Ship of Fools: Off by heart.

Thread: Off by heart. Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Yangtze (# 4965) on :

When I was in my last year of primary school we had to choose and learn a poem off by heart.

My father suggested I learn Robert Browning's Home Thoughts from Abroad on the grounds that he too had had to learn a poem at school and had learned that one.

Anyway, it has stuck in my memory and, as I too spent a fair amount of time living abroad, has also resonated through the years.

What poems have you memorized. And why? And what do we think about learning poems off by heart?

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

I wish I'd learnt more when I was young and had a memory like flypaper (now it's more of an etch-a-sketch). Patrick Leigh Fermor in A Time of Gifts recounts how he strides across Pre-war Europe with thousands of lines of verse for mental company.

Now I have only fragments - of Sea Fever and Cargoes, The lady of Shalott and How Horatius Kept the Bridge from school. Of Beowulf and Chaucer's Prologue, bits of Shakespeare and Marvell and Donne and Herbert, Yeats, Eliot from Uni. These have I shored against my ruins.

Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :

My memory is shite these days too. The only thing I can remember most of is advent by Kavanagh - which I think I have enthused about on the ship once before.

quote:
We have tested and tasted too much, lover
Through a chink too wide, there comes in no wonder...

...the dry black bread and sugarless tea of penance,
will charm back the luxury of a child's soul...

Kicks me in the balls, every time. It would almost be worth having a tomb-stone, to engrave it on.

[ 25. July 2014, 16:31: Message edited by: mark_in_manchester ]

Posted by Gwai (# 11076) on :

Every few years I try to fix up my partial memorization of Tennyson's Ulysses. And every couple years I notice that it's still only mostly memorized...

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

I have inadvertently remembered tons of stuff, which I'm in the habit of declaiming to the empty air, or 'er indoors. Quite a rag-bag, bits of Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, and ancient stuff from school, 'Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smokestack/Butting through the channel in the mad March days', but really, you do need to thump something as you declaim that, AND CHEAP TIN TRAYS. Nice with a few drinks.

Ah, the valley sheep are fatter, but the mountain sheep are sweeter, We therefore deemed it meeter, TO CARRY OFF THE LATTER ...

Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :

Another one who learnt Cargoes and Sea Fever, but also Kubla Khan and Tyger, Tyger - not sure why because it was never required. We were expected to memorise at least one speech from the Shakespeare plays we studied each year, the "Once more unto the breach, dear friends ..." and "Is this a dagger which I see before me" speeches from Henry V and Macbeth. But I've lost the required speeches from Dream, Twelfth Night and Merchant of Venice until I hear them, gained the prologue and Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet to go with the "Muse of fire" and "wooden O" of Henry V.

Posted by Doublethink (# 1984) on :

I have various fragments; One Fine Day in the Middle of the night (trad I think), When I Am Old I Shall Wear Purple (Jenny Joseph), some pieces of Stevie Smith poems (which I love). Many half verses couplets and so on.

But mostly the verse I remember by heart is in song.

Posted by LeRoc (# 3216) on :

I know one poem by heart. It's written by a Honduran friend of mine who happens to be a very good poet.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

We used to complain at school about learning poetry. "You'll be glad of it one day when you're older," the nuns told us - and so it was. There have been times in my life, and sleepless nights, when thinking of poems has proved a calming resource.

Wordsworth's "Daffodils" was the first poem I learnt at school, followed by A Drover by Padraic Colum and then a few things in Irish, not least of all the poem Is Mise Raifteiri, one of the more famous Irish-language poems which many a schoolchild was obliged to stand up and recite in class. Yeats' "Stolen Child" and "Lake Isle of Inisfree" were two more. When I moved to school in England I was surprised to find that we weren't required to memorize any poems.

For A level we studied T S Eliot's "The Wasteland" and although I never made the attempt to learn it consciously, large passages of that stuck in the mind and have proved quotable on many occasions over the years.

Reading and re-reading other poems - and I have many favourites, enough for a small anthology - you don't consciously memorize them but there is a pleasure in rediscovering the old familiar words, the imagery and sometimes the rhythms, and after a while, you find you can quote some of the verses. There weren't that many that I made a conscious effort to learn, but those I did were because:

Some of the poems I read struck me as really beautiful, and it wasn't always convenient to carry a book around, and scraps of paper could get lost, but I could carry the shorter ones around in my head.

I wanted to be able to drop quotes into conversation (pretentious teenager).

I wanted to prove to myself I could do it, particularly something longer. I didn't finish the Rubaiyat, but got a good halfway through.

Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :

In Flander's fields, by John McRae was required in my boarding school and nearly all Canadians can repeat at least some of it. I know all of it, including punctuation, because we got a swat (hit over the butt with wooden paddle) for each mistake after 3.

I also can repeat the witches brew segment in Macbeth:

Fillet of a fenny snake, in the cauldron boil and bake.
Eye of newt, toe of dog, wool of bat, tongue of frog etc.

I know this only because I liked the awful things thrown in. I also learned the Dr. Suess version from Bartholomew and the Oobleck when the magicians were going into the cave on Mystic Mountain Neekatave:

we must make some brand-new stuff
So feed the fire with wet mouse hair
Burn an onion, burn a chair
burn a whisker from your chin
burn a long sour lizard skin
Burn yellow twigs and burn red rust
And burn a stocking full of dust
make magic smoke, green, thick and hot
it sure smells dreadful, does it not?

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

My school used to enter the local music festival with choral speaking. We once learned the wrong poem as Masefield had two called Posted. Also the battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles. And, naturally, Sea Fever and Cargoes.

At seven years, we did a play based on one of Henry Newbolt's. Oddly, compared with others of his works, this was about fairies. I went on to learn and like, for some reason, the ones about voices of schoolboys rallying ranks and Afghan rebels murdering the speaker. (Against the laws of hospitality, I believe.) I was rather surprised to find he had been the author of the fairy piece.

This thread led me to chase up one of Henry Reed's - not Naming of Parts, but Judging Distances, which I had spotted as being influenced by the Battle Field Skills Training book used in the army which I had seen on a Fleamarket stall. In doing so, I found another which I shall not be learning, entitled "Psychological Warfare", because it is too long, and there is a part in the middle which is wholly unsuitable for declaiming. A warning about homosensualists, easily distinguished by the way they fasten their boots.

I shall confine myself to Allan Ahlberg, and "Please, Mrs Butler".

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
I went on to learn and like, for some reason, the ones about voices of schoolboys rallying ranks and Afghan rebels murdering the speaker.

Henry Newbolt's "Vitai Lampada". My father used to quote that, and I learnt it for the fun of it - it's quite enjoyable for all the wrong reasons. We both loved the imagery of

quote:
"Then the voice of a schoolboy rallied the ranks - 'Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :

Mind you, I do recall, about 30 years ago, sharing a taxi up Leith Walk with a young man, and us antiphonally chanting Chesterton's Lepanto -

Dim drums throbbing in the hills half heard
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred.
Where risen from a doubtful seat and half-attainted stall
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall..

Reader, I married him.

Posted by Hedgehog (# 14125) on :

Some 35 years ago, I committed Alastair Reid's Curiosity to memory. I still recite it to myself periodically to remind me to try new things. To be prepared to pay the cat price which is to die and die, again and again, each time with no less pain.

Posted by Welease Woderwick (# 10424) on :

Strangely the one that most comes to mind is the first stanza of Mon Village Natal a poem in yer actual French by Victor Hugo - no idea why it comes mind so readily, perhaps because it is the only foreign poem I ever had to learn.

For Daffodils I far prefer Herrick to Wordsworth, and had to learn both at various times.

My favourite bits are often Milligan-modified as in:

The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled...

...TWIT!

Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :

I'd forgotten that - I learnt Chanson d'automne by Paul Verlaine in French classes and that one stuck. It's got such long melancholy tones.

I hadn't met Curiosity before - that's great.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Firenze:
Mind you, I do recall, about 30 years ago, sharing a taxi up Leith Walk with a young man, and us antiphonally chanting Chesterton's Lepanto ...

I was at a poetry festival in Stratford on Avon last weekend, which was advertised as having poets declaiming and "poetrybombs" throughout the town. The only bit I actually saw was a recital in Holy Trinity Church (where Shakespeare is buried) which was a delightfully varied short programme of readings, one of which was "Lepanto".

The audience, interestingly, was small, and the age almost entirely 50+, except for some young Chinese tourists and some bored teenagers sitting reluctantly there with their middle-aged parents. And the poems were lovely - Yeats, Shakespeare, Donne, Causley and a couple of modern poets; they covered love, old age, the war, nature, homelessness... poems to make you think, or laugh, or look back... and it seemed such a shame that so few of the younger generation had any interest in them.

[ 26. July 2014, 08:44: Message edited by: Ariel ]

Posted by Lyda*Rose (# 4544) on :

I memorized "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" by Yeats as an adult just 'cos I liked it and it was short enough for my tiny brain. And at one time I had "My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun", but it's mostly gone now.

