“The thing is,” said Charlotte Mason in a book she wrote for children, “to keep your eye upon words and wait to feel their force and beauty; and, when words are so fit that no other words can be put in their places, so few that none can be left out without spoiling the sense, and so fresh and musical that they delight you, then you may be sure that you are reading Literature, whether in prose or poetry. A great deal of delightful literature can be recognised only by this test.” (volume 4)
I grew up on Mother Goose and AA Milne. However, I really learned to love poetry through boredom and solitude one Christmas season when I was 10 years old. I had come down with a nasty case of pneumonia. First my mother thought it was just a cold combined with malingering so I could stay home instead of going to seasonal social functions. She made me go to the seasonal social functions anyway, including a party with our sister church across the border in Mexico on Christmas Eve. That Christmas morning I had to be told to open my presents, and as soon I had done so, I left them where they lay, and went back to bed. That's when she realized I was truly sick. Later I was taken to the hospital with a temperature of 106 and I received horribly painful penicillin shots around the clock for the next several days.
I was in the hospital a full week, mostly by myself. Visiting hours were strict back then. My parents both worked fulltime and my younger siblings weren't allowed in the hospital ward so it wasn't easy for them to come visit for more than an hour or two each weekday. My parents brought some of my presents to the hospital to keep me company during the long, solitary and boring hours between shots. The first three days I didn't really care. I was just that sick. However, once the rounds of antibiotics by injection took effect, I felt much more interested in life and was ready to go home. The doctor would not release me until I ate all my meals. I was already a gawky stick of a child, something of a picky eater, and I had lost a lot of weight. I sent back my hospital meals mostly untouched. But I had hardly eaten much before I got pneumonia, and I wasn’t going to start then (when I grew up, I got over this aversion to food, unfortunately). Finally, my father would come to the hospital at meal times to eat my meals for me so the right boxes were ticked off and I could come home.
Meanwhile, I was incredibly bored and I had nothing to do except continue to be jabbed with needles around the clock, every four hours. I was extremely needle phobic when I was hospitalized but I lacked the energy or oxygen to put up my usual fight, but they still filled me with horror. There were only soap operas and game shows on daytime television in the seventies, mostly deemed inappropriate for children. There were no cell phones in the world, nor any electronic games to speak of. I didn’t have a lot of energy even if a nurse had been free to play a game with me. I had my Christmas presents, though. I savoured one gift in particular. It was a marvelous anthology of poetry from my Aunt (see below for title). She always gave lovely gifts.
I read it all the way through, and then began again. And again.
One one of his visits to the hospital my dad used a series of dots and dashes on paper to teach me the rhyme scheme for limericks and other forms of poetry. I wrote very bad poetry and even worse limericks, but they scanned.
I pushed away the horror of needles and the smell of disinfectant with Tennyson’s ballads and Wordsworth’s daffodils and other wonders. I hugged Emily Dickinson to myself like a longlost friend. I wrote scores of very bad limericks after the fashion of Lear.
Sometimes they recite. Most recently it was Christina Rosetti's Flint:
"An emerald is as green as grass,
A ruby red as blood;
A sapphire shines as blue as heaven;
A flint lies in the mud.
A diamond is a brillant stone,
To catch the world's desire;
An opal holds a fiery spark;
What we never do talk about at this stage is schools of poetry, rhyme scheme, symbolism, or gendered nuances and patriarchy in poetry. We talk about the poems we like and maybe what we like about them. We also talk about what we did that day, which of the treats we do and don't like, and how many spoonfuls of sugar one might be permitted. Poetry is a natural part of their lives. It's taken for granted that humans read poems, just as they read other things, and some of the poems they like and some they don't, and that's perfectly normal to them as well.
The Light Brigade faced death squarely in the eye, and I, too, could face my own ordeals inspired by their courage, even though my ordeal was the far more humiliating needle in the buttocks six times every 24 hours. By the time the ordeal was over, I had so many bruises behind me they had to start giving me the injections in my thighs, but I was forever filled with the morally bolstering and soul-warming gift of poetry.
Sometimes they recite. Most recently it was Christina Rosetti's Flint:
"An emerald is as green as grass,
A ruby red as blood;
A sapphire shines as blue as heaven;
A flint lies in the mud.
