Some institutions look so polished that nobody thinks to check what is underneath. That is the situation in "My College in the Sky," where a lone speaker smells something rotten and cannot persuade anyone to look. On the surface it is a small, comic anecdote about a college and some spoiled fruit. Underneath, it is about loneliness: the pain of seeing something clearly and being treated as a joke for saying so.
The poem has two halves, and the shift between them is sharp. The first three lines paint a gleaming picture. The college sits "High above the Canyon Freeway," buildings "Float" in "a sea of ivy," and the stone is "shiny." Everything is lifted away from ordinary traffic and ground. The sentence is also built in a lofty, slightly stiff way: the subject, "buildings," does not arrive until the third line, after its verb, as if the syntax itself were floating. Words like "numerous" and "comprise" sound like a college brochure. Ivy adds to this, since it suggests age, tradition, and prestige.
Then comes "Beneath," and the poem drops. The strawberries are "wild," so they are natural, sweet, and unplanned, the opposite of the polished campus. Yet they are "in the process of decaying," a phrase so clinical that it is funny. The speaker reports the rot in the same flat, official voice the brochure might use, which makes the situation feel absurd. There is also a quiet pun in "lie." The strawberries lie beneath the ivy, but the pleasant surface lies too, in the sense of deceiving.
The students' mistake is revealing. They "think the smell comes from a broken gas-main." A gas leak is man-made and mechanical, the kind of problem a modern institution would expect, so they reach for an explanation that fits the world of freeways and pipes. Oddly, even that explanation does not alarm them. They simply put up with the smell. The poem suggests a comfortable, incurious community that would rather sniff and shrug than look down.
The poem uses no rhyme and no regular meter. The lines are plain and mostly end-stopped, and each one delivers a single flat statement, which gives the speaker an earnest, reporting tone. That tone is what makes the middle lines hurt. "I have tried to spread the news of the strawberries" echoes the earlier line "Few students know about the strawberries," and the word "news" makes the speaker sound like a town crier, or a prophet. The semicolon that follows leans into the rebuff: "But the students only smile." That word "only" is full of condescension. The smile is polite and dismissive, and the next line makes it worse: "And when my back is turned, they laugh." Being laughed at behind one's back is a small cruelty, and the poem delivers it without comment.
The ending is the most carefully handled part. The last two lines are not a full sentence: "If I could just get a few of them / To look under the ivy with me." The wish never gets a result clause, so it hangs unfinished, like the buildings in the sky. The ambition has also shrunk. The speaker no longer hopes to convince the college, only "a few of them," and the word "just" makes the request sound almost pleading. The closing words, "with me," show what he really wants. It is less to be proved right than to stop being alone with what he knows. The ivy that opened the poem returns here, now as something to be looked *under*, so the poem ends where it began, but at ground level.
One thing the poem never settles is whether the speaker can be trusted. We only hear his account, and no one else confirms the strawberries. He could be a truth-teller ignored by the crowd, or an eccentric the students have understandably stopped listening to. Leaving that open is what keeps the poem from becoming a simple complaint.
The poem is worth reading because it turns a familiar situation into one image. Many people have noticed a hidden problem in a school, a workplace, or a community and been met with a smile. By choosing something as small and sweet as strawberries, the poem makes the rot feel both ridiculous and sad, a loss no one else will admit to.