I'm now thinking it might be a fun exercise to choose some poems to memorize to wake up the old brain cells. Sonnets are about my speed. That sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay about telling a condescending lover to whistle for her after she has suddenly left him? [Snigger]

Posted by agingjb (# 16555) on :

Never could remember verse, even my own. Sadly it influenced my choice of A-level subjects towards the sciences. (Still, now long retired I can be a failed poet in comfort rather than poverty.)

I am always impressed by Wavell's "Other Men's Flowers" which is composed of poems he knew by heart.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

"Ye have robbed," said he, "Ye have slaughtered and made an end.
"Take your ill-got plunder and bury your dead.
What will ye more of your guest and sometime friend?"
"Blood for our blood," they said.

That's the other, not Vitai Lampada, one.

And for Spike...

"I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
I left my shoes and socks there, I wonder if they're dry."

I learned Dover Beach once, not understanding it at all, but because I lived in Dover and associated it with a particular person. Ignorant armies all around these days.

Not quite a matter of learning poetry, but when they built the Bluewater shopping centre, the grotto in the Food Hall (no use looking for it now, it's been buried) had verse from different poets there. Within a day, Eliot's "The last temptation is the greatest treason, to do the right thing for the wrong reason" had been plastered over. And there was a missing word from Kipling's Picts' Song. "We are the little folk we, Too small to fear or to hate. Leave us alone and you'll see, how we can bring down the "

There were other pieces too, all plastered over in the end to allow a Smarties themed area to take over, gone with the Green Man's head and the dinosaur footprints. I used to say, during the campaign to prevent the development of the Crystal Palace site with tawdry glitz, that Bluewater had more of the spirit of Paxton's work than what was proposed up there, but when they put the Chocolate Mine down the grotto, they destroyed that.

The centre had no record of the poems they destroyed, only the ones on the walls of the malls, but the architects had hidden stuff there in plain sight. "Out of the spent and unconsidered earth, The cities rise again," they took from Kipling, again. Fitting for a pleasure dome in a chalk pit. But in the last verse, the daffodils die, and "shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith, See how our works endure." When it is clear that they will not, one with Nineveh and Tyre, and the non-Kipling Ozymandias.

Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :

We had to learn "Cargoes" and "The Sair Finger" at primary school. I once remarked to a small child with a sticking plaster "You've hurt your finger? puir wee soul" and several random people around all chanted "Your pinkie, dearie me!" in unison, so I take it that that was a school standard.

Lots of Burns in secondary school, and Shakespeare, of course, plus the hoary old favourites - "Ozymandias", "Autumn", "Leisure" "Henry King."

Then there are the ones I learned because they were set poems for my children at school. "The Puddock" and "Mid Term Break" are the two that come to mind.

The North East Man can (or could) recite both "Tam O'Shanter" and "Eskimo Nell" off by heart. I could probably stumble through Tam O'Shanter with prompting, but only the first 20 lines or so of "Nell."

Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :

Oh, and Donne's "Flea" in 5th year English, plus lots of the War poems - "The General" "Dulce et Decorum Est" "Anthem for Doomed Youth" etc which were a recurring lesson each November, right through secondary school.

"The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna" was another I learned by heart.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

Somebody, the name Steven or Stephen seems to be associated, wrote a small volume of corrupted verses in the shape of a tombstone which utterly fouled up Sir John Moore for me when I borrowed it from the library.

Thus:
"Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note,
As his corpse to the ramparts we hurried,
For a flashburn is not an agreeable sight,
And the other ranks might have got worried."

There was also:
"Come unto these yellow sands,
There take hands,
'Till bacterial cyclones blow,
Then let go."

This being the time when we used to sit at school dinners wondering what we could do after a four minute warning sounded. I didn't learn these. They stuck. It was a depressing time. I wonder what he would write now.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Penny S:
Somebody, the name Steven or Stephen seems to be associated, wrote a small volume of corrupted verses in the shape of a tombstone which utterly fouled up Sir John Moore for me when I borrowed it from the library.

Thus:
"Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note,
As his corpse to the ramparts we hurried,
For a flashburn is not an agreeable sight,
And the other ranks might have got worried."

Oh dear - for me it was Nigel Molesworth wot did it. I can't read those lines any other way but think of this sort of thing:

"Not a drum was heard not a funeral note as his corse to the ramparts we hurried peason why are you snigering put away that pea shooter. peotry is WET chiz chiz it is for GURLS and fotherington-tomas who sa hello clouds hello sky and skip about."

