The first four lines of “In Mrs. Tilscher’s Class” establish the poem’s theme and its form. The poem begins with the speaker describing the comfortable, pleasurable routines of life in Mrs. Tilscher’s classroom. In lines 1-4 ("You could travel [...] Khartoum. Aswân"), the speaker focuses on a geography lesson in which Mrs. Tilscher describes the course of the Nile as it runs through Africa. The speaker finds this relaxing and pleasant—in part, simply, because of the way Mrs. Tilscher delivers the lecture. Her voice is soothing and musical; the speaker describes it as a “chant,” almost a song.
In describing this lecture, the speaker addresses someone, calling that person simply “you.” Though the speaker never explicitly says so, it seems clear that this “you” is the speaker themselves. In other words, the speaker is an adult reflecting back on their time in school. The recollection is so powerful that the speaker begins to address their younger self, calling them “you.” This suggests that the speaker feels very distant from their youth: so much so that, when the speaker thinks of childhood, it’s almost like it happened to a different person.
The poem is written in free verse: it has no set rhyme scheme or meter. But the speaker uses other formal elements to carefully reconstruct the experience of being a child—in these lines, the experience of listening to Mrs. Tilscher lecture about the Nile. For example, the first two lines of the poem are enjambed. As a result, the sentence flows across the line breaks, just like the river Mrs. Tilscher describes. And the alliterative /t/ sound that appears in “travel,” “tracing,” and “Tilscher” further binds the lines together, making them even more liquid and smooth—while also giving the reader a taste of the chant-like quality of Mrs. Tilscher’s voice.
In line 4, the speaker uses four sentence fragments, each of which names a location on the Nile: "Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswân." The speaker doesn’t use a word like “then” or “next” to establish the relationship between these places, so these fragments are an example of parataxis. The reader has to figure out for themselves how they are connected. The speaker will rely on parataxis throughout the poem. Though it means different things at different points, here it mimics the speaker’s childhood experience of the lecture: grabbing on to certain things, ignoring the rest. In other words, the parataxis mimics the way children think and speak, jumping between ideas without always articulating the connections between them.