Francis Phillips reflects on the purpose of poetry, and highlights the value of memorising at a young age such classic poems as Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’.
A long-time occasional writer and book reviewer living in Buckinghamshire in south-east England, Francis published this article in the British online journal, The Conservative Woman. It is reprinted in The Defendant with Francis’ kind permission.
When I speak of poetry, I mean classic poems of the past that modern educationalists think ‘elitist’ literature. Such writing is now the preserve of private schools. This is a tragedy.
Great poetry should not be the preserve of the few but the birthright of all children. For poetry is the language of the soul (think of the Psalms) and we all have souls; a challenging statement for our age of spiritual mediocrity, but it matters urgently – reminding us that the language of beauty still exists and if children discover it through the cadences, rhythms, imagery of traditional poems they receive an unforgettable glimpse of eternity.
Children should memorise classic poems. This is not favoured by the educational establishment – but it is an essential tool for young people, whose memories are naturally retentive and who would develop a deep wellspring of the linguistic wisdom provided by poetry that remains always.
I once knew two elderly gentlemen who left school at 14. The first recited John Masefield’s ‘Trade Winds’ 80 years after he first learnt it. The second recited Kipling’s ‘If’.
Before I started school a literary lady read me Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Forsaken Merman.’ The first introduced me to Arthurian magic, the second to the mysterious sorrows of adult life.
For my 8th birthday in 1953 I was given The Faber Book of Children’s Verse. Leafing through the index I recognise Tennyson’s ‘The Splendour Falls’, Hilaire Belloc’s ‘Matilda’, William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, Kipling’s ‘A St Helena Lullaby’ and poets such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Keats and GK Chesterton, all with their melodic, stirring verse.
The sections of this wonderful anthology – including Music and Dancing, Beasts and Birds, Kings, Queens and Heroes, Charms and Spells, Marvels and Riddles – taught me everything I needed to know about life; as Hamlet reminds Horatio: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy…’
For classic poetry exposes us to the language of the imagination; and imagination is what separates us from brute beasts. Great hymns are also poetry; I am grateful for my Catholic childhood and to fine hymn-writers such as Fathers Faber and Caswall.
Aged 9 my father gave me Lord Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome for Christmas. I had been tasked with peeling a pile of potatoes and had proclaimed: ‘I long for freedom!’ My father overheard me and inscribed the book, “To Francis, who ‘longs for freedom’, from Daddy who is free from longings.” Churchill, as a schoolboy, had learnt the whole of the Lay of Horatius – about 70 verses. I decided to imitate him and committed about 45 verses to memory before I got bored.
About the same age, I found Kipling’s poetry on my father’s bookshelves. I fell for his marvellous ear for rhyme and the intriguing glimpses he provided of what I supposed was Cockney soldiery. For a talent competition at my convent boarding school aged 14, I dressed up in my father’s old RAMC uniform and recited ‘Mandalay’ in my best ‘Cockney’ accent. This would now be considered cultural misappropriation.
It was a shock to relinquish Kipling, GK Chesterton (whose ‘Lepanto’ with its vigorous rhythms I also learnt by heart), Stevenson and the other poets I loved as a child, to study TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. Yet I grew to love Eliot and to develop more sophisticated literary tastes. But now I sometimes return to those childhood poems and to wish that future generations of children should possess such a vital element of their imaginative education. Elitism be damned.
My older brother gave me another superb anthology: Other Men’s Flowers, compiled by Field-Marshall Lord Wavell, published in 1944. Wavell had been at Winchester College where learning poetry was a daily requirement. In his preface to ‘Music, Mystery and Magic’ he reminds readers such themes are ‘the essence of the highest poetry’. Yes, indeed.
Wavell was not conventionally religious yet, as a cultured man, he includes at the end his own poem: ‘Sonnet for the Madonna of the Cherries’, inspired by a painting by Leonardo da Vinci. He concludes, ‘For all that loveliness, that warmth, that light/Blessed Madonna, I go back to fight.’
As I said, poetry is the language of the soul – and we all have souls.