Today, I have an early Christmas present for fans of William F. Buckley Jr. (and fans-to-be?): a little memoir, on WFB’s wide-ranging interests and abilities. Here it is. Hope you enjoy.
Lately, I have had some columns and posts about poetry, and, in particular, the memorization of it. A little mail — starting with this:
You reminded me of “L’infinito,” which I confess I hadn’t thought about for years, but which used to be one of my favorite poems. Re-reading it in your column reminded me why — the wonderful poetic idea that the path to infinity lies through one’s own garden, as it were. It’s not unlike the implications of “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still” if we need an “Amur’kin” example.
Our correspondent has quoted the first lines of Frost’s “After Apple-Picking”; “L’infinito” is by Leopardi.
He (our correspondent) continues,
But I’ve also long been interested in the idea of memorizing poems. It’s something that, like you, I wish I had done more of over the years. When I was in college in the ’70s and ’80s, memorization was very much out of style in favor of “close reading,” I suppose. We were encouraged to look down on memorization as a superficial approach to poetry. Over the years, however, I’ve come to believe that it’s much more important than that.
Sadly, I don’t have many English poems memorized, and, oddly, I wound up memorizing more poems in German — Rilke, Eichendorff, Mörike, and the like — perhaps because they were foreign and the words themselves needed learning.
Yes.
In any event, I found that once one memorizes a poem, one has it forever and can go back and ponder it over and over. In the end, this creates a deeper, more meaningful engagement with the poem than any performative close reading.
The ones I do know by heart — long bits of “Prufrock”; Housman’s “Loveliest of trees” (I recite this one more anxiously every year), “Into my heart an air that kills,” and “To an Athlete Dying Young”; Yeats’s “When you are old”; Rilke’s “Herbsttag” and “Aus einer Kindheit”; some Shakespeare sonnets — are now like old, dear friends ready to help me “In the dark and cloudy day.”
Word.
A reader notes, “Music makes poetry easier to memorize.” Another reader writes,
Most of the Scripture I’ve managed to memorize comes from singing and not from Bible study. About 40 years ago, I was in a church choir which did “The Road Not Taken” as an anthem. I still remember some; 40 years ago, I knew most of the poem.
Randall Thompson set “The Road Not Taken” — listen to it here.
A few days ago, I surveyed some friends and colleagues about poems they had memorized, would like to memorize, etc. Here is an additional entry, from National Review’s Vahaken Mouradian — who has the following poems en tête:
“Aubade” (Larkin)
“This Be the Verse” (also Larkin)
“Dulce et Decorum Est” (Owen)
“Base Details” (Sassoon)
“Ithaca” (Cavafy)
“Tis little I — could care for Pearls” (Dickinson)
That is an excellent list (as most any would be, in my book).
Let’s have one more letter, which I think will tickle you, as we would say in the Midwest:
I’m an English prof at a small college in the South. As it happens, my daughter decided to take her degree here (English major), which meant that she would wind up in my class from time to time. On one such occasion, we were reading Larkin, and a highlight of my career will always be having her read “This Be the Verse” aloud to the class.
That poems begins, “They [mess] you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.”
I can just hear the laughter in that classroom. Thank you to one and all.