Even after all these years, William Ernest Henley’s Invictus remains the one poem memorized in school that won’t leave my mind. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it being there. But, seriously, why has it lingered while so many others left?
Partly I know the answer. I had a crush on a boy in my 9th-grade English class, so it’s within the realm of possibilities that I was trying extra-hard to impress him with my dramatic delivery of the poem. Why else do I recall gesticulating wildly as I yelled the lines of Invictus to the door of my bedroom closet?
But the poem was hard. Fellow students whined about it. By the 1960s, the pedagogical wisdom of having kids memorize poetry was waning. Everything else was getting thrown out the window, so why not that tradition too? Still, we memorized a lot of poems. Yet, all of the others have fled my mind. Or, to use a better expression, left my heart.
“To learn by heart” is a precious and accurate expression that describes the best way to memorize. Many of you reading this essay have seen the actual moment where I was reminded of this old-fashioned phrase. We were filming a scene for Unit 1 of Discovering Music. Sitting with poetry guru Bob Falls at the ice-cream counter of a restored, early 1900s apothecary in Bowie, Texas, we were awaiting sundaes. Is there a better place to discuss poetry?
Poems have always poured out of Bob Fall’s mouth. He rightly says he never has to worry about reading to kids if the electricity fails: he wouldn’t miss a beat of his repertoire.
Not mine, alas. After I recite the four quatrains of Invictus, I’m done. To be fair, I spent my youth learning by heart a boatload of Beethoven sonatas, Brahms intermezzi, Chopin scherzi, and Bach fugues. These pieces I still know. I also learned texts to songs and hymns. I didn’t realize these were “poetry” until years later.
Mostly I liked the poetry my mother recited aloud to me. She read a jillion poems to me from a volume presented to me on Christmas Eve 1958 called One Thousand Poems for Children. Can you imagine that? One Thousand poems! Throughout my whole childhood I gazed at that gold-embossed title in awe.
Back then, 1000 sounded like a magnificent number. Our family’s bank offered a “Thousand-aire’s Club” where a child could save 1000 dimes and become an elite member. That seemed amazing to me.
But reading a thousand poems was more impressive. And I did it, multiple times. The volume started with “Songs for the Nursery” and proceeded through every level and style of English-language poems imaginable, ending with historical ballads and high-toned literary classics.
I doubt you could print a similar volume today. Too many of the poems would be deemed politically incorrect, if not racist, bigoted, or sexist. But for me, they were an exotic garden of delights pointing to the “big world” I hoped to experience when I grew up.
The tattered remains of that book still sit on my shelf, although I’ve supplemented it with other intact copies found on-line. The depth of this compendium astonishes me every time I pick it up. What used to be viewed as “common fodder” for American kids can barely be fathomed today. Whenever possible, I read from it to the grandchildren.
Yet, Invictus is not in that volume. Perhaps the rights were not obtainable. Perhaps the editor decided that a child wasn’t ready to grasp the “fell clutch of circumstance” or the “bludgeonings of chance”? Still, among the 1000 poems were offered many equally complex and sophisticated. Who knows?
Poems are windows into life, past, present, and future. They open their meaning wider and deeper to us as time goes along. We inevitably learn what it is to experience “wrath and tears” and, despite these, proclaim that “It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishment the scroll.”
So, while a ninth-grader vociferously proclaims “I am the captain of my soul,” an adult knows what it means to whisper these words in the face of a glowering obstacle. Henley did when he lost a leg to amputation as a young man. So, too, did Nelson Mandela when he invoked Invictus during his long years of imprisonment.
How grateful I am to have learned this poem by memory. Or, better said, by heart.
It is good to hear how you benefited from poetry memorization. My kids started learning Mother Goose rhymes as preschoolers (one of them could recite nursery rhymes at age 2, but another could not until age 5, and the others were 3 or 4). I think hearing the rhythm and rhyme helped tune their ears to language patterns and increased their vocabulary. Poetry memorization has been a very good part of homeschooling for us. For many years, I just chose classic poems or fun poems that struck me, but in the past few years, I have been using Andrew Pudewa’s Poetry Memorization student book. It contains a variety of poems of different lengths, including many classics, and that has simplified poetry memorization for me, which helps in teaching multiple children and working with each one personally.
I also had a copy of this book, given to me as a young elementary student. I memorized countless poems in the book . When I thought about books for my new granddaughter, this book shot back to my memory. The poems that I had memorized so many decades ago flooded my emotions. I haven’t heard the term “memorize by heart” since I was a little child. I still cherish how this book effected my life to the positive.