A diamond is a brillant stone,
To catch the world's desire;
An opal holds a fiery spark;
What we never do talk about at this stage is schools of poetry, rhyme scheme, symbolism, or gendered nuances and patriarchy in poetry. We talk about the poems we like and maybe what we like about them. We also talk about what we did that day, which of the treats we do and don't like, and how many spoonfuls of sugar one might be permitted. Poetry is a natural part of their lives. It's taken for granted that humans read poems, just as they read other things, and some of the poems they like and some they don't, and that's perfectly normal to them as well.
The Light Brigade faced death squarely in the eye, and I, too, could face my own ordeals inspired by their courage, even though my ordeal was the far more humiliating needle in the buttocks six times every 24 hours. By the time the ordeal was over, I had so many bruises behind me they had to start giving me the injections in my thighs, but I was forever filled with the morally bolstering and soul-warming gift of poetry.
Over the next few years I read that book so many times it fell apart, and then I read it to my children and bought a replacement, twice, when it, too, fell apart.I taught some of those poems to my daughters and they are teaching some of them to my grandchildren. I have been blessed to have tea and poetry afternoons with my grandchildren where they choose a poem from their family's copy of this book and I read it while we have tea in pretty china cups and I offer treats I learned about in our travels in Asia. The oldest child in that family is barely 9. Even the four year old likes to choose her own poems for me to read to the group. The children talk about what they like about their poem, what it means, and they have debates about them as well, spontaneously, sometimes silly, sometimes erudite enough to grace the table of any Oxford don, if we ignore the crumbs and spilled tea, the jam smeared faces, the bits of ppeungo-bang that have escaped.
But a flint holds fire."
More than once in their mother's childhood, we have stood at the sea and one of us has said, "I must go down to the sea again...' and we knew what the other meant. More than once, I have said to their teenaged mother when we had a busy and noisy toddler and a new baby, "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree," and the vision of beehives and bean-rows and a place where peace comes dropping slow came to mind without being said, and she knew what I meant. I imagine some day in the future of these grandchildren some one of them will comment on a flashy piece of commercialism with 'but a flint holds fire,' and the others will know what she means without another word. Poetry is another vocabulary, another way of thinking, feeling, and picturing, another way of meaning.
That meaning is derived from more than the dictionary. A line is greater than the sum of its parts- it holds richer, deeper, broader meaning than merely the definition of the individual words. It comes from the sound and the sense, the rhythm and the feel. It comes from shared experiences, like reading poetry over the tea-table, or reciting it to your grandparents, or standing in a quiet, sunny space in the woods on a sultry day and looking at a creek still and smooth as glass and thinking of Milne's lines, "Between the woods the afternoon has fallen in a golden swoon..." Flints will ever always mean something more to these children than merely a gray stone which is used to start campfires. It has a host of associations for them now.
There is actually a term used for this string of association behind words (and lines of words in poetry). It's the rather inelegant word 'chunking.' Our brains works at a more efficient organization of memories and knowledge through this chunking process. We put phone numbers together combining them, so instead of learning 7 separate digits, we might turn 5-5-1-0 into 55-10. The word apple doesn't just mean the red fruit in our minds, it represents a host of other things- trees, George Washington, pies, computers, that time we went apple picking, the history of the marketing of the delicious apple over tastier, better breeds, the season best for apple picking, and more. Try it and see- play this little game of association with me. If I say George Washington, what are some things that come to mind?
Selma?
Water?
Fort?
Oak Tree?
The words, phrases, memories, experiences, all those things you pulled up and recalled just now- each is an example of how our brain makes connections, and each of those connections makes things easier to remember. Words and memorable phrases such as we fine in poems are like microchips or extra storage cells for lots of additional information. And what are books and stories full of?
In an eloquent 1997 review of a not very happy anthology of poetry (now I believe out of print), J. Bottum writes:
“Is poetry important for today?” somebody might ask me, and they really mean that no, it's not.
“How will it help them get a job?” is another question I've heard, and of course, I can't claim that it will. But if that is all that matters, why do we do anything at all not directly connected to employment? Why sing a song or listen to one, why learn more than one way to prepare chicken, why buy two different shirts because we like the pattern when five duplicates of the same shirt would be more efficient? Why bother asking me the question, since that will also not help you with employment?
” Isn’t it old fashioned?” I have been asked, or passively aggressively told, reall. I suppose it is, in some circles. But the fact that something may have fallen out of fashion in some circles is not itself evidence that it deserves to stay out of fashion. Surely we don't believe things matter only insofar as they are widely valued by our current culture. "Old fashioned' is an observation, not a reasoned position. And that observation may not be as useful as we thought, since poetry books are still published, poetry still read. So it isn't exactly like bustles and buggy whips.
