The new issue of 'the real reader's quarterly', Slightly Foxed, is out, and, as ever, it's full of good stuff, including pieces on Jane Welsh Carlyle's letters, Updike's Couples, Lucky Jim, Edward Gorey and Georges Simenon. There's also this, by me, in which I look back to a time when people would read, memorise and happily recite the kind of 'good bad' verse that stirred the blood...
Bernie Taupin and I have one thing (and only one, I suspect) in common. Catching an interview with him on the radio recently, I discovered that the man who wrote the words for all those Elton John hits was, like me, reared on recitations of stirring narrative verse, mostly from the Victorian age.
In his case, it was his mother and maternal grandfather who had quantities of the stuff by heart and would recite it at the drop of a hat; in my case, it was my father, and his preferred time of day for poetry was the morning, often while he was shaving. To this day, I cannot hear or read Newbolt’s ‘Vitai Lampada’ (‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight – Ten to make and the match to win…’) or Macaulay’s ‘Horatius’ (‘Lars Porsena of Clusium by the nine gods he swore…’) or Tennyson’s ‘A Ballad of the Fleet’ (‘At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay, And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away…’) without being transported back to the chilly bathroom of an Edwardian house in Ealing, where my father is lathering his face with shaving soap and reciting from memory his favourite poetry.
Part of his delight in such verse was no doubt that it reconnected him with his post-Edwardian boyhood and his charmed schooldays. He surely enjoyed ¬– who wouldn’t? – the strong rhythms and rhymes that are a feature of so much narrative verse, and he relished expressions of patriotic sentiment, courage under fire, morally upright behaviour, the excitement of action, a fight in a good cause – all themes that were already unfashionable when he was a young man, not that he would have cared.
There was one anthology that was so important to him that he bought a copy to keep him company when he was serving in Palestine during the war. I still have that copy, inscribed with his name, regiment and number, and carrying the label of the Modern Library & Stationery Store, Jaffa & Haifa. The anthology is Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys, edited by William Ernest Henley, the peg-legged poet whose wooden leg and overpowering presence partly inspired his friend Robert Louis Stevenson’s creation of Long John Silver.
The epigraph, from Scott, on the title page gives some idea of the tone: ‘Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife, To all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.’ Stirring stuff indeed.
In his short preface, Henley reaffirms that his selection is aimed at boys, and that it represents only ‘the simpler sentiments, and the more elemental emotions’. And yet, reading it now, it seems to me that, for all its emphasis on stirring narrative, it actually makes a useful introduction to a far wider field of English poetry, from Shakespeare and Drayton (both on Agincourt) to Henley himself, represented by three works, including his most enduring, ‘Invictus’ (‘Out of the night that covers me, Black at the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul…’). Along the way there is much that is quieter and more inward-looking than might be expected: George Herbert’s beautiful ‘Memento Mori’ (‘Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright – The bridal of the earth and sky – The dew shall weep thy fall tonight, For thou must die…’), Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, Samuel Johnson’s lines on the death of Dr Robert Levet (‘Condemn’d to Hope’s delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day…’). Henley even includes Marvell’s Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, a poem that cleverly subverts the very triumph it appears to celebrate. Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ appears under the heading ‘The Beauty of Terror’ – Henley likes to add his own titles, to point a moral: Keats’s great sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ is headed, bizarrely, ‘To the Adventurous’.
John Greenleaf Whittier’s ‘Barbara Frietchie’, a favourite of my father’s, is here (‘“Shoot, if you must, this old grey head, But spare your country’s flag,” she said …’), as is another favourite, Francis Hastings Doyle’s ‘The Private of the Buffs’ (‘Last night, among his fellow roughs, He jested, quaffed and swore; A drunken private of the Buffs, Who never looked before…’). Others that made a big impression on the boyhood me include Byron’s thrilling ‘Sennacherib’ (‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold…’) and ‘The Isles of Greece’ (‘where burning Sappho loved and sung’). Surprisingly absent are Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and Kipling’s ‘If’, but they were in my father’s repertoire anyway, as was (on a good day) the whole of Chesterton’s ‘Lepanto’, which he probably took from another anthology we had on our shelves, the more straightforwardly literary A Book of Narrative Verse, an Oxford World’s Classic dating from 1930. ‘Lepanto’, a gorgeously coloured account of the great naval confrontation between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire, stirred me more than almost anything I heard in my boyhood. Who could resist the opening lines? ‘White founts falling in the Courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run; There is laughter like fountains in that face of all men feared, It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard, It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips, For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships…’).
I never managed to learn the whole thing myself, but back in those days, when I still had a retentive memory, I did commit some quite long poems to memory – inspired, of course, by my father’s impromptu recitations. Though sadly I can no longer retain any great quantity of verse, I still believe that learning ‘by heart’ is an excellent way of really getting to know a poem, to know it, as it were, from the inside – and the same goes for reading aloud. The musicality of a poem, how it sounds when read out loud as well as in the head, is essential to its nature, and both learning by heart and reading aloud can open up a poem to us more effectively than just reading it on the page. And yet it seems that both are now largely things of the past.
In the Introduction to The Faber Popular Reciter (1978), Kingsley Amis, its editor, strikes an elegiac note: ‘When I was a schoolboy before the Second World War,’ he writes, ‘the majority of the poems in this book were too well known to be worth reprinting. If they were not in one anthology they were in a couple of others; they were learned by heart and recited in class, or performed as turns at grown-up gatherings … Most of that, together with much else, has gone.’ Despite its name, his anthology is, Amis insists, for reading aloud – sharing a poem with like-minded friends (or harmlessly showing off), and quoting rather than reciting. He recognises that much popular verse is ‘good bad verse’, but, as Orwell wrote, ‘a good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form … some emotion which nearly every human being can share.’
Amis’s anthology, which includes some hymns and songs, is, in its less overtly sinew-stiffening way, every bit as stirring as Lyra Heroica (and it does include ‘If’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’). It represents the poetry that lingered in the mind of a man raised at a certain time, a time when learning by heart and recitation were standard ways of engaging with poetry, and when poetry – the ‘good bad poetry’ of popular verse, hymns and songs – was everywhere, in a way it no longer is. If all that was already gone in 1978, how much more so is it now.
However, there are occasional signs that something survives. Kipling’s ‘If’ clearly lives on, coming top in a nationwide poll of favourite poems in 1995 (with Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shallot’ and Walter de la Mare’s ‘The Listeners’ a rather surprising second and third). I suspect it would come top again if the poll was repeated. In 2009 the film Invictus told how the imprisoned Nelson Mandela read Henley’s poem of that name on a scrap of paper and drew strength from it. This inspired various politicians, including our own Gordon Brown, to claim that they too had been inspired by the poem, and when Prince Harry founded his games for disabled veterans in 2014, he christened them the Invictus Games.
Perhaps, paraphrasing Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, we could say that, though much is taken, much abides… However, there is no denying that the poetry-infused world recalled by Kingsley Amis has, sadly, long gone. Those of us who caught the tail end of it, like me and Bernie Taupin, are surely the better for having been exposed at an early age to all that stirring verse, recited with gusto. In my case, it laid the foundations for a lifelong love of poetry – even if, alas, it didn’t make a millionaire songwriter of me.
