Learning by heart
When I was a child I used to enjoy reading and learning poems at home, encouraged by my parents. I learnt the following little rhyme but have never been able to trace it. I have searched everywhere without success. I’m sure there were further verses which I cannot recall.
A little grey mouse, so plump and sleek,
Crept out from I know not where,
And betwixt the rails of the iron road
Sat nibbling its dainty fare.
A paper of crumbs most happily found
And by somebody cast aside,
Did now for the tiny bright-eyed thing
A heaven-sent meal provide.
It took me a very long time to understand what was meant by ‘the rails of the iron road’.
I continued ‘committing to memory’ various verses, ‘All the world’s a stage’ from ‘As you like it’ being a favourite, along with John Donne’s ‘No man is an island’ and Keats’s ‘Isabella, or The Pot of Basil’, the latter being thrillingly, romantically grotesque for a fifteen-year-old.
Later, my verse reading was directed more to children’s poetry. An all-time favourite, Eleanor Farjeon’s poem ‘Cats sleep anywhere’ is still taught, though I think it might be limited now to speech and drama classes and competitions.
Do you remember
poems from your youth?
Learning by rote seems to have fallen into disfavour in recent years, but it does seem to have had value. I can still recite sections of “Lochinvar” from memory.
ReplyDeleteEven learning times tables by rote is somewhat frowned upon!
DeleteI remember some. A line comes to mind and I try to fill in more from that strange place within our brains where such information is stored...partly. It is left to the really active part of the brain to remember. And if that fails, Google.
ReplyDeleteI just thought of a what is it called? A rhyme? Mr Foster went to Gloucester. I couldn't remember anymore. It was a good lesson for the very young me about the pronunciation of names though. I think I could remember the rest in time. But suddenly it came through. 'In a shower of rain. He stepped into a puddle right up to his muddle! and was never seen again.' Now I am thinking it was Dr Foster.
I don't have the energy to put into remembering any of Coleridge's Christabel, no matter how fascinating I found it at the time.
Well done. It was Dr Foster. We learn so much but our brains haven't the capacity to recall it all at will.
DeleteDelete that last - F recalls only one from her you and it wouldn't count as poetry here being of the 'bush poet' literary genre which recorded life with humour and pathos in NZ and Australia in the colonial days.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm intrigued . . .
Delete3 Blind Mice, Row Row Row Your Boat and a few of the Mother Goose poems are forever stuck in my mind and they quite often pop up while I am biking. If I am alone, I sing them out. Wouldn't want anyone to hear me, not because of the verse, but because my voice would sound like a wail to them, lol. The iron rails was for the train track, yes? I've never heard this poem, but over here, I guess Mother Goose was our biggest influence from Great Britain.
ReplyDeleteYes, the rails of the iron road were the railway track. I was quite slow, really . . .
DeleteThe only thing I memorized voluntarily was the poem High Flight. We did a writing project in our final year of school, an anthology which had to be at least fifty percent poetry and fifty percent our own work. I discovered High Flight, and was mesmerized by its musicality and imagery. Other than that, we memorized In Flanders Fields at a very young age and recited it each Remembrance Day, and the opening stanzas of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in high school. I picked up others from my mother who was an English teacher. Her father memorized a few of Robert Service's lengthy poems for the pleasure of reciting them to anyone who would listen.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the grey mouse poem had a happy ending or not, being set between railroad tracks??? I'm not sure I want to know! You appear to have committed quite a number of pieces to memory - well done!
I would also add, I love the picture of the mouse. And the title today - learning by heart - which is what we called it too.
ReplyDeleteI have just looked up High Flight and also learned a little about John Gillespie Magee. What a talent and what a tragically short life. It's a beautiful poem and deserves its place as the official poem of both the RCAF and the RAF and on the Space Shuttle Challenger Memorial. Thank you for introducing it to me x
DeleteMy pleasure. I've just had a look at Wikipedia (which didn't exist when I was in high school, of course) and I had no idea how widely it is known and quoted and in how many ways it has been performed. To think he was only 19 when he died. So many young men like him ... lost. Who knows what the world would be like had they been able to live out their lives?
DeleteLearnt at school: Blake's 'The Tyger', Wordsworth's 'Daffodils', and various Shakespeare speeches - I can still recite the whole of Portia's 'the quality of mercy' speech from Merchant of Venice, to no-one's great interest! From my mother, Browning's 'Home Thoughts from Abroad' (which she learnt as a child evacuee in Canada). During the early days of lockdown I decided to try to commit a few favourite poems to memory, but the only ones that stuck are Thomas Hardy's 'The Darkling Thrush' and Kipling's 'His Apologies'. Both lovely for reciting to myself when out walking Nobby, the Kipling one being particularly appropriate. My Aberdeen neighbour Kirsty can recite the whole of Burns' 'Tam O'Shanter', which apparently she does when swimming lengths in the local pool - it takes 20 minutes!
ReplyDeleteCheers! Gail.
20 minutes! That's a very long poem. Thank you for the introduction to 'His Apologies'. I'm afraid the last two verses caused tears to flow.
DeleteThank you from me, too, for 'His Apologies'. New to me and made my eyes leak as well.
DeleteI used to commit lots of poems to memory but it's not easy when you get older:
ReplyDelete"Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day?"
"I have of late but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth" and various other Shakespeare.
Barry @ https://todiscoverice.blogspot.com/
I suppose our brains are out of practice - we can't all be actors and learn lines for a living.
DeleteSilver by Walter de La Mer is the only one I (partly) remember. Only have to see a bright full moon and it pops into my mind
ReplyDelete‘Slowly silently now the moon, walks the night in her silver shoon. This way and that she peers and sees, silver fruit upon silver trees’…The rest has gone to wherever forgotten things go.
I always loved the word 'shoon'. Other more important things take up the spaces where poems used to be;-)
DeletePoems? No. We were made to learn a few in school so the teacher could have us all reciting them for reasons I have forgotten, but I don't remember a single one. Maybe a line here and there but not all verses of Mulga Bill's Bicycle or A Bush Christening.
ReplyDeleteI had to look up Mulga Bill's Bicycle and discovered that Banjo Paterson wrote Waltzing Matilda, among other things.
ReplyDelete