Our poetry theme this month is ‘Poetry learnt by heart – what do we remember learning at school and/or later that has stayed with us?’ This is a topic that allows us to consider the value of learning words by heart; what poetry means to us and perhaps indulge in a little nostalgic trip down memory lane back to school days. I thought it fun to look up ‘poetry’ in the Oxford English Dictionary and this is what it says:
poetry (noun): literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm … late Middle English: from medieval Latin poetria ‘poet’. In early use the word sometimes referred to creative literature in general.
This theme was chosen by Christine A.
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Christine A:
One of the aspects I like about poems learnt by heart years ago is how snatches of them pop up in my mind when the circumstances are right.
For instance when it was snowing heavily a couple of Sundays ago these lines from Thomas Hardy’s ‘Snow in the Suburbs’ came to mind:
Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot
Very economically describing exactly what was in front of me.
The familiarity of lines committed to memory can be heartening in strange circumstances. In the pressure-cooker environment of the morning commute I looked up and read the ‘Poem in the Underground’ above me. It was Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘The Windhover’ last seen when I had wrestled to learn it aged 16. It was like meeting an old friend giving me instant uplift. Here’s a taster:
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn drawn falcon in his
riding of the rolling level underneath him steady air
As with the Thomas Hardy poem, it helped me look at the natural world with fresh eyes – knowing that the Windhover is in fact a European Kestrel, which I see occasionally when out in the countryside, I notice particularly how they are just riding the air as Hopkins describes – his riding of the rolling level underneath him steady air.
Melvyn Bragg and guests did a very good In Our Timeon Gerard Manley Hopkins where ‘The Windhover’ was discussed and recited. Link here BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Final choice is a group of poems which while not actually learned by heart, by virtue of reading and rereading I have got to know them well. When I lived in Italy the only book in English I was able to buy in the small town where I lived was Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In my yearning to read something English, on my afternoon off I would take the book into the park and read it avidly. Years later couplets spring to mind as the occasion demands, for example on arriving at the top of a ski station first thing in one morning:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain top with sovereign eye
A very contemporary experience given resonance by 17th century writing:
Centuries hence,
take a line of verse
from its paper frame
and bring back time! *
Poems recalled are such a treasure trove – I’m glad I was ‘forced’ to learn them.
*(From Conversations with a Tax Collector about Poetry)
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Tim:
I attended a remarkably enlightened primary school as far as poetry and great artists were concerned to age of 9. Learning by heart continued at a less enlightened prep school, memory sharpened by the ever present cane! A few that come to mind:
I remember, I remember ,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came creeping in at morn:
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day,
But, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!
3 more verses …
By now ‘tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from heav’n
Than when I was a boy.
Thomas Hood (1799-1845)
Cargoes
Verse 3….after two romantic ships :
Dirty British coaster with salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal ,
Road-rails, pig lead, Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.
John Masefield (1878-1967)
The Donkey
verse 4:
Fools! For I also had my hour:
One far fierce hour and sweet :
There was a shout about my ears,
And palms before my feet.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
… which of course is why all donkeys have a cross on their backs.
Up-Hill
Does the road wind up-hill the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole day long?
From morn to night my friend.
. . .Will there be beds for me and all who seek /
Yea, beds for all who come
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Whom we visited some weeks ago “Remember” ???
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Kay:
I remember that as a child at school we had to learn a lot of things by heart: poetry, lines from plays and novels to quote in essays during exam time. I wasn’t sure whether kids have to do that these days, but when I checked with my teacher daughter-in-law, happily she told me they did. I think there’s much to be gained from learning the written word by heart; it feels to me like a kind of grounding that centres you and you can always come back to. There’s almost a spiritual quality to it, sitting quietly reciting words that are so well known they rise from the subconscious, bringing a moment of peace and reflection. Having said that, I have to admit to struggling a bit to get any of it to come back to me right now … there’s quite a lot of Hamlet in my head as I did it for A Level and have seen in many times in the theatre, and who can ever forget ‘To be or not to be’, ‘The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ and ‘When sorrows come they come, not single spies, but in battalions’. The poem that always comes to me first is John Keats’ ‘To Autumn’. I even still have my book of Keats’ poetry from my school days, with my name written in the front and ‘Lower III’ – so I must have been about 10 or 11.
To Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.
