The actor Simon Callow is intelligent and conscientious, too, but he claims to find learning lines more of a struggle. ‘It’s a matter of battling through,’ he says. And in case when it comes to line-learning you think you may be more Callow than Jacobi, here is a battle plan for you: eleven specific strategies to help you master the poems you want to learn.
1. Repetition, repetition, repetition
Learn one line at a time and learn two lines in a day. Repeat tomorrow what you learnt today. Do as much of it as possible out loud.
2. Analyse and understand each line as you learn it
Look up words and references you don’t know. Check pronunciations if you are uncertain about them. The clearer you are about what you are learning the easier it will be to learn it.
3. Find a friend
The actor Sir Simon Russell Beale learns his lines with the help of his friend, Susie. They sit facing one another. She checks the line as he learns it. She corrects him when he goes wrong. She prompts him when he hesitates. The actress Dame Judi Dench learns her lines the same way, with the help of her friend, Pen. Learning a poem with a friend is a good idea. Your friend can either simply listen to you and prompt you, or you can both learn the same poem and test each other as you progress.
4. Write it down
Copying out your poem is a good idea. The actor Sir Lenny Henry recommends writing out your lines at least ten times – not typing them out, writing them out. The act of putting the words on paper with pen or pencil helps embed them in the brain. The late, great Sir Ralph Richardson when appearing in a play used to write out all his speeches on separate scraps of paper and stick them up all over his dressing room.
5. Walk as you talk
Walk around your room – or your garden, if you have one – or a field – or a car park – or anywhere where there is space to move and you won’t feel self-consciously conspicuous – and speak your lines out loud as you move, turning sharply in a different direction at the end of every line.
I wandered lonely as a Cloud Turn right
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills, Turn left
When all at once I saw a crowd, Turn right
A host of golden Daffodils; Turn left
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees, Turn right
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Turn left
6. Visualize what you are saying
Picture what you are saying in your mind’s eye and look in the appropriate direction as you speak.
I wandered lonely as a Cloud Look up into the sky
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills, Look ahead towards the hills
When all at once I saw a crowd, Look somewhere closer to you
A host of golden Daffodils; Look down
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees, Picture the lake
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Feel the breeze
7. Rhyme and reason
If there are rhymes in your poem, use them. Note how they work:
I wandered lonely as a Cloud ‘a’ rhyme
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills, ‘b’ rhyme
When all at once I saw a crowd, ‘a’ rhyme
A host of golden Daffodils; ‘b’ rhyme
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees, ‘c’ rhyme
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. ‘c’ rhyme
‘Cloud’ will give you ‘crowd’; ‘Hills’ will prompt ‘Daffodils’; ‘trees’ will make it a ‘breeze’.
8. Work on your trouble-spots
If there are words that keep tripping you up, or phrases where you always stall, stop and devise a way through the trouble-spot. For example, when I first tried to learn William Wordsworth’s famous poem I always got stuck at ‘o’er Vales and Hills’. I hesitated. Hesitation made me think of um-ing and er-ing, and the ‘er’ in ‘er-ring’ reminded me that the word I was looking for was ‘o’er’. It sounds convoluted, but it worked. Similarly, in the fifth line I could never remember if it was the lake or the trees that came first. I know now it’s the lake that comes first, because, alphabetically, ‘l’, the first letter of ‘lake’, comes before ‘t’, the first letter of ‘trees’. If you have a problem with a line or a word, find your own personal way to overcome it. Is it ‘dancing and fluttering in the breeze’ or the other way around? As you say the line, look first at your fingers and picture them fluttering, then look down at your feet and picture them dancing.
9. Mnemonics
In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne was the goddess of memory, the daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth), and, if I remember right, the mother (by Zeus) of the nine Muses. A mnemonic is a device to help you remember things.
‘Memory masters’ – magicians and the like who perform feats of memory, recalling the names of scores of people having been introduced to them just once, for example – use the ‘Memory Palace’ as an elaborate mnemonic device. They create a virtual ‘palace’ in their mind’s eye with a series of rooms and specific pieces of furniture within each room. They then attach the items they want to remember to the items in the rooms as they travel through the palace. It is less complicated than it sounds and if you want to explore its possibilities there are podcasts and websites galore out there to help you. I have a simplified version of the idea that I use to help me learn sonnets (see the beginning of Chapter Five on page 81), but, for learning a poem by heart – as opposed to a series of random names or words or numbers – I don’t believe the Memory Palace is very useful.
