crisis (did a rocket set a forest fire?), and a scene in which Homer and his friends use trigonometry to argue their innocence.

There have been a lot of recent movies set in high school: "She's All That,'' "Varsity Blues,'' "Jawbreaker'' (also reviewed today). In those movies, even the better ones, "teenagers'' who look like soap stars in their 20s have lives that revolve around sex and popularity. The kids in "October Sky'' look like they're in their mid-teens, and act that way, too. Watching Homer get out the trig book, I was reminded how rarely high school movies have anything to do with school--with how an education is a ticket to freedom.

Perhaps because "October Sky'' is based on a real memoir, Homer Hickam's Rocket Boys, it doesn't simplify the father into a bad guy or a tyrant. He understandably wants his son to follow in his footsteps, and one of the best elements of the movie is in breaking free, he is respecting his father. This movie has deep values.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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October Sky (1999)

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Poppies in October

By sylvia plath, poppies in october essay questions.

What is the significance of the woman in the ambulance?

The speaker describes how nothing is as red as the poppies, including "the woman in the ambulance/whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly." This juxtaposition is striking: Plath not only shares an image of a bleeding and possibly dying woman, but suggests, in an ironic turn, that she is beautiful in a manner similar to flowers. This comparison helps build out the speaker's worldview, giving us the impression that, for them, beauty is connected to sensation and intensity. For the speaker, the woman is similar to flowers because she is striking, shocking, colorful, and full of feeling, even if that feeling is negative. In contrast, the speaker scorns the demure or repressed, preferring the rawness represented by both the natural world and the bleeding woman.

How does Plath contrast the rural and the urban in this poem?

In this poem, there are two distinct settings. One is the natural landscape with the "sun-clouds" and vibrant red poppies, which stand out from their surroundings. The other is a distinctly urban setting, suggested by the industrial waste of "carbon monoxides" and the business-world apparition of "eyes dulled to a halt under bowlers." Plath uses these settings to emphasize the beauty of the natural world and the vibrancy of the poppies, contrasting them with the monotony of the city. She also suggests that the urban and industrial have a soporific or blinding quality, demonstrating that passers-by, with "eyes dulled," have lost interest in natural beauty. However, Plath ultimately suggests that the natural and rural have a transformative effect on those who are open to them: by the poem's end, the colorlessness of the city appears to have been transmuted into "a forest of frost" and "a dawn of cornflowers."

Poppies in October Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Poppies in October is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Study Guide for Poppies in October

Poppies in October study guide contains a biography of Sylvia Plath, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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Friday essay: crimes against humankind – Rai Gaita on Israel’s war on Gaza and the student protests

Honourary professorial fellow, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

Disclosure statement

Raimond Gaita does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Melbourne provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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I dedicated Justice and Hope: Essays Lectures and Other Writings , published last year, to my grandchildren, but I intended this dedication, implicitly, to be to all young people. This is what I wrote.

More and more, I fear, knowledge of affliction and cruelty will test their understanding of what it means to share a common humanity with all the peoples of the earth, and to a degree almost too awful to imagine, their faith that the world is a good world despite the suffering and the evil in it. What can sustain that faith? I believe there are few questions more urgently in need of sober realism in their formulation and in the answers offered to them.

Subjected as they have been to corrosive disillusionment about political institutions, I feared then that hope had deserted young people. The student protests in response to Israel’s war on Gaza and its people have changed my mind about that. At times, the protests appear to express a joyful affirmation that this kind of political action can, indirectly, change the world. I welcome that, though with qualifications I sometimes fear will reduce the voice of hope in me to a whisper.

Generally, I’m not keen on a declaration of interest in these circumstances, but sometimes it matters. The understanding and discussion of ethical matters is always personal, though this should not compromise a robust attempt to to see things as they are.

My wife is Jewish, and I have Jewish stepchildren and step-grandchildren. Hardly a day passes when I am not at some level aware that in the lifetime of my parents, most of the nations of Europe were glad to see Jews exterminated like vermin unfit to live on this earth.