” I don’t like it, so I don’t see why I need to teach it to my kids. I turned out just fine without it.” This is the most unanswerable argument of all, because I have nothing to say which matches my ideas about courtesy. I don't know how to respond that won't be hurtful. We are standing on opposite sides of an incredibly wide and deep chasm, and we don’t speak the same language. Because no, you didn’t turn out just fine without it, or you wouldn’t need to ask that question. You wouldn’t limit education by equating it only with ‘necessary for a job’. You wouldn’t limit what you teach your children based on what you like or dislike, know or do not know. It isn’t that you are a bad person, a dumb person, a worthless person. I am shocked by such questions, but I don’t want to mock those who ask. I want to weep in pity, but nobody likes to be pitied at all. But what else are we to feel when confronted by precious souls who have been defrauded, hurt, wounded, and they don’t know it. They had the gift of wings, and the wings were sheared off before they ever had a chance to use them.
But a flint holds fire."
More than once in their mother's childhood, we have stood at the sea and one of us has said, "I must go down to the sea again...' and we knew what the other meant. More than once, I have said to their teenaged mother when we had a busy and noisy toddler and a new baby, "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree," and the vision of beehives and bean-rows and a place where peace comes dropping slow came to mind without being said, and she knew what I meant. I imagine some day in the future of these grandchildren some one of them will comment on a flashy piece of commercialism with 'but a flint holds fire,' and the others will know what she means without another word. Poetry is another vocabulary, another way of thinking, feeling, and picturing, another way of meaning.
That meaning is derived from more than the dictionary. A line is greater than the sum of its parts- it holds richer, deeper, broader meaning than merely the definition of the individual words. It comes from the sound and the sense, the rhythm and the feel. It comes from shared experiences, like reading poetry over the tea-table, or reciting it to your grandparents, or standing in a quiet, sunny space in the woods on a sultry day and looking at a creek still and smooth as glass and thinking of Milne's lines, "Between the woods the afternoon has fallen in a golden swoon..." Flints will ever always mean something more to these children than merely a gray stone which is used to start campfires. It has a host of associations for them now.
There is actually a term used for this string of association behind words (and lines of words in poetry). It's the rather inelegant word 'chunking.' Our brains works at a more efficient organization of memories and knowledge through this chunking process. We put phone numbers together combining them, so instead of learning 7 separate digits, we might turn 5-5-1-0 into 55-10. The word apple doesn't just mean the red fruit in our minds, it represents a host of other things- trees, George Washington, pies, computers, that time we went apple picking, the history of the marketing of the delicious apple over tastier, better breeds, the season best for apple picking, and more. Try it and see- play this little game of association with me. If I say George Washington, what are some things that come to mind?
Selma?
Water?
Fort?
Oak Tree?
The words, phrases, memories, experiences, all those things you pulled up and recalled just now- each is an example of how our brain makes connections, and each of those connections makes things easier to remember. Words and memorable phrases such as we fine in poems are like microchips or extra storage cells for lots of additional information. And what are books and stories full of?
In an eloquent 1997 review of a not very happy anthology of poetry (now I believe out of print), J. Bottum writes:
"...one reason we read poetry to children is to hand on a deposit of words and phrases, the investment of prior generations in the language. There is a purpose in putting lines like “young Lochinvar is come out of the West” in children’s anthologies—and “’Twas the night before Christmas” and “what is so rare as a day in June?” and “I hear America singing” and “Under a spreading chestnut tree” and all the rest of the Victorian parlor classics, together with the most hackneyed, overquoted lines from Shakespeare and Dryden and Pope and Keats... The person who is not given these references as a child will be deprived as an adult, lacking old memories around which the language can thicken.
... Another reason we read poetry to children has to do with what can only be called magic. Heavy meter and insistent rhyme are a kind of sorcery, through which words achieve unity not only with their meanings but with the things they represent. To put it another way, meter and rhyme confirm children’s deeply conservative desire that the world make sense in all its parts."
"Language is the amber in which a thousand precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved," said Ralph Waldo Emerson, poet, writer, philosopher, well over a hundred years before scientists came up with the theory of 'chunking.'“Is poetry important for today?” somebody might ask me, and they really mean that no, it's not.