Posted by quetzalcoatl (# 16740) on :

Just went for a walk, and I just had to try and recall some of Robert Lowell's 'Katherine's Dream', one of my favourite poems. I kept getting snatches, and reconstructing the beginning. My wife listens patiently, as I enthuse about Lowell. Then it's The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket, majestic really.

The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand. We weight the body, close
Its eyes and heave it seaward whence it came.

Posted by Signaller (# 17495) on :

Alas, the way we learned it, Sir John Moore's men were experimenting with battlefield cookery:

Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note
As his horse on the ramparts we curried...

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

As an American growing up in the Northeast, we had to memorize quite a bit of Robert Frost. Two of my favorites are Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening and The Pasture.

We also had to memorize the last nine lines of William Cullen Bryant's Thanatopsis.

And quite a few selections from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, most notably Lucinda Matlock.

But my personal favorite is Emily Dickinson, epecially I'm Nobody, The Soul selects her own Society, and the unbelievably elegant The Moon was but a Chin of Gold.

Posted by Roselyn (# 17859) on :

"Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note," as antipodean females we used to sit around on the grass at lunchtime competing for the honour of making the best sound of a gun "sullenly firing".

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

Yesterday, my internal playlist turned up, almost instantly on the triggering thought (can't remember why I was thinking of a chief, though*) the first three verses of "Lord Ullin's Daughter", word perfect. I had totally forgotten that the poem even existed. It came accompanied by the imagery which I had in mind when I used to read it. I did, once, learn the whole thing, but so far, the rest is silence, bar the last line.

*Remembered, a character in a detective story by Jane Finnis, involving a chief of the Parisii in Yorkshire, who might have been involved in anti-Roman misdeeds. Though I wasn't thinking of her at the time, he did indeed have a daughter, and the plot, though I hadn't reached that at the time, involved a foundering boat with her in it.

Posted by MrsBeaky (# 17663) on :

The first poem I learned off by heart was an A.A. Milne (?) one about giving buns to the elephant at the zoo...I was eight years and taking a spoken English examination.
Then "The Night of Trafalgar" for a choral speaking examination.
I have bits of the Mersey poets, Betjemen, RS Thomas, Ted Hughes and the metaphysical poets stored away from English exams and then bits of Vergil and Ovid from my Uni days.
And many others too but frustratingly NOTHING in its entirety and sometimes I'll see/ hear/ experience something which triggers a partial memory and I go looking in my memory banks for the beautiful words but to no avail...getting older has its challenges!

Posted by Fineline (# 12143) on :

As a child I had to learn a few comical poems for school - 'Colonel Fazackerley Butterworth Toast', 'Hunter's Trials', 'The King's Breakfast' and 'The Biddly Bear'. I still know them and can recite them. And also as child I memorised all sorts of hymns from the hymn book at church, when I was bored during the church service, and I still know them - when we sing them at church I find myself singing the whole lot without looking down at my hymn book.

Other than that, I know fragments of all sorts of poems that I studied at uni - I did strategic memorisation, learning the bits I would quote in exams, and often they were the bits that just stuck in my head anyway. Things like 'I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled' and 'Do I dare to eat a peach?' (a consequence of which is that I have ever since found myself automatically feeling quite daring whenever I eat a peach!).

I have no idea what I think of learning poems by heart. I've just seen it as harmless fun. When they rhyme and have a regular rhythm, like the comic verses I learnt as a kid, they stick automatically in your mind anyway - they lend themselves to learning. With songs, it's quite handy if you like singing in the bath, because then you can sing them all the way through, without getting stuck and wondering what the next bit is. It's also quite handy with hymns if you're very short sighted and you have to hold the hymn book quite high to see it, so that you can look at it through your glasses and not under them. Either that or bend your neck very low to look down. It's good not to have to rely on the hymn book.

Posted by St. Gwladys (# 14504) on :

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Ah, the valley sheep are fatter, but the mountain sheep are sweeter, We therefore deemed it meeter, TO CARRY OFF THE LATTER ...

Yay! I remember that! The war song of the men of Dinas something. I always think of it when I go to Carreg Cennyn.

[code fix]

[ 05. August 2014, 21:32: Message edited by: Yorick ]

Posted by Carex (# 9643) on :

The first poem that I memorized was The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service. Hardly serious poetry, I know, but I wanted to be able to recite it around a campfire. That may have changed my life.