For many people of my age (I’m 78), the Holocaust taught two important lessons. First, irrespective of what they have done and what they are like, no human being should be treated as vermin, outside the boundaries of a sense of a common humanity. That is perhaps why so many postwar preambles to international law speak of the Dignity (capital intended) of humanity: of the inalienable dignity of peoples of all ethnic, religious and national kinds.

The second is that because of their allegiance to nation or religion, which often forms an essential element of their identity, good people will sometimes do, support or condone morally terrible deeds. To believe therefore they could not be good people is to be blind to the tragic ethical complexity of the human condition.

My wife is also Israeli. We are shocked and deeply pained by what Israel is doing in Gaza and the West Bank, but do not believe what Israel has become was inevitable from at least 1948, when Israel became a state. (The Palestinians call this the Nakba.) Between then and now, many possibilities were squandered, not realised, or not even noticed.

Millions of people throughout the world have marched in the streets of their cities, towns and villages to express their revulsion at Israel’s war against Gaza.

They do not need the results of investigations to know what they see every night on their television screens is also a war against Gaza’s people, if not because it is motivated by genocidal intent, then because it is driven by a fierce desire for revenge that has shown contempt for its victims.

They are outraged because nothing Hamas did on October 7, or could realistically threaten to do, justifies what Israel has done in response. It is not only the number of dead and wounded, estimated at 35,709 dead and 79,990 wounded at the time of writing , that motivates them. It is the destruction in Gaza of a human way of living.

When one reflects on how often people have spoken of the way a sense of place has shaped them and coloured their orientation to the world, their sense of being at home in it, then one can see what a heinous crime the physical destruction of a city can be. The claim that it is disproportionate – even overwhelmingly disproportionate – is in the wrong ethical space to capture the moral and human awfulness of it. Summoning every ethical resonance of the phrase, it is a crime against humankind.

Israel has destroyed this kind of “at homeness in the world” for the people of Gaza. Palestinians are fighting to achieve it in their struggle for national self-determination. To defend or fight for the conditions of this sense of belonging in the world, states will do things that are against morality and law.

That is why Israel claims, falsely, that its war against Hamas is a fight for its existence and, even more absurdly, for Western civilisation.

Intergenerational trauma

It seems that most Israelis and a significant portion of the Jewish diaspora support the war. One reason is that they have not been able to overcome the trauma caused by October 7. It was not the terrorist killing of civilians, including children and babies, that caused it. Nor was it the brutal sexual violence, or the fact more Jews were killed in a single day than at any time since the Holocaust, though of course these were fundamental.

What made the trauma intergenerational throughout the Jewish diaspora, I think, is that those terrible deeds were committed with exultant Jew hatred. The trauma was compounded by equivocation over the moral and political significance of October 7 by a surprising number of intellectuals on the left and sometimes, even the denial of their sympathy.

When the UN Secretary General António Guterres said , in a tone of frustration many Jews took to be directed at them, that October 7 did “not occur in a vacuum”, they took him to mean they should understand the crimes of that day in their historical context. Many believed that was equivalent to a justification of these crimes. Guterres angrily denied the latter.

He was obviously right, but it was foolish of him to say it. His statement encompassed the ethical particularity of October 7 and Palestinian terrorist attacks more generally. This was echoed by many others, who described the deeds of October 7 as the actions of freedom or resistance fighters.

Obviously, one action can fall under several descriptions, not all of them morally salient. Some terrorists are resistance fighters; some resistance fighters are terrorists. And, it is important to note, some who might have been resistance fighters forfeited the right to that expression, with its heroic resonance, because of how they acted.

At least some of the Hamas fighters forfeited it with their actions on October 7, even if they might rightly have been described as resistance fighters when they broke through the Israel-Gaza border fence .

They did not forfeit it because they killed civilians, or because they raped (and perpetrated crimes worse than rapes) – nor even because they killed children. They forfeited it because of the obscene glee they took in those deeds as an expression of their hatred of Jews.

If one wants to understand how they could do it, as of course one should, one needs more than knowledge of the occupation and daily suffering and humiliations of the Palestinians . One needs a political psychology of the kind writer Adam Shatz offered in a fine article in London Review of Books titled Vengeful Pathologies . That is not what most people had in mind when they talked of the need to place October 7 – politically and morally – in its historical context.

