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| Brad Leithauser |
Actually,
if the process has altered over the years, perhaps we feel the difficulties of
the task more acutely than our ancestors did. As a college professor of writing
and literature, I regularly impose memorization assignments, and I’m struck by
how burdensome my students typically find them. Give them a full week to
memorize any Shakespeare sonnet (“Hey,” I tell them, “pick a really famous
one—Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?—and you’ve already got the first
line down”), and a number of them will painfully falter. They’re not used to
memorizing much of anything.
In
what would have been my prime recitation years had I been born in an earlier
era—junior high and high school—little memorization was required of me. But in
early boyhood I did a fair amount of it. My mother, who had literary ambitions,
paid me a penny a line to memorize poems. The first one I mastered was Tennyson’s
“The Eagle” (“He clasps the crag with crooked hands”), which brought in a haul
of six cents. Opportunistically, I moved on to the longer “Casey at the Bat”
(“It looked extremely rocky for the Mudville nine that day”) and Byron’s “The
Destruction of Sennacherib” (whose title I mispronounced for decades), which
netted me fifty-two cents and twenty-four cents respectively. Some Longfellow,
some Frost. I straggled through Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and enough of his “The
Ancient Mariner” to purchase a couple of candy bars.
It
sounds whimsical and entertaining now, but I suspect some dead-serious counsel
lay behind my mother’s beaming encouragement. I think she was tacitly saying,
“Stick with poetry—that’s where the money is.”
It
turned out to be levelheaded advice. Today, I pay my bills by talking to my
students about poetry, and about stories and novels and essays—ultimately,
about memorable cadences, about the music that occasionally lifts off of words
carefully deployed on a page.
* * *
It’s
tempting to sentimentalize an era in which poetry—memorized, recited
poetry—held so prominent a place in the culture. But its once-substantial role
turns out to be a mixed and complicated tale, as thoroughly chronicled in
Catherine Robson’s new “Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem.”
Reared in England, now a professor at N.Y.U., Robson compares classroom
procedures in Britain and the United States during the years when recitation
held a sizeable and official slot in the curriculum (roughly 1875 to 1950). The
rationales for verse recitation were many and sometimes mutually contradictory:
to foster a lifelong love of literature; to preserve the finest accomplishments
in the language down the generations; to boost self-confidence through a
mastery of elocution; to help purge the idioms and accents of lower-class
speech; to strengthen the brain through exercise; and so forth. And the
construction of a canon—the choice of which poems ought to be assigned to
students at various grade levels—grew out of a collision of nationalistic zeal,
piety, commercial enterprise (the success or failure of various competitive
“readers”—what we would call textbooks), thoughtless imitation, and a fair
amount of what looks like happenstance.
Robson
grounds her book with three “case studies.” (She occasionally takes on a dry,
clinical tone.) The first is Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca,” a poem that
survives today largely as a first line (“The boy stood on the burning deck”),
with a vague suspicion that what follows has often been parodied. (Poor Tom
Sawyer was afflicted by it in the classroom.) The second may be the most
celebrated of eighteenth-century English poems, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in
a Country Churchyard.” The third is a poem previously unknown to me, Charles
Wolfe’s charming ballad “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” Each poem
was at one time universally embraced, both by society and by educators.
“The
Burial of Sir John Moore” has a likably homespun texture and offers, from a
pedagogical standpoint, a salutary lesson about the triumph of courage over
grandeur. (General Moore died, in 1809, in Spain, while leading his troops to a
magnificent long-shot victory over the French, and his last words were, “I hope
my country will do me justice.” Military exigency did not allow time for a
suitable burial—a lack for which the poem seeks to indemnify him.) But the
other two poems look like extremely peculiar candidates for widespread
memorization. The forty-line “Casabianca,” which was put to memory by countless
pre-adolescents, is grotesquely grisly: it tells the tale of a boy sailor who,
while prudence is shouting at him to beat a hasty retreat, dutifully remains at
his post (“he would not go / Without his Father’s word; / That father, faint in
death below, / His voice no longer heard”), and, as a consequence, is blown to
smithereens. As for Gray’s lovely, leisurely, dusky elegy, nothing much happens
in its hundred and twenty-eight lines, and, as a result, his many scene-setting
stanzas are easily confused and transposed by the would-be memorizer; to hold
it all in one’s head is a somewhat perverse feat, like those jigsaw-puzzle
aficionados who, finding their task insufficiently challenging, put the puzzle
together face-side-down.
Though
“Casabianca” and “The Burial of Sir John Moore” are actually nineteenth-century
poems, they partake of that misty, moss-and-granite melancholy one associates
with those of Gray’s contemporaries known as the Graveyard Poets (or the
Boneyard Boys). These were a pallid bunch, for whom cemeteries were what bars
and brothels would be for many French poets of the nineteenth century—a comfy
home away from home. They were continually reminding us that we all have one
foot in the grave. It’s a weighty burden to drop on the scrawny shoulders of
some ten-year-old boy or girl, standing hunched and terrified before a
scowling, correction-bent teacher.
* * *
My
late colleague Joseph Brodsky, who died in 1996, used to appall his students by
requiring them to memorize something like a thousand lines each semester. He
felt he was preparing them for the future; they might need such verses later in
life. His own biography provided a stirring example of the virtues of mental
husbandry. He’d been grateful for every scrap of poetry he had in his head
during his enforced exile in the Arctic, banished there by a Soviet government
that did not know what to do with his genius and that, in a symbolic embrace of
a national policy of brain drain, expelled him from the country in 1972.
Brodsky
was a nonpareil in various ways, not least in being the only teacher I knew who
continued to smoke during class as the air-purifying nineties rolled around. He
loved to recite poetry. The words emerged through smoke, and a thick Russian
accent, but the conviction and import were unmistakable: to take a poem to
heart was to know it by heart.
I’m
struck by how, in the seventeen years since his death, the meaning and
justifications for verse memorization have shifted. The effort in its
acquisition may be the same, but we’d be naïve to suppose the necessity behind
it is unaltered.
Memorized
poems are a sort of larder, laid up against the hungers of an extended period
of solitude. But today we are far less solitary than we were even a few years
ago. Anyone equipped with a smartphone—many of my friends would never step
outdoors without one—commands a range of poetry that beggars anything the brain
can store. Let’s say it’s a gorgeous afternoon in October. You’re walking
through a park, and you wish to recall—but can’t quite summon—the opening lines
of Keats’ “To Autumn.” With a quick tap-tap-tap, you have it on your screen.
You’re back in the nineteenth century, but you’re also in the twenty-first,
where machine memory regularly supplants and superannuates brain memory.
So
why undergo the laborious process of memorizing a poem these days, when—tap,
tap, tap—you have it at your fingertips? Has this become another outmoded
practice? When I was a Boy Scout, in the sixties, I spent some hours trying to
learn Morse code and even, on a couple of overly sunny, headachey afternoons,
trying to communicate by flag semaphore. Some things were meant to disappear.
(And many of my students wish that assignments to memorize poems would follow
them.)
The
best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge
of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem
inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a
deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the
point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the
rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.”
After
all this time, I still have every word of Tennyson’s “Eagle.” He’s a literal
part of me, which perhaps accounts for his splendid supremacy in my
imagination. No other bird I’ve encountered in poems since—not Keats’
nightingale, or Hardy’s thrush, or Frost’s oven bird, or Clampitt’s
kingfisher—can compete with him, roosting as he does in an aerie at the top of the
world. Here’s the poem in entirety:
He clasps the crag
with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
Six
cents. It was a cheap thrill, and an everlasting one.
(source : newyorker.com)
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