Learn a Poem by Heart!
And limerick isn’t the only form worth committing to memory.
I am — if I may say so myself — the proud purveyor of a vast repertoire of limericks, most of which are absolutely filthy. These keep my sanity more or less intact at those times when circumstances conspire to elicit a crushing sensation of boredom. They are, due to their structure, very easy to remember. For example:
‘The Anglican dean of Hong Kong
Had a thing that was nine inches long:
He thought that the waiters were admiring his gators
When he went to the loo. He was wrong.’
See?
But limerick is not the only form of poetry worth committing to memory. This view is now held to be quaint. It is also a victim of the same modern (but, I am hopeful, temporary) view that anything that can be grouped roughly under the heading ‘Humanities’ is frivolous and ought to be abandoned so that so-called STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — can consolidate their place at the top of the educational hierarchy. (I have written elsewhere about the general dismissal of the liberal arts as pointless (it isn’t), as well as the claim that the role of education is to raise the earning potential of its students (it isn’t).)
Limerick is not the only form of poetry worth committing to memory.
So Sir Salman Rushdie, as well as Seamus Heaney, well prove Robert Conquest’s dictum, that ‘everybody is reactionary on subjects he knows about’, to be spot on, since he has complained that abolishing the rote learning of poetry at school is a mistake. Here is Sir Salman is on the subject:
‘It is a lost thing but it is a real loss in education … It is a simple exercise that enriches the way you enjoy poems and enriches your relationship with language and once you have done it at that age it stays with you forever.’
Till fairly recently, it was taken as obvious that learning poetry by heart was a worthwhile thing to do. That something is a time-honoured practice is not enough by itself to make an undertaking worthwhile, of course; though it should at least push us to uncover its value so we can defend it in other ways. (This, by the way, is the idea captured by Chesterton’s famous fence: that we should not make reforms until the reasoning behind the existing state of things is understood. More concisely: ‘Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up’.) In my country, learning poetry by heart became a topic of peculiarly fierce debate. Michael Gove, then the Education Secretary, had proposed it as part of his reform of the National Curriculum. Predictably, it caused an outcry: learning poetry by heart was wholly regressive.
This is the idea captured by Chesterton’s famous fence: that we should not make reforms until the reasoning behind the existing state of things is understood.
Here we should refresh our memories. What we generally call culture — books, films, plays, music, etc. — is a means by which we learn how to feel. When we go to the cinema, we rehearse the emotions elicited by what we see, and so become more skilled at dealing with those emotions. We develop our emotional intelligence. Equally, we are brought into contact with our common humanity: we see that others experience what we do. And this is part of Shakespeare’s genius: the psychological and emotional core of his work is timeless. He deals with human nature. We are still prone to developing the giddy, destructive ambition of Macbeth, the control-freakery of Prospero.
Moreover, culture communicates inexpressible truths. Poetry is remarkable in that it uses language against language, which is to say that it uses words to throw light on that which lies beyond words: on love or beauty or transcendence. Every poem is a kind of rebellion against the very thing that makes it possible. And because poems are generally short, and because we can commit them to memory, we can take a poem with us, in a way that we cannot take a whole novel or a film. Like anything deep, poetry requires (and rewards) sustained and open attention. We have to be patient with it, so that it can reveal itself to us in its own time. And what it reveals to us changes, because we are part of the process, and we evolve. We bring ourselves to bear on everything we experience. We enter a dialogue with the world, governed by respect, and out of it, something truthful arises. Poetry is no different.
Like anything deep, poetry requires (and rewards) sustained and open attention. We have to be patient with it.
When we learn a poem by heart, this process is taking place all the time in our minds. How we understand the poems we commit to memory is shaped and reshaped by experience. So that when go away and return home with a different perspective, what arises in our mind is ‘And the end of all our exploring. / Will be to arrive where we started. / And know the place for the first time.’ That’s T.S. Eliot. Or when we need to find our last remaining reserves of energy, motivation and strength, perhaps what comes to mind is Kipling — ‘If you can fill the unforgiving minute / With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, / Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it, / And which is more, you will be a Man, my son’. Or perhaps Henley’s ‘Invictus’: ‘I am the master of my fate. / I am the captain of my soul.’ Or when we consider the perfect imperfections of someone we love: ‘And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare. / As any she belied with false compare.’ That’s Shakespeare. Or, musing on the evanescence of life, maybe Ezra Pound comes to mind (and this is my favourite poem, it happens):
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field-mouse
Not shaking the grass.
Of course, it doesn’t all have to be so serious. Here’s Wendy Cope:
The day that he left was terrible:
That evening, she went through hell.
His absence wasn’t the problem.
It’s just the corkscrew had gone as well.
I suspect this whole exercise—the writing of this little article—has been pointless. For, to paraphrase Madame de Sévigny, if you don’t understand, there is not much I can do for you. Rationalists, unable to draw a clear connection between learning poetry and manipulating the world — or, worse, simply making money — will likely miss the point. And the rest—those who ‘get’ poetry—never needed persuading in the first place.
