Learning poetry by heart and speaking it to your child can give your child a better start in life.
Learning poetry by heart can exercise your mind, boost your brainpower, and help keep dementia at bay.
Do you need more to convince you to pick a poem to learn right now – this moment, immediately?
You do? I’m surprised. But I’m ready.
A dozen other things a poem can do for you
A poem is a good companion. You’ll never be alone if you’ve got a poem in your head. If you’ve got nothing to say to yourself, a poem will say something to you.
A poem can be a comforting link with the past. Many of the poems we remember best are the poems we learnt first. They have remained good companions all our lives.
A poem can be a challenge. What’s it all about? It’s good to stretch your mind.
A poem can stretch your vocabulary, too. When you are reading Milton, given his way with words and range of references, the googling never stops.
A poem can help you get to sleep. Reciting a poem about sheep is a more satisfying way to nod off than counting them. (I recommend Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Lambs of Grasmere’, page 129.)
A poem can be an ice-breaker. ‘Do you have a favourite poem? You don’t? You must. I do. No, what’s yours? You go first. “Ozymandias”? Really? You must be joking. Why?’
A poem can help you secure the partner of your dreams. (Oh yes it can: see Chapter Twelve on page 242.)
A poem can do stuff that prose can’t. A poem can be elusive, elliptical, illogical, ambiguous, nonsensical, fantastical, phantasmagorical; it can create music and mood and magic and mystery as much as meaning. The American poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) said: The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.
A poem can offer consolation – and catharsis.
A poem can make you laugh.
A poem can make you feel. According to T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), ‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.’
A poem can make you think.
Whenever the question ‘What does poetry do?’ or ‘What is it for?’ is raised, I have no hesitation in replying that poetry is central to our culture, and that it is capable of being the most powerful and transformative of the arts.
There are poems that have, literally, changed my life, because they have changed the way I looked at and listened to the world; there are poems that, on repeated reading, have gradually revealed to me areas of my own experience that, for reasons both personal and societal, I had lost sight of; and there are poems that I have read over and over again, knowing they contained some secret knowledge that I had yet to discover, but refused to give up on. So, at the most basic level, poetry is important because it makes us think, it opens us up to wonder and the sometimes astonishing possibilities of language. It is, in its subtle yet powerful way, a discipline for re-engaging with a world we take too much for granted.
John Burnside (born 1955)
What is poetry? According to Plutarch (c. 46–120), ‘Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.’ According to the great Romantic, William Wordsworth (1770–1850): ‘Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ According to the great American poet, Carl Sandburg (1878–1967): ‘Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance.’
It’s all that and more. And it comes in all shapes and sizes. It does not have to have either rhythm or rhyme, of course, but most of the poems that feature in my book have either or both, because poems with rhythm and rhyme are, as a rule, easier to learn by heart than those without.
Take ‘Tarantella’ by Hilaire Belloc. There can be few poems richer in rhythm and rhyme and consequently it’s a favourite with old hands at the poetry-by-heart game. The tarantella is an up-tempo Italian folk dance for two people brought on by the intoxication induced by the sting of the tarantula, a sensation, apparently, similar to that induced by falling in love.
Tarantella
by Hilaire Belloc
(1870–1953)
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark verandah)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn’t got a penny,
And who weren’t paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the Din?
And the Hip! Hop! Hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of a clapper to the spin
Out and in –
And the Ting, Tong, Tang of the Guitar.
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar:
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the Halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far Waterfall like Doom.
You don’t need to fully understand the poem to feel its power. Most people, I reckon, misunderstand the poem because they assume Miranda is a girl. It ain’t necessarily so. In fact, no one knows for sure who is the Miranda in the poem. In 1929, Belloc gave an inscribed copy of his poem to Miranda Mackintosh, the daughter of a friend, but it was not her. She was only two in 1929 and the poem refers to the time Belloc visited an inn in the Pyrenean hamlet of Canfranc on the River Aragon twenty years before, in 1909. Many years later, Miranda Mackintosh suggested that the Miranda in the poem was probably not a girl at all, but the surname of one of Belloc’s Spanish men friends – someone he went hunting with. Now you know that, read the poem again and you may find it tells you a slightly different story.
