What's poem can you recite by heart? Post your comments below
At the age of nine, Winston Churchill was a great disappointment to his
mother. He was not good at lessons, he was argumentative and he stuttered.
But then one of Winston’s teachers introduced him to Macaulay’s Lays of
Ancient Rome and encouraged him to learn them off by heart.
Churchill duly memorised all 1,200 lines and recited them at his mother’s next
society party, to her amazement. It was the first time she realised that her
son might be more than an embarrassment.
Perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to see a link between Macaulay’s
stirring stanzas and the rhythmic cadences of Churchill’s speeches to the
nation in the darkest days of the second world war.
Today’s children are more likely to do Vicky Pollard than Macaulay as their
party piece, and doubtless Britney cuts more ice in the playground than
Wordsworth, but they lose out as a result. Learning a poem at an early age
is an investment for the future. As T S Eliot said, you don’t need to
understand a poem to enjoy it.
A seven-year-old might miss every nuance of Kubla Khan or Ozymandias — but,
learnt young, the poems will stay in the head for life, adding lustre to the
good moments and illumination in the bad. Memorising a poem means you own
it.
As a child, I was paid by my grandmother to learn Shakespeare sonnets at 50p a
pop. Back then the fringe benefits of a good memory were a steady supply of
Maltesers; now I can call up “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds
sang” every autumn and “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in
action” every time I look at the News of the World.
Think of the Beirut hostage Terry Waite, whose five years of captivity were
made tolerable by the reams of Milton and the Book of Common Prayer he had
committed to memory. Senator John McCain, who learnt the Victorian
spine-stiffener Invictus (by W E Henley) as a boy, said it helped him to
survive a Vietnamese PoW camp — he even gave an impromptu recital when he
won the South Carolina primary, using its lines “I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul” as the opening to his speech.
It must have been a spontaneous quote, as his spin doctors would have told him
that the last person to use that poem so publicly was Timothy McVeigh, the
Oklahoma bomber.
It is not just the politicians, the hostages or even the terrorists of the
future who benefit from memorising poetry young. Although rote learning of
verse went out of fashion a generation ago, together with dates and tables,
there is now a feeling among teachers and educationists that this kind of
performance-based learning has real benefits. It can be particularly useful
for children with dyslexia.
Emma Fearnhamm, head of sixth form at a leading grammar school, says: “Young
children have amazing recall; they can quote song lyrics and comedy sketches
verbatim. If you teach a child a poem orally, they can pick it up in an
afternoon. That child may have problems reading, but by memorising the poem
they can approach it on the page with real confidence. The key is to make it
a pleasure rather than a duty.”
This is the key: learning poetry by heart should be fun, not another piece of
homework. Starting very young, when the brain is at its most receptive, is
essential.
I will never forget going to a primary school to give a talk on poetry and
asking if the seven-year-olds knew any poems by heart. One little girl put
her hand up and proceeded to recite, word-perfect, The Night Mail by W H
Auden.
She may not have understood every line, but she certainly got the poem’s
rhythmic urgency, rocking from side to side with its locomotive beat:
This is the Night Mail crossing
the border,
Bringing the cheque and the
postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for
the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl
next door.
When she finished, her classmates gave her a round of applause. She told me
that it was “really fun learning poems. The best bit is when everybody
claps”.
It is time to rebrand poetry as an achievement, not a soppy indulgence. To
this end the BBC, together with my production company Silver River, has
launched a poetry recital competition open to every child in the country
between the ages of seven and 11. Every primary school in Britain can hold a
poetry recital competition and put forward one child to take part in a
series of regional heats held in libraries up and down the country.
Twelve finalists will be chosen to come to Oxford with their parents to
compete at a final, compered by Jeremy Paxman, at the Sheldonian theatre
during The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival in April. The whole event
will be captured for a feature-length documentary to be shown on BBC2 next
spring.
The winner will be awarded an Off by Heart trophy, and his or her school will
receive a prize. All the finalists will take part in a masterclass with
actors and poets to help them make the most of their performance. Any child
who wants to enter should lobby a teacher to get the school involved. All
this information can be found on the BBC learning website, which has the
poems that the children need to learn.
This competition is modelled on similar schemes run in America and Ireland,
where they have proved hugely popular. Last year more than 150,000 children
took part in the contest in the United States. One teacher from Kansas City
wrote: “Success in reciting poetry gives even reluctant learners a feeling
of success in an area in which they have had little interest. I think it
takes away some of the perceived difficulty and mystery of poetry for many
of the students.”
The competitors were equally enthusiastic. One state champion wrote:
“Memorising the poem gets it stuck in your head and your heart, so when you
really understand the poem, it’s not just saying it — it’s like feeling the
poem itself come from you.”
One of the aims of the competition is to put pupils in direct contact with the
nation’s greatest poetry. A 2007 Ofsted report complained that across
primary and secondary schools, too much poetry teaching was dull and
unchallenging.
Indeed, after checking poetry teaching at 86 schools, the inspectors concluded
that it was the worst-taught aspect of English.
This is not the teachers’ fault: it is hard to instil a love of poetry in
others if you have never learnt to love it yourself. The report also said
that too few pupils were reading classic poems such as Wordsworth’s
Daffodils or Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
Wordsworth features on the list of poems that children will need to learn for
the competition, as well as Kipling, Robert Burns, A A Milne, W H Davies and
Benjamin Zephaniah. This may seem tough going for junior school pupils, but
100 years or even 50 years ago, poems of this length and complexity would
have been learnt routinely by children of this age. Surely not such a
challenge, then, for a generation raised on Nintendo.
Who knows how many hitherto unpromising nine-year-olds may discover a fluency
and confidence that they never knew they possessed and find themselves on
the path to greatness? Or, failing that, they will always have a way of
passing the time in traffic jams.
For more information on the competition go to www.bbc.co.uk/schools/teachers/offbyheart
How to learn verse
1 Read the poem to yourself
2 Now read the first line of the poem out loud. Take your eyes from the page
and immediately say the line again. Glance back to make sure you got it
right. If you made a mistake, try again. Now do the same with the second
line. Repeat the procedure for every line in the poem.
3 Go back to the beginning. This time, read the first two lines out loud, look
away and repeat them aloud. Check. If you made a mistake, try again. Now
move on to the next two lines, going through the whole poem two lines at a
time.
4 Repeat the process three lines at a time, then four lines at a time, then
five and then six. By the sixth pass, no matter how long the poem, you will
have it memorised.
5 Recite the whole poem just before you go to bed at night.
6 Crucial: stop thinking about the poem. Your sleeping mind is very important
for memory.
7 The next day, you should find (after a glance at the first line to
bump-start your memory) that you can recite the whole poem.
