Learning About Poetry

In my last post, I talked about my experience with poetry in my undergraduate and graduate school years. But what about before that? What can I remember about reading or hearing or interacting with poems in my own earlier years?

Not all that much, I realize—although, in the light of the six and a half decades that have passed since I turned eighteen and began to think of myself as being an adult, that isn’t surprising. the little I remember might, perhaps, reveal how little poetry mattered to me then—little enough to not be all that memorable, it seems. But I suspect it has a lot more to do with how very long ago it was that I had not yet reached the age of eighteen, not yet graduated from high school, and not yet began to think of myself as an adult. That happened more than six and a half decades ago, in 1959.

So what few things do I remember? I know a few of the usual well-known nursery rhymes by heart and have no memory of ever not having known them—and I have no memory of having access to a book that contained them, so I’m guessing that I must have heard them being recited to me by my mother and other relatives very early on. Indeed, I have a brief glimmer of my mother reciting

Perry, Perry, quite contrary,

How does your garden grow?

I also remember a song that the girls on my school playground chanted while skipping rope:

On the mountain stands a lady

Who she is I do not know

All she wears is gold and silver

All she wants is a fine young man

So come on in Susan dear, Susan dear . . . .

At which point Susan or whoever happened to be the next to be named would hop in and start skipping. There was also a ball bouncing song that had something to do with “One, two, three, a-laree,” but exactly what I cannot recall.

I also have memories of the lyrics of a vast catalog of popular songs of the twenties and thirties that my mother had picked up from the radio and sang whenever she could—while making beds or vacuuming or cooking dinner or combing her hair or getting ready for work or browsing through a magazine, throughout my childhood and beyond it. My mother loved to sing. But what I remember in this case is what my mother sang, and it was often quite a diet different from the actual words the lyricists created.

And then there were a few books. I can remember that three of the ten or so children’s books in the community library I borrowed from in my childhood were by Dr. Seuss, which means they had rhymes in them about Mayzie, a lazy bird who hatches an egg and produces an elephant bird. Why just ten books, you might ask. Well, everything in that librarian-less voluntary library on the Canadian army base then known as Camp Borden had been donated by various soldiers and members of their families who had lived there until the inevitable posting that soon happened to a different base elsewhere and so they were once more discarding their excess baggage, including the books they’d already read, in the process.

My first actual memories of poems comes, I think, from my last few years of public school and first few years of high school. At some point around then, I was assigned a poetry text book. I remember it being called The Ambleside Book of Verse. I think I had to buy it, but if so, it has long since left my personal library. But I’ve found an anthology with that name available on line, edited by E.W. Parker, and have ordered a second-hand copy of it, and I will plan to explore it further once I have it in my hands.

I’m not sure about what the M.C. after his name means, but I’m guessing that it probably stands for the Military Cross, awarded by the British government for “gallantry during active operations against the enemy.” in World War 1. While this book was published in 1949, not long after the end of World War II, Walker, born in 1896, probably served in the first war. He seems to have published a number of other poetry anthologies, many of them intended as school textbooks. Here’s a list from Goodreads:

A Galaxy of Poems Old and New
Discovering Poetry

Fresh Fields: Being Book Four of Discovering Poetry

Into Battle: A Seventeen-year-Old Joins Kitchener's Army
The Poets' Way
The Poets' Way, Stage II

The Poets' Path

The Poets' Harvest: Australian Edition
The Poets` Company
The Ambleside Book of Verse
Verse for You Book Three: A Collection of Verse for Senior Forms
A Pageant of English Verse

The list also includes Into Battle: A Seventeen-year-Old Joins Kitchener's Army, which suggests it was World War I Parker served in?

While I remember the name of The Ambleside Book of Verse—and, maybe, some of the poems in it—I have next to no memory of what we did with that book in school. Did we study what the poems meant? Did we talk about how we felt about them? Not that I can recall. I do have a vague idea that we spent much of our time with it figuring out how the rhyme schemes worked and what the metric structure of the lines of poems were: what sonnets and rhyming couplets were, what the difference between an iambic pentameter and an anapaestic trochee is. I still know they these things are different. I no longer know what the difference is.

But I remember some of the poems I read at that point in my life because, as far as I can remember now, remembering them was, in fact, a major part of the work we did with them. I can recall an assignment that required us to choose a poem from the anthology we were using, and to learn it well enough to recite it to the teacher. I can also remember rushing up to the teacher’s desk and asking her to please, please, let me recite the poem I had just been learning right that very moment, because I was pretty sure that I was likely to forget it a moment or two later.

These are poems that I can remember all or part of from that period of my life:

Masefield, Cargoes (“Quinquereme of Ninevah from distant Ophir”)

Shelley, Ozymandias

Byron, Sennacherib (“The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold”)

Caryl, Walloping Window Blind

Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

The ballad about Sir Patrick Spens

I’ve lately been finding these in many different children’s poetry anthologies. What I’m finding especially interesting is that they are all fairly long poems, and yet I clearly remember that I and my fellow students back in grade eight for nine always chose the shortest poems we could find to memorize and recite. But I appear to have in fact forgotten all of those, just as I’d figured I would.

And for that matter, my memory of the longer ones is also pretty hazy. I can do:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

But then my memory follows it with

But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight—

“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

So much for memorizing and reciting poems training and sharpening the memories of young minds, as the children’s poetry anthology introductions so often claim they do. It sure didn’t work for me.