Verses Recalled

I just discovered something shocking...well, I suppose shocking is a bit hyperbolic, but it's not a good thing. Apparently school children are no longer required to memorize poems as they study English literature in middle and high school. According to my reliable source — a current high school teacher of English — many schools ignore centuries of great English and American literature, preferring instead to focus on modern novels by writers like Stephen King. And poetry? Apparently, at best, it's back-burnered or completely ignored. I hope this is not true, or at least not universal.

If you're my age or even a few years younger, I'm pretty sure you were exposed to at least some of the English language's great poetry, and probably had to memorize many of those poems. I can still recite some of them, so burned into my memory were those lines. A poem like Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty" will always be with me:

Glory be to God for dappled things -- 

    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

        For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches wings;

    Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;

        And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

    Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

        With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                        Praise him.

(Although I can still recall all the words, I had to look up the punctuation.)

The first time I read this poem, in my eighth-grade classroom, I was intrigued by its sounds, by the flow of the verse, but I hadn't a clue what all those strange words meant. I then made the mistake of mentioning this to Sister Francis Jane, O.P. In doing so I had talked myself into another homework assignment: "Find out," she ordered, "and tomorrow you can tell the class what you discovered." 

The next day, I introduced the class to another new word -- new, at least, for me -- "paradox"  -- and went on to explain, very poorly and nervously, how God fills the world with wondrous things that show off the variety and surprise of His creation. It's a creation, too, of opposites that display His glory. And, perhaps not surprisingly, man, in his own use of nature's gifts, imitates God. 

My brief commentary resulted in lots of blank looks and no applause, but one cute girl with long, auburn tresses seemed mildly impressed, so it was worth it. Of course, I ended up angering the entire class because "Franny Jane" (as we affectionately called Sister behind her back) decided that everyone should memorize the poem...lots of groans and dirty looks directed at yours truly.

And how many of you had to memorize Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"? Once again the words have remained with me. I found Frost's poetry refleshing because I could understand what he was saying without turning to the Oxford English Dictionary. It just took me a while to comprehend his deeper meanings related to the choices life places before us. And with that, Franny Jane introduced us to symbols and metaphors and similes. 

There's so much more verse tucked away in my aging memory banks -- poetry by Shakespeare, Tennyson, Pope, Dickinson, Francis Thompson, and many others -- and like the songs we loved in our youth, I can recall these poems and savor them when life's challenges demand a touch of calm or a reminder of reality. How sad that the memories of many of today's children will be empty of such wonderful poetry, for poetry introduces us to the fullness and intensity of language. Indeed, poetry, for me, is another proof of the very existence of God, in whose image and likeness you and I were created. The Creative Word presents us with a perfect divine song, a gift from a loving God who fills His creation with the objects of our poetry.