I have been quoting Leontes in the bath ever since I studied The Winter’s Tale for A-level. I have been quoting Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale ever since I studied it for O-level. I think of it when I’m fed up. I think of it when I’m tired. I think of it when I’m broken-hearted. And I think of it when I order a nice glass of Rioja, or what Keats would have called “a beaker full of the warm South”.
“There are some people I know,” said Salman Rushdie at the Hay literary festivallast week, “who are just able to carry around absurd amounts of poetry in their heads.” Memorising poetry, he added, had become a “lost art".
If it really is lost, it’s a shame. It’s a shame not just because random scraps of poetry from childhood can make you giggle in the bath, and because there’s nothing like a Keats ode to turn a minor irritation into a full-blown drama. It’s a shame because poetry really does do powerful things to the brain.
I know some people hate to memorize, but it's a style of learning that works for me, and I can definitely relate to this article. The article suggests that memorization exercises are great for mental stimulus and long-term memory health, which is great. I enjoy the more present benefits of being able to spit out something lovely that someone else wrote as commentary (and maybe the benefit of feeling a bit smug for being able to do so). My favorite is from a memorized passage from Romeo and Juliet done in high school "Ancient damnation, oh most wicked fiend, is it more sin to wish me thus forsworn?" etc. Ancient damnation sounds nice if you are mad at something but don't necessary want to go to the vulgar. My librarian friend suggested posting poems up in places where you have to do unloved but necessary work, like dishes or folding laundry.
The article cites a poem, Electric Light by Seamus Heaney, which I will share with you, because that's what we do.
Candle grease congealed, dark-streaked with wick-soot.
Rucked alps from above. The smashed thumbnail
of that ancient mangled thumb was puckered pearl,
moonlit quartz, a bleached and littered Cumae.
In the first house where I saw electric light
she sat with her fur-lined felt slippers unzipped,
year in, year out, in the same chair, and whispered
in a voice that at its loudest did nothing else
but whisper. We were both desperate
the night I was left to stay with her and wept
under the clothes, under the waste of light
left turned on in the bedroom. "What ails you, child,
what ails you, for God's sake?" Urgent, sorrowing
ails, far-off and old. Scaresome cavern waters
lapping a boatslip. Her helplessness no help.
Lisp and relapse. Eddy of sibylline English.
Splashes between a ship and dock, to which,
animula, I would come alive in time
as ferries churned and turned down Belfast Lough
towards the brow-to-glass transport of a morning train,
the very "there-you-are-and-where-are-you?"
of poetry itself. Backs of houses
like the back of hers, meat safes and mangles
in the railway-facing yards of fleeting England,
an allotment scarecrow among patted rigs,
then a town-edge soccer pitch, the groin of distance,
fields of grain like the Field of the Cloth of Gold,
tunnel gauntlet and horizon keep. To Southwark,
too, I came, from tube mouth into sunlight,
Moyola-breath by Thames's "straunge strond."
If I stood on the bow-backed chair, I could reach
the light switch. They let me and they watched me,
A touch of the little pip would work the magic.
A turn of their wireless knob and light came on
in the dial. They let me and they watched me
as I roamed at will the stations of the world.
Then they were gone and Big Ben and the news
were over. The set had been switched off,
all quiet behind the blackout except for
knitting needles ticking, wind in the flue.
She sat with her fur-lined felt slippers unzipped,
electric light shone over us, I feared
the dirt-tracked flint and fissure of her nail,
so plectrum-hard, glit-glittery, it must still keep
among beads and vertebrae in the Derry ground.
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