“How will it help them get a job?” is another question I've heard, and of course, I can't claim that it will. But if that is all that matters, why do we do anything at all not directly connected to employment? Why sing a song or listen to one, why learn more than one way to prepare chicken, why buy two different shirts because we like the pattern when five duplicates of the same shirt would be more efficient? Why bother asking me the question, since that will also not help you with employment?
” Isn’t it old fashioned?” I have been asked, or passively aggressively told, reall. I suppose it is, in some circles. But the fact that something may have fallen out of fashion in some circles is not itself evidence that it deserves to stay out of fashion. Surely we don't believe things matter only insofar as they are widely valued by our current culture. "Old fashioned' is an observation, not a reasoned position. And that observation may not be as useful as we thought, since poetry books are still published, poetry still read. So it isn't exactly like bustles and buggy whips.
” I don’t like it, so I don’t see why I need to teach it to my kids. I turned out just fine without it.” This is the most unanswerable argument of all, because I have nothing to say which matches my ideas about courtesy. I don't know how to respond that won't be hurtful. We are standing on opposite sides of an incredibly wide and deep chasm, and we don’t speak the same language. Because no, you didn’t turn out just fine without it, or you wouldn’t need to ask that question. You wouldn’t limit education by equating it only with ‘necessary for a job’. You wouldn’t limit what you teach your children based on what you like or dislike, know or do not know. It isn’t that you are a bad person, a dumb person, a worthless person. I am shocked by such questions, but I don’t want to mock those who ask. I want to weep in pity, but nobody likes to be pitied at all. But what else are we to feel when confronted by precious souls who have been defrauded, hurt, wounded, and they don’t know it. They had the gift of wings, and the wings were sheared off before they ever had a chance to use them.
Poetry gives us wings, beauty, a wider vista, a deeper emotional life, a new way of seeing, thinking, and feeling. We read poetry because it's rich and expresses ideas and helps us make connections and understand more than before. We read poetry because it's a human endeavor. If it were valueless, there would be no book of Psalms. It doesn't matter what it has to do with a job.
“…we have set up a little tin god of efficiency in that niche within our private pantheon which should be occupied by personality. We trouble ourselves about the uses of the young person to society. As for his own use, what he should be in and for himself, why, what matter? Because, say we, if we fit him to earn his living we fit him also to be of service to the world and what better can we do for him personally? We forget that it is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God shall man live,––whether it be spoken in the way of some truth of religion, poem, picture, scientific discovery, or literary expression; by these things men live and in all such is the life of the spirit. The spiritual life requires the food of ideas for its daily bread.” (Charlotte Mason)
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The Golden Treasury of Poetry, edited by Louis Untermyer and illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund is the book that gave me such pleasure when I was in the hospital at age 10.
The Golden Treasury of Poetry, edited by Louis Untermyer and illustrated by Joan Walsh Anglund is the book that gave me such pleasure when I was in the hospital at age 10.
It was republished a few years later as The Golden Books Family Treasury of Poetry, slightly different cover and I think maybe two or three poems are omitted here that were in the previous version. It wasn’t a substantive difference.
Another poetry anthology I highly recommend to anybody with young children (about grade 6 and below) is any early copy of the Childcraft poetry volume. About 1970 and before would be excellent. You can find these easily in thrift shops and second hand stores. If you can't find a Childcraft, look for any multivolume set of Children's stories and literature published between 1919 and 1970 or so, and buy just the volume with poetry and Mother Goose in it. It's sure to be affordable ( about a dollar if you in the U.S.) and much better than a couple of other anthologies often recommended to homeschooling families. I am not a fan of those.
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I have that Golden Treasury (in the cover with the red border and the picture of the Pied Piper)! It's one of my favorites and the one I always recommend if someone asks where to begin. <3
ReplyDeleteI really, really love this post, Wendi. You are eloquent, and also, right. :) It seems very familiar to me, though - have you posted it before?
ReplyDeleteI have! A few years back. I just updated it and revised it a bit and reposted here. I'm flattered that you remember it.
DeleteHappy to see that volume on my bookshelf and now that you have written such a lovely story about it, I will treasure it even more. Mine is copyright 1959 so I am thinking it may be the one you had in the hospital. Mine is tan with an Anglund illustration of a couple holding hands under a tree with a house in the distance on the cover. Green spine. Thank you for this beautiful post about the power of poetry.
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