When you are learning a poem you can devise your own mnemonics to help you overcome individual challenges. For example, if you have difficulty remembering that it’s ‘A host of golden Daffodils’ at the beginning of the fourth line, make the smell of lightly burnt toast your mnemonic. You will get to the line, you will smell the toast, it’s golden brown, and ‘toast’ rhymes with ‘host’, and immediately you’re there, where you need to be, with ‘A host of golden Daffodils’. Associating a word with a smell is a good form of mnemonic. Associating a word with a physical movement or with a specific standing position or with a physical touch works well, too. For example, if ‘trees’ is your stumbling block, touch wood when you get to it – or spread out the five fingers on your right hand. There are five letters in the word ‘trees’ and, holding up your hand, your five fingers remind you of five trees standing in a row.
You can use people as mnemonics, too:
I wandered lonely as a Cloud Think of yourself when you’ve been lonely – or another loner if you prefer
That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills, Think of someone you know who is fat: ‘floats’ rhymes with ‘bloats’
When all at once I saw a crowd, Think of the last party you went to
A host of golden Daffodils; Think of your host
Beside the Lake, beneath the trees, Think of you being lonely again, smoking a cigarette beside the lake, beneath the trees
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Think of the party crowd up at the house, dancing on the lawn
The trick with a mnemonic is to make it personal. The closer it is to you, the quicker it will trigger the required memory.
10. Enjoy the journey
Almost every poem takes you on a journey of sorts – some, obviously, rather shorter than others. Whatever the journey, be aware of it. As you travel through your poem, look at each line or phrase or thought as a stepping stone – or as a stop on a country railway ride. If you are conscious of the journey you are taking, wherever you are it will help you know where you are going next.
11. Sleep on it
There is plenty of research to suggest that sleep helps boost learning – and not only a good night’s sleep, but also a sixty-to ninety-minute post-learning nap. With an hour-long sleep, information absorbed into short-term storage in the hippocampus gets bedded into the prefrontal cortex where you will be needing it for executive action … the executive action in question being the speaking of the poem you have learnt by heart.
&nb
sp; We will get to the fun of ‘the performing bit’ in due course. Let’s start learning some poems now. It’s time for the work-out. Kindly turn the page and join me in the gym.
Take a Poem
by James Carter
(born 1959)
Why not take a poem
wherever you go?
Pop it in your pocket
nobody will know
Take it to your classroom
stick it on the wall
tell them about it
read it in the hall
Take it to the bathroom
tuck it up in bed
take the time to learn it
keep it in your head
Take it for a day trip
take it on a train
fold it as a hat
when it starts to rain
Take it to a river
fold it as a boat
pop it on the water
hope that it will float
Take it to a hilltop
fold it as a plane
throw it up skywards
time and time again
Take it to a mailbox
send it anywhere
out into the world
with
tender
loving
care.
CHAPTER FOUR
There Was a Young Man from PeruWhose limericks stopped at line two
Welcome to the poetry gym.
To get you going, to warm you up, here are some little poems by some big names.
For many years, the shortest poem in the English language was reckoned to be the nine-letter couplet by the American poet Strickland Gillilan (1869–1954). The poem’s full title is ‘Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes’, but it is also known simply as ‘Fleas’:
Adam
Had ’em
A few years ago, I came up with a rhyming verse to rival Gillilan’s masterpiece. When my children were small we kept a lot of pets. We had a sophisticated French poodle called Phydeaux and a lovely mongrel who thought his name was Down Boy. We kept hamsters, but they kept dying on us. (I wanted to put their remains through the blender and lay them to rest on the flowerbeds, having heard you get tulips from hamster jam, but my wife wouldn’t have it.) We kept a goldfish, too, called Spot, but he died as well – eaten by Oscar, our cat, who was wild, though by no means as bad as his brothers, Thornton, Billy and Gene, who were wilder. (Thornton was a crafty cat, with a penchant for cheddar: he’d sit by the mouse-hole with baited bated breath.) Anyway, one day Oscar ate Spot, and at a family memorial gathering in the garden we remembered him, and I recited my poem in his memory. I believe it is the shortest rhyming poem in the language.
Ode to a Goldfish
by Gyles Brandreth
(born 1948)
Oh
Wet
Pet!
Another, more distinguished poet came up with a poem that may not have the powerful rhyme of mine, but has quite as much impact and is unquestionably shorter:
The Lover Writes a One-Word Poem
by Gavin Ewart
(1916–95)
You!
