3 November 2011

Learning poems by heart - and censorship of "foreign"

A nice piece in the Guardian about the benefits of learning poems by heart at school.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/mortarboard/2011/nov/03/fielding-poetry-rime-of-raving-dotard
My comment was inexplicably deleted. Here it is anyway - followed by my follow-up comment...



One of the best things you can give the kids at school - all categories.
And the better your choice, the greater the treasure they carry with them through life.
If it's memorable, they'll memorize it - even if it's memorable only for your own enthusiasm or the blood and thunder Fagin/Frankenstein presentation. 
That's a teacher's view. As a kid, I remembered a lot - as pointers, not as whole poems. The mountain sheep are sweeter/But the valley sheep are fatter./We therefore deemed it meeter/To carry off the latter... Ours not to reason why/Ours but to do or die/Into the valley of death/Rode the six hundred... St Agnes Eve - Ah, bitter chill it was/The hare limped trembling through the frozen grass./Numb were the beadsman's fingers as he told/His beads. His beads he told, this patient holy man.... O Wild West Wind, thou breath of autumn's being...  If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind. 
Non-pointing wholes were the exception - Ozymandias (how not!), a couple of Wordsworth's things, Tyger, Jabberwock, and a fair few Donne Falling Stars. 
But later, learning languages and having runs to pace, I got into Chaucer - original Prologue some way in, and Latin, Catullus, Horace and my special favourite the invocation to Venus and Spring and Epicurus of De rerum natura.
Banging it in.
Benefits so great I even got my 8th grade immigrant kids in the Stockholm ghetto school to work through Vivamus mea Lesbia atque amemus in enough detail to get it by heart if they wanted to. (The Latinos helped with the first vocab runthrough).
Rhythm, word music, real life - all resonating inside as Wystan says. Ignore crabbed age and celebrate golden youth.
In der Jugend goldnen Schimmer... Unter den linden,/ an der heide/da unser zweie bette was,/da muket ir finden/schone beide/gebrochen bluomen unde gras./Vor dem walde in einem tal - /tandaradei! - /schone sanc diu nahtergal... 
And if you want to learn Swedish, try Fröding... 
Havet välte, stormen ven,
vågorna rullade asklikt grå.
"En man är vräkt över bord, kapten!"
"Jaså."
So much for God.
"Den dröm som ej aldrig besannats,
som dröm var den vacker att få.
För den som ur Eden förbannats,
är Eden en Eden ändå."
So much for the cynics.
Or Ferlin:
"Du har tappat ditt ord och din papperslapp, 
du barfota barn i livet.
Nu sitter du åter på handlarns trapp,
och gråter så övergivit.
Vad var det för ord, var det långt eller kort?
Var det väl eller illa skrivit?
Tänk efter nu förrn de föser dig bort,
du barfota barn i livet..."
So much for the Tories and Gradgrinds of this world.
Or Diktonius:
"Röd Eemili ramlade perklande raklång i snön..."
Or Almqvist:
"Men utur rike prästens ko 
var den söta mjölken.
Barnen fingo stå
vid modrens bål."
So much for White Terror and witch-hunters...
Or the shortest sweetest poem I know (Yugoslav folk):
Дај
Боже
да драги 
може!
Time to leave?
I will arise and go now,
and go to Inisfree,
and wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled...
And savage indignation there will no longer lacerate my breast.


[Follow-up:]
Since my comment above was deleted presumable cos some of the quotes were in foreign, I'd just like to say that most of my school learnings-by-heart were pointers not full poems. Full poems and long stretches came later when I needed to pace long runs and fill queuing with some meaning if I couldn't read or think. And a lot of the time they were in foreign.
Wystan's "resonance" is spot on. And so is the teaching power of making poems (or any resonant language artefact) your own.
That's it. As for the quotes etc you don't know what you missed.