Whatever it is about, ‘Tarantella’ is undoubtedly a remarkable piece of poetry, hypnotic and evocative, and it’s because of the relentless rhythm and the rush of rhymes that it has cast a special spell over so many for so long. It’s a fun one to learn by heart.
Now take ‘The Catch’ by Simon Armitage, Britain’s latest Poet Laureate. It is a short poem about a moment in a cricket match. There is no rhyme this time, and though there is a distinct shape to the poem there isn’t an obvious rhythm in the dictionary sense of ‘a strong, regular repeated pattern of movement or sound’.
Read it as it is written, noticing the punctuation when you get to it (the commas, the semi-colon, the full stop), noticing the punctuation when it isn’t there, noticing the breaks that come after every three lines. Read the poem as it presented to you on the page, with the hint of pause at the end of each line, and a longer pause where the breaks fall. ‘The Catch’ is wonderfully evocative. It is a poem where the words and the very presentation of those words create the scene.
The Catch
by Simon Armitage
(born 1963)
Forget
the long, smouldering
afternoon. It is
this moment
when the ball scoots
off the edge
of the bat; upwards,
backwards, falling
seemingly
beyond him
yet he reaches
and picks it
out
of its loop
like
an appl
e
from a branch,
the first of the season.
CHAPTER THREE
How Do You Learn a Poem by Heart?Getting down to the nitty-gritty
First catch your hare
Famously, the recipe for hare soup in Mrs Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) begins with the line, ‘First catch your hare.’
Except it doesn’t. The line doesn’t appear in Mrs Glasse’s celebrated book – or in Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861). Nobody seems to know the origins of the line (or its variants: ‘First catch your carp’, ‘First catch your fish’, ‘First catch your dolphin’), but you get the point. Before you learn a poem, you need to choose a poem to learn.
There are hundreds of poems to choose from right here, so you could just close the book, open it again at random, and learn whatever poem your eye first hits upon: chance encounters can prove rewarding. But if you have not learnt a poem before – or not learnt one since your schooldays – my advice would be: start with something relatively short and relatively simple.
Begin by learning a poem that will give you a personal buzz – because it’s funny and you like a chuckle; because it’s profound and you are in a thoughtful frame of mind; because it does wonderful things with words and you are taken with its beauty or its ingenuity. Pick a poem whose company you think you might enjoy.
A poem you read to yourself and just the once is like a stranger briefly met and soon forgotten. A short poem you learn by heart is the stranger you begin to get to know because, having shared a cup of tea, you are now going on a train journey or a walk together. A long poem you learn by heart is a companion who is coming with you on holiday: you could be together for weeks and you will certainly be sharing the same bedroom – and standing in the shower together, too. (You will find the shower is an ace place for learning poetry by heart. Seriously.)
There are three elements to learning a poem by heart:
The understanding bit
The learning bit
The performing bit
It is possible to understand a poem and learn a poem by heart inside your head without uttering a word out loud. It is possible, but it isn’t easy. Research shows that speaking the words out loud makes them easier to remember. When you say something out loud you ‘commit’ to it in a way that you don’t when the same words are simply running through your head. And, once you have learnt the words to your poem, while you can repeat them to yourself silently in your head, there is a special satisfaction to be had from speaking them out loud.
Okay, let’s get started.
The understanding bit
Now you’ve chosen your poem, read it.
Reread it.
Read it once more – out loud.
Read it again out loud – but more slowly. (My late friend, the actor Simon Cadell, was a wine buff and he used to say you should taste a poem like you taste wine: see it – swirl it – sniff it – sip it – savour it – fill your mouth with it and let it run all around your palate before you swallow.)
Understand your poem – understand the detail. If there are specific words or references you’re not sure of, look them up in the dictionary or online.
Understand your poem – decide what you think it’s about. At least for now.
