I have been memorising ‘Estuary’, by the Australian poet Gwen Harwood. Today I find myself crouched over a notebook, her poem covered up as I attempt to replicate the opening lines: Wind crosshatches shallow water. / Paddocks rest in the arm of the sea / Swamphens racing through spiky grass. Alright, I think, comparing my attempt with the original – how did I do? Oh, yeah, it’s “the sea’s arm”, not “the arm of the sea”. And there’s no “-ing” on the swamphens, obviously, otherwise it ruins the serenity in the rhythm. Okay, from the top!
This desire to memorise something comes over me every year or so, and it is one of the most rewarding ways of interacting with literature that I know. I don’t mean remembering witty quips and quotes from Cicero or Elizabeth Hardwick: these have a snobby whiff of habitus about them, a bit of Boris Johnson chumminess. For me, at least, it’s a non to bon mots.
What I’m advocating instead is the memorisation of literature, particularly poetry. I get that none of us liked being forced to rote-learn at school. And I realise that most of the literature currently being carried around in people’s heads is the work of dead white men – and specifically one dead white man, unless you believe those hopeful theories about how “William Shakespeare” was actually a noblewoman. But that seems to be a problem with the canon, not with memorising itself. Why can’t we have a world where Tracy K Smith gets recited at dinner parties and in parliament, where anxious patients at the dentist repeat the opening of To The Lighthouse to calm themselves or where young literary types compete to learn Derek Walcott’s Omeros by heart?
Rote learning is not, after all, exclusively a feature of the schoolroom. Epic poetry was designed to be memorised and passed on – that’s partly where rhyme and rhythm schemes come in. Many of our favourite writers learned to write through memorisation. Sometimes I wonder if Western pedagogy’s swerve away from memorising towards critiquing as the predominant way of encountering literature has led to the loss of something valuable.
My favourite thing about poetry is that moment… when you take the hard clay of your mind and make it soft
I’m not saying that texts should not be critiqued – that would put me out of a job! But the attention to detail that comes with rote learning has a literary power all its own, and it is a power that we can all rediscover for ourselves. I know of at least two Berliners who recently gave themselves the task of memorising T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock poem, one “just because” and the other “to impress a lady – but she wasn’t impressed”. One friend intones Emily Dickinson to himself as he cycles to the Stabi; another rocked an in-laws’ family talent show with some Rilke. An Englishman I know says he can do ‘Ozymandias’ by heart, while his father sometimes recites the opening of Beowulf in Old English – although who can tell if he is getting it right? A young novelist, when I asked him if he knew anything by heart, sent me screenshots proving he had passed the online Sporcle quiz recreating the first page of Moby-Dick.
Personally, I owe it to memorisation that I was ever able to get into poetry at all. Poetry had always intimidated me: I thought I didn’t have the knowledge, the taste, the capital, or something. I only changed my ways in my mid-20s once someone told me I was allowed to enjoy it without being able to understand everything: you just have to let yourself feel stung by it, by the desire to store it away inside you. Years later, my favourite thing about poetry is still that moment before you start reading: a moment when you take the hard clay of your mind and make it soft for someone else.
Good poems invade you. They arrive as if they could never have been different: no line, no word, no comma could be changed without destroying the overall magic. This is something that becomes clear when you try memorising. Any synonym you substitute, any chunk you overlook, any singular you absent-mindedly turn plural – these all call for immediate correction. And as you go correcting them, you start to understand why this poem has the particular shape it has, why the poet decided on this version above the others. “If you possess a poem by memory, it begins to possess you,” the American critic Harold Bloom once said.
So, emptying my mental pockets out onto the table, what do I have memorised now? A Shakespeare sonnet, some chunks of Ashbery and Frost, one of Christian Wiman’s Mandelstam translations, and Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’ (an embarrassing souvenir from school) plus some recent acquisitions, like ‘Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair’ by Antigone Kefala, a poem of such gorgeously dark power that I decided I needed to hear it inside me as well as aloud. And now I am working on the Harwood, a work of tender luminescence that builds and resolves and ends on some lovely lines about light and benediction and… well, I haven’t got that far yet.
