WHEN I speak of poetry, I think of classic poems written by great poets of the past, poetry that modern educationalists think of as ‘elitist’ literature. Such writing may now be largely the preserve of private schools – those privileged places disliked by our Labour government. This is a tragedy. Great poetry should not be the preserve of the few but the birthright of all children. For poetry is the language of the soul (think of the Psalms) and we all have souls. This is a challenging statement for an age of spiritual mediocrity, the age in which we live now, but it matters urgently – if only to remind people that the language of beauty still exists and that if children are exposed to it through the words, the cadences, the rhythms and the imagery of traditional poems they will have a glimpse of the eternal which they will never forget.
Children should learn classic poems by heart. Such methods are not now favoured by the educational establishment, but they are an essential tool for young people, whose memories are naturally retentive and who would thus develop a deep wellspring of the profound linguistic wisdom provided by poetry that remains with us all our days. I once knew two elderly gentlemen, proudly working-class, who both left school at 14 to go to work. The first, my father-in-law, could quote John Masefield’s Trade Winds by heart 80 years after he had learnt it at school. The second, when asked for his favourite poem, recited Kipling’s If – to me with great gusto.
Before I started school a literary friend of my mother’s read me Lord Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott and Matthew Arnold’s The Forsaken Merman. The first introduced me to Arthurian magic and the second to the mysterious sorrows of adult life. Then for my eighth birthday in 1953 I was given The Faber Book of Children’s Verse. I treasure it still. Leafing through the index I recognise Tennyson’s The Splendour Falls, Hilaire Belloc’s Matilda, William Blake’s The Tyger, Oliver Goldsmith’s Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, Shelley’s Ozymandias, Kipling’s A St Helena Lullaby and names such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, John Keats and G K Chesterton, all with their drum roll of stirring and startling subjects described memorably in verse.
The sections of this wonderful anthology – including Poetry, Music and Dancing, Beasts and Birds, Kings, Queens and Heroes, Magic, Witches, Charms and Spells, Marvels and Riddles, God and Heaven, History and Time – taught me everything I needed to know about life; as Hamlet reminds his friend: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ In other words, classic poetry introduces us to the language and world of the imagination in a way that no other subject does; and imagination is what separates us from brute beasts. Hymns, I might add, are also a form of poetry; I am forever grateful for my Catholic childhood, the old Westminster Hymnal and to hymn-writers such as Fathers Faber and Caswall.
Kathy Gyngell quoted from The Lay of Horatius in a recent article lamenting our country’s dire political situation. It reminded me that when I was nine my father gave me a copy of Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome for Christmas. I had been tasked with peeling a pile of potatoes for the family meal (we were a large family) and had proclaimed to no one in particular: ‘I long for freedom!’ My father overheard this appeal and in his inscription to the book wrote ‘To Francis, who “longs for freedom”, from Daddy who is free from longings’. It sits on my desk in front of me now as I type. Subsequently I read that Churchill, in his Harrow schooldays, had learnt the whole of The Lay of Horatius – about 70 verses – by heart and had recited them in a school assembly. I decided to imitate him and committed about 45 verses to memory before I got bored.
About the same age I found a volume of Kipling’s poetry on my father’s bookshelves and instantly fell for his marvellous ear for rhyme and the intriguing glimpses he gave me of what I supposed was Cockney soldiery. Indeed, for a talent competition at my convent boarding school when I was 14, I got togged up in my father’s old RAMC uniform, with a pith helmet and ancient rifle, and recited Mandalay in my best ‘Cockney’ accent, to the consternation of the nuns. I expect this would now be considered cultural misappropriation.
It was a shock to be forced to relinquish Kipling, Chesterton, Lord Macaulay and the other poets I had loved as a child to study T S Eliot’s The Waste Land for A level. Yet I did grow to love Eliot and to develop more sophisticated literary tastes, including the discovery of Gerard Manley Hopkins on a senior school retreat, as well as Shakespeare. But now, in old age, I sometimes return to the excitement of my childhood discovery of poetry – and wish that future generations of children should not be deprived of such a vital element of their literary and imaginative education. Elitism be damned.
I conclude with the memory of my older brother, a career soldier, late an officer in the Enniskillen Fusiliers, who introduced me to another superb anthology: Other Men’s Flowers, compiled by Field-Marshall Lord Wavell and first published in 1944, during the war. It has the advantage of Wavell’s idiosyncratic introductions to each section of his anthology. He had been schooled at Winchester College where learning poetry was part of the daily curriculum and is reputed to have memorised every single poem he selected. In his preface to Music, Mystery and Magic, his first section, he reminds us that such themes are ‘the essence of the highest poetry’. Yes, indeed. Wavell was not conventionally religious; yet, as a cultured man of heart, sensitivity and imagination, he includes at the end of his anthology a poem of his own: Sonnet for the Madonna of the Cherries. After ‘nearly four years of war’ he had been inspired by a painting by Leonardo da Vinci and longed for ‘the kindly earth, and truth and grace’, concluding: ‘For all that loveliness, that warmth, that light/Blessed Madonna, I go back to fight.’
As I said, poetry is the language of the soul and we all (including members of the Labour government) have souls.