No, not the poem itself, or the companion Shooting of Dan McGrew, but some of the other poems such as:

The Spell of the Yukon
The Call of the Wild
The Rhyme of the Remittance Man

quote:

Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing else to gaze on,
Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,
Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,
Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?
Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking through it,
Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?
Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God's sake go and do it;
Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost.

Partly due to this, I quite my first job in computers to work in the forests of Alaska, ride a bicycle around New Zealand, hitchhike across Australia...

And it has left an indelible mark on me, even after all these years. I don't know what I would have been like otherwise, but it was a very important part of becoming who I am today.

Posted by QLib (# 43) on :

I seem to remember that, at primary school, we were supposed to learn a poem a week - but I'm not sure how long it lasted. We did Keats' Ode to Autumn but I don't actually recall any others, except for the one I learned in the week we were given a free choice. Everyone else followed the bright spark who had worked out that Poe's Eldorado was the shortest poem in the book (for some reason, only the first two stanzas were included) - and they all learned that, but I wanted to choose something I liked, so I chose The Cavalier's Escape by Walter Thornbury (I was only 10). You'd think the teacher might have been a bit narked with all the others and pleased with me, but no. I could do nothing right for that woman.

Posted by jacobsen (# 14998) on :

For some reason I was dreaming of Wordsworth's "Daffodils," and in my dream I couldn't remember the middle stanzas. This worried me to the point where I woke up and had to go downstairs and look them up!

Posted by L'organist (# 17338) on :

My school had a long list of poems to be learned: some that still stick in the mind are Ode to a Nightingale, To Autumn, St Agnes' Eve, Sir Patrick Spens, Daffodils, La Bells Dame sans Merci, At a Solemn Music. There were others but they haven't 'stuck'.

We were also expected to commit to memory the General Thanksgiving and General Confession, plus psalms 23, 67, 121 and 150 - all from the BCP - the first five verses of St John's Gospel and first two verses of the National Anthem.

Posted by Caissa (# 16710) on :

I love Keats. Didn't have to memorize much poetry when I was a student other than Flanders Fields. Keat When I have fears that I may cease to be, spoke to me as a young high school poet.

Posted by Penny S (# 14768) on :

quote:
Originally posted by St. Gwladys:

quote:
Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
Ah, the valley sheep are fatter, but the mountain sheep are sweeter, We therefore deemed it meeter, TO CARRY OFF THE LATTER ...
Yay! I remember that! The war song of the men of Dinas something. I always think of it when I go to Carreg Cennyn.

[code fix]

Isn't that the wrong way round? I'm sure they carried off the fatter sheep.

Posted by St. Gwladys (# 14504) on :

yes - "The mountain sheep are sweeter
but the valley sheep are fatter.
We therefore deem it meeter
To carry off the latter".

What else did I learn - Daffodils for choral speaking in our school eisteddfod, Sea Fever ("I must down to the sea again), a bit of Gilbert and Sullivan about a nightmare, something about "Do you remember an inn Miranda?" - I think called Tarantella, which fascinated me with it's rhythm. "Tyger, Tyger" quoted by our English master as how not to quote poetry..all good stuff!

Posted by SvitlanaV2 (# 16967) on :

I have vague memories of learning one or two poems by Betjeman when I was at school, and I would've had to learn a few things when I did a drama course as a teenager. But the kind of poetry that has stuck with me far more vividly is the nursery rhyme! I don't know why, but this a form that has retained its charm for me.

More recently I taught myself a poem for the purpose of learning all the books of the Bible. I'd like to learn more poetry for pedagogical purposes, but of course such poetry is always assumed to be of poor quality.

Posted by Yangtze (# 4965) on :

Watching Poets in their Own Words now on the BBC and it's made me realise I still know Betjeman's The Subaltern's Love Song (aka Joan Hunter-Dunn) off by heart. Learned for some drama thing at school. (Though also one of my dad's favourites.)

[ 10. August 2014, 20:44: Message edited by: Yangtze ]

Posted by Doublethink (# 1984) on :

Damn ! Missed the begining of that - shall have to iplayer.

Posted by EloiseA (# 18029) on :

Whenever I have to walk fast along muddy lanes in rain, I find myself shouting out the last stanza of John Masefield's Cargoes (mentioned earlier in the thread). Tremendous rhythm for stomping, strong unusual stresses too. DIRty BritISH COASter...

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

Another great poem to declaim from memory is Gertrude Stein's Portrait of Picasso

If I told him would he like it. Would he like it if I told him.
Would he like it would Napoleon would Napoleon would would he like it.

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