The Ambleside Book of Verse
Edited by E. W. Parker
London: Longmans, 1949.
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I ordered a copy of this anthology after seeing it mentioned online because I recognized the name—if rather fuzzily. I have a vague memory of having been assigned this exact book, published in 1949, as a textbook. I read it somewhere in the mid-1950s when I was in grade eight or nine or so.
My vague memory of it centrally involves an ongoing assignment in which we students were required to memorize poems we chose from the Ambleside and then, when we believed we were ready to do so, head up to the teacher’s desk at the front of the class and ask the teacher for permission to recite them: “Now, right now, please, let me say it right now please,” we begged, because we knew that if we recited the poem we’d chosen accurately enough, we were free to forget it altogether and move on to another one and get the stupid memorizing over and done with. I don’t remember how many poems we were supposed to memorize and recite altogether—five or six, maybe?
I do remember the relief with which I immediately set about actively forgetting each one I recited as soon as the recitation was declared to be successful and the check mark acknowledging it was recorded in the teacher’s grade-book. So my big surprise upon making my way through the Ambleside this week, almost seven decades later, was just how much if it I can still remember—not whole poems, mind you, but lots of lines and shorter passages in them. Had I once memorized these poems? Probably not. But some of their lines stuck anyway.
And I also came upon lot of poems I had forgotten I ever knew even though I couldn’t remember any individual passages from them: poems like “Get Up and Bar the Door”, in which a husband and wife argue about who will get up and close the door the wind blew open, or Oliver Wendell-Holmes’ “Wonderful ‘One-Hoss’ Shay” which runs for exactly a hundred years. I only remembered remembering them when I came upon. them in my browse through the Ambleside. But apparently I am much better at remembering than I’d thought, and much worse at forgetting.
But then I realized that I was misremembering what I had in fact not quite completely forgotten. One of the clearest parts of what I remembered was that, like all the other students in that class, I’d combed through the anthology looking for the shortest poems—the ones most easily memorized. But not only were most of the briefer passages I found myself re-remembering from longer poems, but most of The Ambleside Book of Verse consists of longer poems—poems that cover two or three pages, even sometimes, five or six or seven pages, and in one case, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” well over twenty pages.
And almost all of these poems tells stories. While there’s a section of the Ambleside named “Narrative Poems,” almost every poem in the whole book from page 1 (“the Bonny Earl of Moray” to page 180 (a passage from Wordsworth’s Prelude) offers a narrative, a series of events organized into a cohesive story. The “Foreward” to the Ambleside quotes the Victorian poetic and critic Matthew Arnold:
What are the eternal objects of Poetry, among all nations and at all times? They are actions; human actions; possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the Poet.
Action is the basis of narrative, no?
But are all the poems in Ambleside narratives? No. Beginning on p. 181, there is a section identified as “lyrics,” and it goes on for another sixty-three pages—and while some of these “lyrics” do describe human actions, some, instead, describe the actions of animals or the appearance of natural scenes or the emotional state of not particularly active humans.
The one hundred and eighty or so pages that precede the lyrics include only fifty or so poems, but these sixty or so pages of lyrics include more than half of the poems in the book. That happens, it seems, because one of the defining qualities of what we identify as a lyric poem is brevity.
But, so too, simply, is a lack of narrative. Most if not all of those fifty longer poems are narratives. They tell a story or at least organize a series of events in something like the form of a story. Some of them, in fact, occur in a section identified as “Narrative Poems,” but most of the poems identified as “Ballads” or “Humour” also tell stories. According to the Foreward,
. . . most of the poetry which has come down to us from the earliest times is in the form of a narrative of action, and these epics, narrative poems and ballads never stale, but bring to each succeeding generation of readers the same joy in their fresh vigour and their stark passionate beauty.
That may or may not be true—but what is true is that the Ambleside makes it seem true by the extent to which much of the poetry in it is narratives of action.
There might be good reasons for it being that way. According to the cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen, the earliest and most childlike of the five stages of aesthetic development is the “accountive” stage, in which “senses, memories, and personal associations . . . are woven into a narrative” and “judgments are based on what is known and what is liked. Emotions color viewers’ comments, as they seem to enter the work of art and become part of its unfolding narrative.” In order for that to happen, obviously, there needs to be a narrative. Adults often choose both paintings and poems to share with children based on their narrative qualities.
On. the other hand, there does not in any obvious way need to be one entire section of the one of the six sections the Ambleside is divided into in of what are identified as “Ballads and Songs of Jacobite Times.” This section comes after one just identified as “Ballads” and the other sections—Humour, Narrative Poems, Pictures from longer Poems, and Lyrics all name kinds of poems rather than specific topics or subjects. While the “Ballads” are all by “Anonymous” and most of them describe fictional heroes such as Sir Patrick Spens and Robin Hood, the “Ballads and Songs of Jacobite Times” are by specific named poets and are all about one specific subject: the real leaders of the rebellions in Scotland in the 18th century that attempted to overthrow the ruling House of Hanover and restore the House of Stuart to the British throne. The editor Parker offers no explanation of why this very specific group of poems about a very specific topic is included in the book.
The Jacobite poems do, however, go along quite neatly with the many poems found in other sections that describe similarly valiant and similarly underdog heroes defeating more powerful enemies and their larger armies. The entire anthology exudes a celebratory aura of British and often specifically Scottish patriotism, a fervent conviction of the wonderful heroic qualities that allow small groups of British people to defeat larger groups of inferior non-Britishers or Scottish people to defeat larger groups of inferior Britishers, or to go down bravely doing their best to defeat them. It might be significant that the school where I first met these poems was on an army base—an army base in the former British colony of Canada, mind you, but nevertheless, an army base.
But while the Ambleside often celebrates its military heroes, many of them are being celebrated even as they go bravely down to defeat. Sir Patrick Spens and his crew all drown, Lord Randal gets poisoned, and in Tennyson’s “The Captain,” not only the cruel captain but also the sailors who suffer under him and then take revenge on him by not fleeing the enemy ship all die when the enemy ship blows up their ship. For that matter, come to think of out, the Jacobite rebels went down to defeat, too. These are often, then, surprisingly dark poems. Was the teacher who assigned it to my class a sadist?
But my suspicions about of come from my earlier experience of the book in my younger years that has led me to think of it as an anthology of poetry specifically for young people. Nothing in it identifies it as such—and except for some of the humorous poems by writers like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, none of the poems in it are ones originally intended specifically for audiences of children.
A description on a publishing history website of “The Heritage of Literature series” the Ambleside appears in describes it as “a series that will lead to wider horizons by awakening a love of good books, and by providing a key to the treasures of the world's best thought”—and while young people might well be understood as being in need of wider horizons and learning to love good books, the intent seems to be more broadly educational than that, and a list of titles on its end papers supports that wider focus by including among a wide range of other books a section of ones specifically “For Younger Readers,” a section that includes Thrilling Stories of Action and When Animals Talked but does not include the Ambleside. Apparently the teacher who chose the Ambleside for me and my fellow young students was less interested in having poetry entertain us as children in theoretically childlike ways than in widening our horizons and making us more adult as well as more military in our tastes and interests in poetry. My happy childhood memories of enjoying Little Lulu and Superman comics and movie serials about swashbuckling pirates at Saturdays matinees much more than what I remember of the Ambleside poems suggests that it probably didn’t work all that well. I suspect I could still use some of that broadening.
Wha wadna fecht for Charlie!