There was a question yesterday on the Washington Post Style Invitational site on Facebook about which poems people knew from memory. The most common answers seem to be Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse and Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride which they were forced to learn in school. I myself learned a different Longfellow poem as an assignment in American Lit in high school, The Day is Done. But for fun as a teenager I also memorized a smattering of other poems I liked: Lord Byron’s She Walks in Beauty and his Headpiece to Don Juan, Robert Herrick’s Upon Julia’s Clothes, and (embarrassingly) Tolkein’s One Ring. At least I didn’t memorize the Elvish.
The only poem (apart from my own) I memorized as an adult was one I’ve never seen written down. My grandmother learned it in primary school from a McGuffy reader or similar and used to recite it to us. She recited many such poems, but most were about topics like the importance of doing chores without grumbling, so my siblings and I never bothered to learn them. But this was our favourite, so when she was in her 90s I committed it to memory.
Belinda
Belinda was a cautious little maid
whose motto was the single word, “Beware!”
She never lost a chance to be afraid
and spent a lot of time in taking care.
Obliged one day on a railway train
to sit beside a grave, sedate young man,
a sudden terror seized Belinda’s brain:
“He’ll surely pick my pocket if he can!”
They reached a tunnel in another minute
and Belinda with her customary care
to guard her pocket, placed her hand within it.
And lo! Another hand was already there.
To show her fortitude and hide her fright,
Belinda seized the hand and held it tight.
And as the train into daylight rushed,
no wonder the modest maiden blushed.
No wonder the villain smiled a smile:
her hand was in his pocket all the while.
It’s no coincidence that nearly every poem people remembered used rhyme and meter. It’s possible to memorize poems that don’t use either, but it’s very difficult. And of course, this is presumably how poetry began, as an oral tradition. People would sit together and someone would recite a bit of Homer or Beowulf as entertainment. Neither poems rhyme, but both have very strong meters that drive the telling and prompt the memory, and I think this must have been crucial for such long epics to survive in the era before writing.
Certainly I think that after The Event, when we are all huddled around a campfire sucking the marrow out of rat bones, we won’t be reciting The Wasteland to each other, no matter how apt. Most likely Mother Goose will triumph.
profanepoet 