There is another important thing to note. Sometimes, confronted with morally terrible deeds, we are incredulous, bewildered, and we ask of their agents, “How was it possible that they did it?”.

That is not a question that invites an answer – which is, perhaps, to say it is not really a question. We are not in need of facts, or expert knowledge. We may know the motives, which fully explain why they did it. Often they will be ordinary, banal motives: perhaps they were frightened, vengeful, or sadists, or were obeying orders.

It’s a fact of human life that we sometimes respond this way to morally terrible deeds. But that’s not why I’ve drawn attention to this phenomenon. Rather, I want to suggest that the fact we do, the generality of that fact in human life, is intrinsic to (because it partly constitutes) our concept of the morally terrible. People who are blank to this kind of response in themselves or in others, have an impoverished understanding of the morally terrible, or, if you are at ease with this word, of “evil”.

An analogy might help. Many are bewildered by the disappearance of a human personality in death. That’s not because they hanker for supernatural beliefs of any kind. They know the facts of science. This kind of bewilderment is partly what constitutes our idea that human beings are unique and irreplaceable: not just to those who love and mourn them, but period.

The aggressive calls to see the atrocities of October 7 within the context of clear explanations felt to some like an uncomprehending assault on the way people – not only Jewish people – responded to them.

However, I believe it is a moral tragedy for the Jewish diaspora that it has not allowed its trauma to transform into an urgent obligation to criticise what Israel has done in its name. I would say the same about the citizens of Israel. The response of both communities – but especially of the diaspora – is, as it has been for many years, “Israel has enough haters in world. Why should we join them?”

But just as nothing Hamas or other terrorists have done was comparable to October 7, nothing Israel has done, not even in 1948 , is comparable to what it has done and continues to do since October 7.

When one listens to statements by Israel’s political leaders, it is easy to believe they are out of touch with reality. But it is also necessary to understand the brutal realpolitik that has long been part of Israeli international politics. It is based on the belief that if one can sit out the world’s condemnation, there will come a time when the world will no longer care – or not enough for it to matter.

That may be true of older leaders in the West, but it is unlikely to be true of younger people in the Global South. Of them, Pankaj Mishra wrote in March in The London Review of Books:

At the same time, Gaza has become for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the 21st century – just as the first world war was for a generation in the West.

It will be different for younger people in the Global North, but the alienation from Israel now evident in many of them is likely to continue to affect their attitude to it profoundly in the future, even as it diminishes.

The concept of a university

The student protests began some six months after the marches in streets, towns and villages throughout the world. They were inspired by the same revulsion at the crimes in Gaza and the West Bank, but focused on what the students believed to be the varying forms of complicity of their institutions in those crimes.

Journalists and some students have likened the current protests to those of the 1960s and early 1970s . The reason is obvious, but there is a fundamental difference: in the 60s and 70s, institutions called universities regarded themselves as answerable to an historically deep conception of a university . This governed ideas about what was possible or not. Included, of course, was discussion of what could or could not be done at a university in the name of free speech and protest.

It was taken for granted universities would host faculties (or schools) of humanities – and that their students and academic staff would therefore form political and moral beliefs that would sometimes be radically contrary to those of their fellow citizens. Expressed in actions – or sometimes even just expressed – these beliefs would also be against the law.

Recall the arguments about pornography and abortion in the 1960s, and about torture after September 11. Not to mention arguments about the justifiability of infanticide in certain circumstances , which started in the late 1970s and are ongoing.

Regarding deeds rather than arguments, Monash University students openly collected money for non-military aid to Vietnam’s pro-unification National Liberation Front (NLF) in the late 1960s, when it was killing their fellow citizens fighting in Vietnam. They chanted “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win”, though “Uncle Ho” was at the time believed to have murdered at least 30,000 peasants in a program of “land reforms”.

When the institutions now called universities deliberate about which disciplines (or even faculties) they will support, no serious concept of a university even remotely enters their minds. Some universities have axed philosophy, classics, physics – or even the entire faculty of humanities. Clearly, they would not be moved by the argument that institutions lacking these things do not deserve to be called universities.

If anyone old enough to have been a student in the 1960s were to offer such an argument, they would betray they had been asleep for at least 40 years. It would never occur to younger people to do so: that concept of the university died before many of them were born.

