Marie Borroff, English

Marie Borroff (PhD ’56) was a renowned scholar of English poetry, medieval Anglo-Saxon literature and philology. She was the first woman tenured in the English department (1965), the first woman appointed as a Sterling Professor (1991), and the first woman to have an endowed chair named for her at Yale. She was widely lauded in the academic world, excelling in her scholarship, teaching, and professional responsibilities. Former student Kathrin Day Lassila ’81 described Borroff’s lectures as “having a conversation over lunch with a friend who happened to be a supreme interpreter of English poetry. By the end of the talk she would have exposed a poem’s heart—its anguish, ecstasy, fury, or even frivolity. I can still feel how her lectures moved me.”

Borroff was a champion of female academics throughout her career. Penelope Laurans, former Lecturer in English and Special Assistant to the President, writes that “[Borroff] recognized that her position allowed some older English faculty to rest easy by saying ‘You see, we have tenured a woman.’” She took seriously her unique position to promote women’s equity in academia through her professional service and her mentorship of students and junior faculty, women and men alike. Leslie Brisman, Karl Young Professor of English, remembers Borroff’s “gentle reassurance that I could stand my ground when it was a matter of principle, and not fear the wrath of a superior,” often a major concern in the hierarchical world of academia.

Laurans notes that Borroff made a major impact simply by being a woman on the Yale faculty during this time and showing full confidence in her abilities and accomplishments. She writes, “No doubt the best thing she [Borroff] did for women… was simply to set herself in the middle of an all-male world as a person of the highest accomplishment, never faltering, never compromising, never making anything of her solitary position, and demonstrating by her unwavering excellence that she belonged.”

The poem below, written by Borroff, describes her daily walks to campus from her home, listening to the chapel bells chime at the Divinity School and reflecting on the passage of time. For a reading of this poem and commentary by Borroff herself, see the podcast “Poetry Readings by Marie Borroff.”

In Range of Bells
(for Richard Brodhead)

I walk in range of bells
Where silence (one
By one) marks off each stroke that tells
time ended, time begun.

Daily down Prospect Hill
the tally keeps (nine, ten)
telling with what a constant will
time brings me round and round again,

And brings me schoolward here
to breast the advancing line:
eyes, faces, year by year,
young, and more young than mine,

While bell on bell, borne past
as leaves blow from a tree,
tells how time’s branches hold us fast
only to cast us free.

Selected works of Marie Borroff:

  • Borroff, M. (2002). Stars and Other Signs. Yale University Press.
  • Borroff, M. (2000). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: Patience; and Pearl: Verse Translations. WW Norton.
  • Borroff, M. (1973). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: a stylistic and metrical study (No. 152). Shoe String PressInc.

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