The fog comes
on little cat feet.

You recall the poem, perhaps? Within five short lines, Carl Sandburg personifies fog in an unforgettable manner: as a cat, sitting on “silent haunches,” surveying city and harbor from above. And then, silently, moving on.

Hank and I have driven through a lot of fog this week, so this poem has sprung to mind. We left North Carolina in a thick pre-dawn fog that lingered through Virginia and into the mountains of Tennessee. We crisscrossed the fog and downpour of a serious storm that left billboards draped over power lines in Arkansas.

Starting our drive back east Tuesday night after my pre-concert talk and an electric performance by the Dallas Winds, we hurled through fog again on the way up to Texarkana. Wednesday, we swirled through more corridors of fog driving to Louisville, Kentucky. Apparently there are a lot of fog-cats moving around this time of year.

Today we will spend time at one of our favorite places: Memoria Press and the inspiring Highlands Latin School. Both institutions grew from the vision of their exceptional founder, the late Cheryl Lowe. A woman of dignity and joy, she saw clearly the imperative to renew the virtues and rigor of what used to be called simply “education,” and is known widely today as Classical education. Her intense lifework brought forth not only a press that provides exceptional pedagogical materials but the founding of a remarkable school where children K-through-12 drink from the fountain of the highest standards of learning.

In such a place, poetry is not a subject, but a way of life.* In fact, it’s been through our decade-long association with Memoria and Highlands Latin that I have renewed my own commitment to the importance of poetry in a child’s life.

Despite learning a goodly amount of poems in my own 1950s-style public education, that exposure fell far short of what would have been common for a similar education in earlier generations. To paraphrase what my mother said, in rare references to her upbringing in the Brooklyn tenements during the 1920s, she learned three-times more of everything by age 16 than I ever did through college. Much of that learning grew from her systematic memorization of poetry—poetry that never left her heart and mind.

For Christmas, 1958, she gave me a thick volume called One Thousand Poems for Children that I have clasped as my favorite book throughout life. But, while spending decades preaching the fruits of exposure to good music, I sometimes lapsed into a fog about poetry per se, viewing it as a kind of lovely literary option, rather than a core artery of life.

That is fixed now. And the work I now do, as well as friendships with colleagues striving for the renewal of classical standards in education, has resulted in launching a stronger program for poetry in my life and in the upbringing of our grandchildren.

Observing our grandchildren’s joy in poetry, and their ease in absorbing it, thrills me. But they do this not because they are exceptionally bright kids (of course, I think they are), but because they are kids and most children respond to poetry the way they do to ice cream. The sweetness of the vocabulary, imagery, meter, and rhythm brings a unique pleasure in their developing minds. Acquiring a repertoire of poems in their youth transforms into a bevy of friendships for a lifetime.

Poetry is a comfort too. Almost nothing happens that does not have a vivid parallel in poetic expression. Sandburg’s fog provides one tiny example. We could turn the spotlight on the Psalms for a much bigger one. Or we can point to any of tens of thousands of examples from the annals of poetry within our Western heritage. Poetry is a mirror reflecting laughter and tears, joy or sorrow, anger or relief, bewilderment or despair—any emotion you wish to name.

And so, perhaps today is a good day to give thought to your friendship with poetry. A verse may stand at your side right now, ready to impart magic before it moves on.

*All sixth graders at Highlands Latin School learn 24 stanzas of Horatius at the Bridge. Students seeking Horatius-like glory volunteer to memorize all 70 stanzas (16 pages, 589 lines, 3201 words). This year, a record 52 students rose to the challenge.