Admittedly, even in the 1960s, the argument didn’t have much life in it. Less than 20 years later, at a meeting convened to protect philosophy departments in the UK, philosophers repeatedly told a minister of education , who had come to hear what they had to say, that an institution without a philosophy department – and most certainly one that closed its philosophy department – could not be called a university. He listened patiently for almost an hour and then responded with evident irritation, “In that case, we will call it something else”. The philosophers didn’t know what to say. There was nothing to say. Only a lament was truthfully on offer.

The concept of a university the philosophers appealed to relied on other notions, whose place in living speech was equally unconvincing. Vocation, collegiality, a community of scholars, love of truth – even truth itself.

When scepticism about truth, and hostility to the intensity that went with talk of love of it, became pervasive in many humanities disciplines, the die was cast: as the UK philosophers discovered. Speaking truth to a seductively cool corporate urbanity that found intensity distasteful proved as least as difficult as speaking it to power.

Serious discussion

If they cannot appeal to a serious concept of a university, what can students and staff appeal to when they ask what should be permitted on campus? I don’t know exactly, but here is a rough answer: students and staff should be permitted to say in political forums on campus what they have come to believe in serious discussion in the classroom.

They should therefore be prepared to say with Machiavelli that political leaders should not desire to be good, and that they should love their country more than their soul. To say with Frantz Fanon that the oppressed can justifiably use political violence, including terror, against their oppressors. To say with Marx that we should aim for revolution.

And to say with many contemporary writers, including Israelis, that Israel is irredeemably a racist colonial settler state that should cease to exist as a Jewish state – or with the Israeli historian Benny Morris that the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs should have been completed in 1948.

They should be prepared to say, with some right-wing Israeli nationalists, that Jordan should become the home for a Palestinian nation . And to say, with many critical legal theorists, that international law as it stands is Eurocentric in ways that have favoured colonial exploitation of peoples in the Global South – and therefore lacks the authority to claim jurisdiction over them. And to say more.

Recently, university leaders asked the federal government for advice on what counts as unlawful conduct on their campuses. This implies they would act against students who behaved unlawfully. Perhaps that is why a student at ANU was suspended for expressing unconditional support for Hamas. I assume the student was not suspended for her foolish, effectively amoral idea one might give unconditional support to a political entity. It seems more likely the university suspended her because Hamas is listed by the government as a terrorist organisation .

Students who study the Cold War, and intellectuals’ arguments about it at the time, are likely to read famous writers and philosophers who refused to condemn mass murder in the Soviet Union – especially if that condemnation was demanded by those who refused to condemn the murder of communists or left-wing leaders and political activists in South America and Asia.

Reading and discussing these thinkers in class, some students might agree with them. They may, for similar reasons, refuse to condemn Hamas – especially when the condemnation is demanded by those who refuse to condemn what Israel is doing in Gaza and on the West Bank, but instead support it.

I find it hard to appreciate the moral difference between refusing to condemn Hamas and refusing to condemn Israel’s terrorism in Gaza and the terrorism by settlers on the West Bank (who are often supported by Israel’s defence forces and government ministers). There are, to be sure, important moral differences between the horrors of October 7 and the current war, but someone who believes they can weigh them to determine definitively which is worse must be using scales made in hell.

One can also argue over whether the thousands of dead civilians in Gaza were intentionally killed, or whether they were killed due to reckless, often opportunist disregard of their lives. (Because of Israel’s ferocious need of revenge and its determination it would not often, or not seriously, risk the lives of its soldiers merely to protect the lives of Gazans, whose humanity is not visible to them.)

The difference will matter to the International Court of Justice when it considers whether Israel is guilty of genocide. Morally, though, it will be weighed only by connoisseurs of evil.

Legitimate and illegitimate persuasion

An institution worthy of the title of university would see that the suspended ANU student could have reached the belief that made her refuse to condemn Hamas by reading prescribed texts and discussing them in her courses. Such a university would protect her.

Not only would it protect her to say what she believes in tutorials, but to express it in the form of protests on campus, ranging from discussion and argument in public lecture theatres to chanting and displaying posters. That is, provided those actions observe a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate persuasion.

