The poet is remembering his initial reaction to the news of his father's death. He had just turned ten and realised that he could use his bereavement to gain a temporary release from bullying and a brief period at the center of attention.
I don't really relate to any of this poem, never having had a close relative die, been physically bullied or enjoyed having all eyes "turned towards me". However, I do like "brown tobacco jar/Splintered at once in tears". Good "ooh" metaphor (the "ooh" techniques are the ones I referred to at the end of my first response to It Was Long Ago; I give them this name because they make you go "ooh"). The rest of the poem is not terribly exciting.
The main thing I recall about this poem now is its starkness. As far as I can remember, the first line is "'Your father's dead,' my bald headmaster said." What a great beginning. [Quite apart from the brutal content of the line, it has internal rhyme!] The poem continues in this vein with increasingly disconcerting images of grief which completely fail to correlate with any socially accepted reaction. Strangely enough I am shocked by these more, not less, now that I'm older.
And yet, despite the narrator's insistence early on that "it wasn't grief", somehow it's clear from the poem that he is truly grieving. The fact that "pride, like a goldfish, flashed a sudden fin" doesn't detract from the portrayal of his grief, and the poem is all the more poignant for acknowledging the foreign emotions which the boy knows he should not be feeling.
By the time we'd finished studying The Lesson in class I had actually grown to like it, and I still do like it. The thing which really won me over was its rhyme structure - irregular, yet still rhyming in places. Like grief itself in a way.
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