Learning By Heart
Children are no longer taught to commit poems to memory, to learn, as we used to say, by heart. Indeed I am not sure how much poetry, if any, is taught anymore. I cannot remember being taught any at secondary level and that was in the 1960’s.
The art of memorizing poems or lines of poems came to me late. It was not until I was in my late teens that I learnt the pleasure to be gained by lodging evocative lines in my memory, really an extension of a love of song lyrics, particularly Bob Dylan.
The first poem I remember committing to memory was Dowson’s ‘Cynara’, a poem that George Orwell, rather snootily, described as having the charm of a pink geranium or soft centred chocolate.
“I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”
Ernest Dowson is almost completely forgotten now, though he gave us the timeless phrases ‘gone with the wind’ and ‘the days of wine and roses.’
A rather sad character, an alcoholic who died young and spent his life pining after a young woman who did not share his affection, he had a gift for the telling line that echoes down the years and invokes a peculiar melancholy.
A line remembered can suddenly broaden the canvas and enrich experience. On watching the trial and subsequent execution of Saddam Hussein one only had to think of Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes,
“He gave a name, at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral or adorn a tale.”
To know that it had all been seen before.
If poetry is no longer taught this is a little sad, though I cannot pretend to care that much, it is however a loss, a denial of something. In this Utilitarian age when everything is gauged against its value in the marketplace I suspect that poetry is seen as mere frippery, having no utility when it comes to finding a job. To invoke another line we inhabit a world that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
The art of memorizing poems or lines of poems came to me late. It was not until I was in my late teens that I learnt the pleasure to be gained by lodging evocative lines in my memory, really an extension of a love of song lyrics, particularly Bob Dylan.
The first poem I remember committing to memory was Dowson’s ‘Cynara’, a poem that George Orwell, rather snootily, described as having the charm of a pink geranium or soft centred chocolate.
“I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”
Ernest Dowson is almost completely forgotten now, though he gave us the timeless phrases ‘gone with the wind’ and ‘the days of wine and roses.’
A rather sad character, an alcoholic who died young and spent his life pining after a young woman who did not share his affection, he had a gift for the telling line that echoes down the years and invokes a peculiar melancholy.
A line remembered can suddenly broaden the canvas and enrich experience. On watching the trial and subsequent execution of Saddam Hussein one only had to think of Johnson’s The Vanity of Human Wishes,
“He gave a name, at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral or adorn a tale.”
To know that it had all been seen before.
If poetry is no longer taught this is a little sad, though I cannot pretend to care that much, it is however a loss, a denial of something. In this Utilitarian age when everything is gauged against its value in the marketplace I suspect that poetry is seen as mere frippery, having no utility when it comes to finding a job. To invoke another line we inhabit a world that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
