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Poetry by Heart Why learn a poem when it is always just a mouse click away, along with thousands more? Isn’t learning poems an old-fashioned chore forced on reluctant schoolchildren in the past?
Why learn a poem when it is always just a mouse click away, along with thousands more? Isn’t learning poems an old-fashioned chore forced on reluctant school children in the past?
James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree Took great care of his mother, though he was only three. James James said to his mother, “Mother,” he said, said he, “You must never go down to the end of the town if you don’t go down with me!
W
hen my daughter was about three we had huge fun chanting this little AA Milne poem called Disobedience (and there are plenty more verses, believe me) as we walked about together. It’s just right for tramping along to. She learnt it as easily as my son learnt the impossibly complicated names of the more obscure dinosaurs, and sometimes, if I just began to say it, it would distract her from a potential misery and cause her to forget all about it and join in with delight. I recently reminded her of this (she is now a teacher in her twenties, by the way) and she immediately grinned, and we chanted the whole thing together,
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following it up with The Tale of Custard the Dragon. We could have done ten more, easily! Perhaps twenty or thirty. When I asked her why she had enjoyed them so much, she said that it was something to do with rhyme, rhythm and structure, which was comforting and fun to share, but it was also a bit mysterious, and made pictures in her head. Why was James James Morrison’s mother so vague? What did King John have to do with it? Why was the little boy in charge? When she was about 9, she would sometimes draw on her poems to help her sleep. By this time we had added some more grown-up ones, like The Highwayman (Alfred Noyes), with its rhythm of galloping hooves, (my son loved this one, too) and we soon went on to add poems by Charles Causley (By St Thomas’ Water and Reservoir Street), AE Houseman’s Is my Team Ploughing?, Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and all sorts of random others, old and new, funny and strange, that caught her fancy. I had kept my much-loved Golden Treasury of Poetry from my childhood, and she devoured it in delight. Now she says that those poems, which she still carries around in her head, are a link back to the person
she was when she learned them – the toddler, the little girl, the adolescent, and a rather good poet herself. No-one ever asked her to learn them – she just did – but there is hot debate about whether children should be made to learn poetry by heart in school. I reckon that being encouraged to love a poem by hearing it many, many times, and being able to join in, is a great way to go, and obviously better than forced rote learning. Just about every 6−year-old I taught seemed to enjoy it, and often had fun playing with the structures and ideas and making their own versions, using patterns, techniques and vocabulary which became part of their language store, to dip into and use. You know that your child is learning vocabulary, language skills, memory skills, grammar, and are thinking about imagery,