That distinction is as old as Socrates. Legitimate persuasion requires people to renounce their power to make others believe something only because they have lied, successfully exploited that person’s ignorance, hidden relevant information, intimidated them, or exploited their vulnerability to sentimental kitsch – or more generally, their bad ear for what rings false.

All such forms of persuasion must be renounced in genuine conversation, as a condition of the participants’ respect for one another – and for their human need of truth as a need of the soul, as Simone Weil put it. If persuasion compels, it will do so in the way logic compels. To someone who says in response to what they take to be a valid argument, “I see that I must accept the conclusion”, one would not say, “Don’t be such a wimp. Try. Show a free spirit.”

This is also true when the discussion involves persuasion directed to the head and heart, inseparably combined. This distinctive form of understanding is partly defined by its resistance to sentimentality, pathos, kitsch and so on.

The university, as I have been describing it, was a community of scholars in conversation. Of course, a conversational argument can be fierce: while being respectful of the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate forms of persuasion. For some, that can be intimidating.

But I think one must distinguish feeling intimidated from being intimidated – by someone who intends to intimidate, consciously or unconsciously.

Protest camps on university lawns are not seminar rooms and chanting is not a form of conversation, but they can be invitations to conversations. In this respect, they share a quality with non-violent forms of civil disobedience.

I think of civil disobedience as an act of civic friendship. The idea that the concept of friendship can mark a distinctive form of political respect in a democratic society is as old as Aristotle. At difficult moments in their friendship, friends must call on each other to attend to what is endangering their friendship.

“It’s time to talk, seriously and truthfully,” one might say to the other. In a similar way, citizens may sometimes feel compelled to call on their fellow citizens to acknowledge what threatens to undermine the conditions of a just and truthful political community. “Hey! It’s time to talk. We can no longer evade it.”

Of course, it takes time for that to be heard. And once it is? It doesn’t need to be taken up. That’s in the nature of an invitation – just as it is in the nature of a conversation that we don’t know where it will go.

Would a conversation like this be possible between those with relatives murdered on October 7 and those with relatives murdered in Gaza? Those who would deny this, or who believe the suggestion (almost grotesquely) lacks political seriousness, they should be told to take their protests to the streets.

A university in which such conversations were possible, and such actions permitted, would, of course, have to acknowledge that as a citizen, a lawbreaker protected on campus would be liable to arrest off campus – probably justifiably.

When the concept of a university had life in it, no one suggested the values of a university should be the values of the general community, or that what should count as freedom of speech and political activity on a campus should apply in wider society.

Uncannily haunting

Though defunct, the memory of the university as it existed in the 1960s remains uncannily haunting. That’s evident when people appeal to academic freedom in its name.

The current resistance to police presence on campuses is motivated by this concept – which was used in similar situations over 50 years before. Students have protested not only as morally concerned citizens, but as members of a community who believed they could appeal to the distinctive obligations that fall on universities, as universities , to avoid being complicit in grave injustices.

Description of the conceptual features of a university – its conceptual skeleton really – is possible, just as it is possible to describe the conceptual features of chivalry or chastity. That is why the concept of a university can still have effects, like a ghost rattling its chains, in a world that mocks it as having never described anything real – only the elitist nostalgia of a handful of academics who dreamed of a golden age that never existed. But it cannot speak to us in a way that would enable creative engagement with it. As things stand, our life with language can give it no voice.

The requirement to allow certain forms of speech and action derives not from the idea of a university, but from considerations about what it is to seriously teach. It would obviously be absurd for a teacher in the corporate teaching institutions called universities to teach set texts of Marx, Fanon and Sartre and say to students, “Read them, then we’ll discuss them, but don’t believe them.”

Nothing, however, that is essential to the identity of such institutions prevents them from forbidding students from expressing beliefs they formed in class discussion in political forums on campus, or from axing the courses, the disciplines to which they belong, or faculties, if they create problems with donors or the government (though it might prove embarrassing for a time).

The embarrassment would be caused by the faint memory of a defunct concept. Therefore, it could be an occasion for universities to face the reality of what they have become – and without a trace of guilt, to purge their institutional memories of uncanny resonances.