But we were both outclassed when the illustrator and poet, Colin McNaughton, came up with this:
Ode to the Invisible Man
by Colin McNaughton
(born 1951)
Among the easiest short poems to learn by heart are limericks, simply because we are familiar with the form and the aabba rhyming pattern. According to the dictionary on my desk, ‘the five-line nonsense poem known as the Limerick originated with the eighteenth-century ale-house chorus, “Will you come up to Limerick?”’ Not so. Limericks of a sort have been around for centuries. This one, for example, is more than five hundred years old:
Ewe bleateth after lamb,
Low’th after calf too.
Bullock starteth
Bucke farteth –
Merry sing Cuckoo!
The great popularizer of the limerick was the Victorian artist and poet, Edward Lear (1812–88). These are five of his favourites:
There was an Old Person of Ischia,
Whose conduct grew friskier and friskier;
He danced hornpipes and jigs,
And ate thousands of figs,
That lively Old Person of Ischia.
There was an Old Man in a boat,
Who said, ‘I’m afloat, I’m afloat!’
When they said, ‘No! you ain’t!’
He was ready to faint,
That unhappy Old Man in a boat.
There was an Old Person of Ewell,
Who chiefly subsisted on gruel;
But to make it more nice,
He inserted some mice,
Which refreshed that Old Person of Ewell.
There is a Young Lady whose nose
Continually prospers and grows;
When it grew out of sight,
She exclaimed in a fright,
‘Oh! Farewell to the end of my nose!’
There was an Old Person of Dean,
Who dined on one pea and one bean;
For he said, ‘More than that
Would make me too fat,’
That cautious Old Person of Dean.
Lear’s limericks are underrated nowadays, largely because the fifth line often replays the first and we live in an age that craves novelty at every turn. That said:
Although at the limericks of Lear
We may be tempted to sneer
We should never forget
That we owe him a debt
For his work as the first pioneer
Lear gave drawing lessons to Queen Victoria. He was a respectable fellow and his line in limericks reflects that. A sense of propriety (and the age of political correctness) prevents me from reproducing most of the limericks that I know by heart. That’s the problem:
The limerick is furtive and mean
You must keep it in close quarantine
Or it sneaks to the slums
And quickly becomes
Disorderly, drunk and obscene
Happily, that’s not the case with this one, by Michael Palin (born 1943):
A handsome young fellow called Frears
Was attracted to girls by their ears
He’d traverse the globe
In search of a lobe,
And the sight would reduce him to tears.
The first short poems I learnt by heart were some of the ‘Ruthless Rhymes’ of Harry Graham (1874–1936):
In the drinking-well
(Which the plumber built her)
Aunt Eliza fell, –
We must buy a filter.
Father heard his children scream,
So he threw them in the stream,
Saying, as he drowned the third,
‘Children should be seen, not heard!’
Billy, in one of his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and was burnt to ashes;
Now, although the room grows chilly,
I haven’t the heart to poke poor Billy.
Baby in the cauldron fell, –
See the grief on Mother’s brow;
Mother loved her darling well, –
Darling’s quite hard-boiled by now.
The Japanese haiku is an elegant short poetic form, presenting a thought (usually on a theme connected with nature) using exactly seventeen syllables in three contrasting phrases (with five, seven and five syllables in successive phrases). The haiku has been around for a thousand years. Matsuo Bash–o (1644–94) is considered by many the master. Nature was his central theme:
An old silent pond …
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again.
In the twilight rain
these brilliant-hued hibiscus –
A lovely sunset
Unfortunately with some of Bash–o’s most evocative haikus, the five/seven/five syllable pattern gets lost in translation:
Bitten by fleas and lice
I slept in
a bed
A horse urinating close by my pillow
Here are three created by Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), credited with reviving the haiku in the nineteenth century and tolerating a looser approach to the form in which the 5/7/5 phrasing is not compulsory:
After killing
a spider, how lonely I feel
in the cold of night!
Night; and once again,
the while I wait for you, cold wind
turns into rain.
A lightning flash:
between the forest trees
I have seen water.
When trying to get to sleep, I find reciting haikus – and, even, trying to compose them – quite helpful. This one, which fails the strict seventeen-syllable test, is by Richard Wright (1908–60):
From across the lake,
Past the black winter trees,
Faint sounds of a flute.
This is by the contemporary performance poet, John Cooper Clarke (born 1949):
TO-CON-VEY ONE’S MOOD
IN SEV-EN-TEEN SYLL-ABLE-S
IS VE-RY DIF-FIC
This last one is my favourite. A number of people claim to have written it. I wish I had.
Dancing by the Light of the Moon Page 5