Enjoy the journey. Most worthwhile poems begin somewhere and end somewhere else. Look for the journey your poem takes. (In Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Tarantella’, the mood changes dramatically on the words ‘Never more’; in Simon Armitage’s ‘The Catch’, you can follow the cricket ball’s trajectory from line five onwards until the magical moment of the catch itself.)
Get in the mood. What is the poem’s mood? Sunny? Sober? Sweet? Sour? Mysterious? Menacing? Mournful? Elegiac? Gentle? Exhilarating? Playful? Romantic? As the man said, ‘If you cannot be the poet, be the poem.’
Look at the words on the page. Look at the way they sit there; look at the way they are punctuated; look at the way they are presented. And speak them as you find them.
Trust the poet.
Of those ten steps, the last – Trust the poet – is probably the most important. Go with the flow. Accept the poem as it is, for what it is. Learn the words and say the words, simply, directly, as you find them written on the page.
At the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, read from St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, one of the most poetic and beautiful passages from the Bible. He read it with clarity and conviction, but arguably with too much feeling. He put so much of himself and his own emphases into his speaking of the words that some people felt they ended up hearing more Blair than Bible.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.
And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.
Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,
Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;
Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;
Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Love never faileth: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.
For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13fn1
In 1987, in the run-up to his eightieth birthday, the great actor Laurence Olivier recorded a television interview with the director, Patrick Garland. Towards the end of the recording, Garland handed Olivier a poem by Philip Larkin and asked him to read it on camera. Olivier did so. The reading was impeccable: affecting, arresting, moving. When he had finished, Olivier returned the poem to Garland, paused, and, after a moment, assuming he was now off camera, asked, ‘What the fuck was that all about?’
Olivier had simply read what he had found on the page and what he had found on the page worked.
When he was a young actor, the playwright Alan Ayckbourn appeared in a production of Harold Pinter’s play, The Birthday Party. Pinter came to see the play during rehearsals and Ayckbourn asked the author a series of questions about his character in the piece: ‘Where does he come from? Where is he going to? What can you tell me about him that will give me more understanding?’ Pinter replied: ‘Mind your own fucking business. Concentrate on what’s there.’
The learning bit
A touch of D-CAF, that’s all you need. D-CAF is a mnemonic that will remind you of what is required to learn anything by heart:
Determination
Concentration
Application
Focus
If you want to learn a poem, keep at it and you will.
You recall ‘JB’, who at the age of 58 set out to memorize John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost? He learnt 10,565 lines using what the researchers at Wesleyan University in Connecticut call ‘deliberate practice theory’. You can learn ten lines, or a hundred, or a thousand, in exactly the same way. ‘Deliberate practice theory’ simply means learning what you are learning intelligently (understanding it by analysing its structure and meaning), deliberately, carefully, methodically,
line by line, with practice, practice, practice.
Anyone can learn a couple of lines of poetry a day, which means anyone can learn a sonnet in a week, which means you could learn one of the world’s most popular poems – William Wordsworth’s twenty-four-liner about daffodils – in under a fortnight.
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
by William Wordsworth
(1770–1850)
I wandered lonely as a Cloud
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden Daffodils;
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: –
A poet could not but be gay
In such a jocund company:
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude,
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the Daffodils.
Some people find learning lines easier than others. The actor Sir Derek Jacobi is famous for his retentive memory: over the years he has managed to learn a great deal and quite quickly. Sometimes he is described in newspaper articles as having a ‘photographic memory’. Not so. Indeed, there is no scientific proof that such a phenomenon as a ‘photographic memory’ exists. Some people can certainly recall individual words or phrases by picturing where they saw them on the page, but no one can look at a page of words, click something inside their mind and subsequently recall it in its entirety at will. The brain doesn’t work that way. Sir Derek is just lucky that he absorbs the words he is trying to learn more quickly than many. He has had a lot of practice, of course. (He has appeared in more performances of Hamlet than anyone alive.) He is intelligent, too: he tries to analyse the structure and meaning of what he is learning. And he is conscientious: he keeps at it until it’s in there.
Dancing by the Light of the Moon Page 4