At the beginning of this essay, I said I have serious qualifications about the hope the students’ protests inspired in me. Aspects of the protests bewilder and alarm me. I do not understand the aggressive contempt (it appears) with which so many participants speak of Zionism and, worse, Zionists. I find it hard not to hear the voice of Hamas in their tone and therefore in how I should understand their meaning when they chant, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”. Presumably they mean free of Zionists.

Do they not know there are many ways of being a Zionist – from the vile ways of some of the right-wing members of the Israeli government to the profoundly humane ways of anti-state Zionists like Hannah Arendt and Martin Buber ?

Do they not know that in Israel, Zionists like the director of Breaking the Silence , an organisation recording testimonies of Israeli soldiers about crimes they and others have committed against Palestinians, receive death threats?

Do they believe because they are Zionists, such people deserve their contempt?

Such Zionists believe Jews have a need of and a right to institutions of political and cultural self-determination in the land “between the river and the sea”, provided it is consistent with the realisation of the Palestinians’ same need and right. If one can be a Zionist without being a Jew, then I am that kind of Zionist.

Many protesters believe Israel could be compelled to cease to exist in any Zionist form. That belief is dangerously out of touch with reality. Israel will never be compelled to give up what it believes to be its responsibility to realise the need of the Jewish people for self-determination. Not militarily – it has nuclear weapons – and not under the pressure of boycotts, divestments and international hostility. For anything like the foreseeable future, Israel will continue to exist as a Jewish state.

Political realism requires one to acknowledge that the Palestinians will receive justice only if Israel is persuaded, albeit under considerable pressure, to give it. It will do so only if it is consistent with some form of Jewish self-determination.

The hope that a radically anti-Zionist project can be achieved is a fantasy. As such, it expresses the kind of thoughtlessness Hannah Arendt argued could produce great evil . The kind of thoughtlessness she had in mind is a failure of judgement that erodes genuinely critical thinking.

It is a conceit on the part of the institutions now called universities to believe they can teach students to be seriously critical thinkers. This was often so, even when the concept of a university meant something.

They can teach students facts, how to weigh them in support of conclusions, how to argue, in the sense in which philosophy departments teach them to be good at argument. They can even teach judgement about how to weigh facts as evidence to support certain propositions. But they cannot, in anything like the same way, teach them to possess the courage or humility necessary if one is to care more for truth than the opinion of one’s peers or fame.

The need for such virtues could be appreciated in what we now call the “culture” of institutions where the academic form of the life of the mind was partly constituted by the distinction between vocations and careers: and by hardheaded talk of the love of truth. Or as Simone Weil put it , the spirit of truth in love – in love with the wondrous treasures available to students and staff in their common effort to understand the world and themselves. Institutions now called universities put obstacles in the way of developing those virtues, enacting them and even understanding the need for them.

Nor can universities teach – in the same way they can teach judgement about factual matters or how to argue – the kind of sensibility necessary to understand the meanings of things in our lives. A sensibility in which feeling and thought are inseparable. A sensibility that informs efforts to try to see things as they are, in the domain of reflection.

That domain includes, of course, ethical questions about the nature of love, virtue, what counts as sobriety in political action and what is needed to become resistant to the enchantment of rhetoric and spin.

Albert Camus said he distinguished between two kinds of intelligence : intelligent intelligence and stupid intelligence.

Stupid intelligence is like what Arendt called thoughtlessness. It can be high-flying and can pass for being critical because it takes a self-regarding pleasure in debunking. But it seldom stops to question the assumptions that inform the debunking.

Stupid intelligence can be formidable, intimidating and quick on its feet. It can take you, deservedly, to the highest reaches of academic life and to international fame. But it is not thoughtful.

It cannot, of itself, take you to wisdom or make you truly answerable to someone who calls on you to be serious. It cannot take you to the virtues necessary for thought that constantly reflects critically on its assumptions.

How do we restore intelligent intelligence, the conditions that generate and nourish thoughtfulness in our institutions of education? That is our challenge, if hope is not to decline into fantasy.

This essay is based on the annual Jim Carlton Integrity Lecture delivered recently at the Melbourne Law School.

• Universities
• Free speech
• Student protests
• Friday essay

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