I’ve loved that poem for over 50 years and the first lines do actually come into my head quite often. It’s so full of life and abundance that it seems to overflow with a kind of love. Of course, Keats himself never saw his autumn years, dying at the tragically young age of 26. One of the saddest experiences of my journeys in Italy was going to the Keats-Shelley Memorial House in Rome at the bottom of the Spanish Steps and reading his letters where he wrote of feeling he’d made nothing of his life. And there I was, almost 200 years later, finding such delight in being where he’d stood, looking out of the window from the room where he’d died, seeing what he’d written in his own hand in frames across the walls, and remembering that beautiful poem.
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Ted:
Here are some snippets of remembered poems from school. I had a wonderful English teacher!
Sonnet XVIII by William Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into forest dim:
Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on…
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal – yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair !
Meeting Point by Louis Macneice
Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with one pulse
[ Somebody stopped the moving stairs]:
Time was away and somewhere else.
Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
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Doreen:
Here’s a poem that stays with one:
When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
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Margaret:
Poetry learnt by heart is usually a childhood memory. I can only recall deliberately learning a whole poem as an adult on a few occasions. Occasionally, a Burns Supper leads to a frantic revision of some old favourite, and a slightly giddy time of re-acquainting myself with broad Scots dialect words – an example, ‘Tae a Moose’. I also recall a crucifying invitation to a Norwegian mid-summer festivity, at which, I was informed, every guest had to perform something. I found myself learning a poem about young love, whilst everyone else was performing charade-like pieces, singing bawdily in groups or, dancing… The poem, I can’t remember it now, but it was a good one, sank without trace in the jollity that had been built up by the time I crept onto the little dais. Awful, never again …
So, here instead, is a fond memory from school of a Walter de la Mare piece, ‘The Listeners’. The writer’s empathetic feeling for children, or the young, is always clear in his work. In his favourite themes of childhood, fantasy and the numinous, commonplace objects and events are invested with mystery, and often with an undercurrent of melancholy. My class was blessed with a wonderful, expressive English teacher who was able to bring feeling to everything he introduced. Here it is:
‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door:
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood, perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head: –
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.
It is difficult to stop quoting when the moments of this quiet, sad, scene are so intricately bound up together. De la Mare’s gift for atmosphere, and the onward thrust of the action are perfectly presented here. How palpable are these listeners to the class being read to by the soft, relentless voice of that teacher. They know, at that moment, that listeners exist. They know too, with a shiver, that answers are not always easily found – that the Traveller must leave, forever unsatisfied.
We none of us minded having to learn this poem. Snatches of it come to me still.
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Christine B:
Like everyone I know ‘Daffodils’ and ‘The Lady of Shalott’ but I will bet a Pound to Penny that no one will choose St. Agnes’ Eve, not the Fantastic Keats one, but the other one.
St. Agnes’ Eve by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Deep on the convent roof the snows
Are sparkling to the moon,
My breath to Heaven like vapour goes;
May my soul follow soon.
The shadow of the convent towers
Slant down the snowy sward
Still creeping hours that lead me to my Lord;
Make Thou my spirit pure and clear
As are the frosty skies,
Or this first snowdrop of the year
That in my bosom lies.
There are two more verses if you want to read to the end.
I was twelve when this poem overwhelmed me.
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Louise:
I’d like to say I can remember erudite poems, but apart from the immortal lines from Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’,
She left the web, she left the loom
She took three paces through the room
She look down on Camelot
Out flew the web and opened wide
The Curse is come upon me cried
The Lady of Shalott
all my learned lines are from comic poetry that my father introduced me to, notably Ogden Nash (especially, ‘Two Dogs Have I’) and the poem I was named after (not the real name),
Cats have Kittens
Dogs have puppies
But guppies just have little guppies (I was called the Guppy for a long time)
There was also an adorable set of comic and ironic poems about tea in a much-thumbed book I still have. Without looking up the book, the one I always remembered began ‘Come little country girl, and will you have a cup of tea’ which I think was by William Wordsworth or T.S. Eliot, there was also one by ‘Rabbie’ Burns.
But the one that has stuck forever is from ‘Verse and Worse’ and is my party trick to recite:
‘Twas an evening in November by Anonymous
‘Twas an evening in November,
As I very well remember,
I was strolling down the street in drunken pride,
But my knees were all a-flutter,
So I landed in the gutter,
And a pig came up and lay down by my side.
Yes, I lay there in the gutter,
Thinking thoughts I could not utter,
When a colleen passing by did softly say:
‘Ye can tell a man that boozes
By the company he chooses.’
At that the pig got up and walked away!
I manage an acceptable Irish accent while reciting.
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Do please let us know what poems you remember reading by heart in Comments.
Richmond Hill Reading @ The Roebuck 