Heart Beats

Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem

Catherine Robson

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780691163376, 9780691119366
• eBook ISBN: 9781400845156
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: History of Education
• Index: Literature

Many people in Great Britain and the United States can recall elderly relatives who remembered long stretches of verse learned at school decades earlier, yet most of us were never required to recite in class. Heart Beats is the first book to examine how poetry recitation came to assume a central place in past curricular programs, and to investigate when and why the once-mandatory exercise declined. Telling the story of a lost pedagogical practice and its wide-ranging effects on two sides of the Atlantic, Catherine Robson explores how recitation altered the ordinary people who committed poems to heart, and changed the worlds in which they lived.



Heart Beats begins by investigating recitation's progress within British and American public educational systems over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and weighs the factors that influenced which poems were most frequently assigned. Robson then scrutinizes the recitational fortunes of three short works that were once classroom classics: Felicia Hemans's "Casabianca," Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," and Charles Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna." To conclude, the book considers W. E. Henley's "Invictus" and Rudyard Kipling's "If--," asking why the idea of the memorized poem arouses such different responses in the United States and Great Britain today.


Focusing on vital connections between poems, individuals, and their communities, Heart Beats is an important study of the history and power of memorized poetry.

PART I

THE MEMORIZED POEM IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION

It is a Friday afternoon, some time in 1910. Elsie Hernsbusher, the blacksmith’s daughter, puts down her book and walks to the recitation bench. Both of Elsie’s grandfathers were born in Germany, but she and her parents are all natives of the United States, and the family speaks English at home. Now, in front of her schoolmates in the small town of Darien, Wisconsin (pop. 1,249), the twelve-year-old girl prepares to break the silence. On another afternoon in the same year, nearly four thousand miles away in Yorkshire, a boy named Charles William Bond is also on the brink of saying his piece. Charles’s father drives a delivery wagon for a local manufacturer of commercial lubricants; just like Elsie, Charles was born in 1898, but unlike her, he is not an only child. On the contrary: he lives (in a village in Mirfield—pop. around 11,000 at this date, but long since part of the West Riding’s sprawling conurbation of industrial towns) with one older brother, three half-brothers, and two half-sisters, his five younger siblings the children of his stepmother, Ada. In a year’s time, Charles will start work in the local coal-mine as a hurrier; six years after that, he will die on October 9, one of that day’s 10,000 Allied casualties at Passchendaele, and his body will never be found. Today, though, he is standing at his desk in Battyeford National School, the long low building on Nab Lane that lies just a short walk away from his family’s home.

The information about the two individuals in the paragraph above, plucked from U.S. and British census data and the Imperial War Graves Commission’s archive, represents the sum total of all I know for certain about Elsie and Charles. What follows in the next few pages is a series of conjectures about the preparations for the performances that are about to begin in these two widely separated classrooms; thereafter, the bulk of the chapter will conduct a detailed examination of how it was that such behaviors came to form an unexceptional part of huge numbers of lives. Accounting for this process will require the investigation of numerous histories and topics that may at first glance seem to bear tenuous connections to “poetry” or “recitation” per se; only by reconstructing a diverse matrix of preconditions will it be possible to understand how poetry recitation eventually found its apparently natural home in public education. My best guesses about the nature and content of two fabricated scenes in Wisconsin and Yorkshire aim to provide glimpses of everyday practice at the zenith of the memorized poem’s heyday, visions of experience from the period of classroom recitation’s most fully achieved state. We begin, in other words, with our journey’s ultimate destination.

And what is Elsie going to recite at the bench in Darien? Here is the section of the 1910 Manual of the Elementary Course of Study for the Common Schools of Wisconsin that sets out the list of poems deemed appropriate for the middle and upper forms, which is to say, for children in their fifth to seventh years of study.

147. Poems Suitable for the Middle Form

O Farewell. Night. The Skylark. Boy’s Song. Morning. To a Butterfly. The Huskers. The Bugle Song. Song of the Fairy. Four Leaf Clover. Autumn. Charge of the Light Brigade. The Night Before Waterloo. Written in March. Under the Greenwood Tree. To the Fringed Gentian.

—The Listening Child, Lucy W. Thacher.

The Sandpiper. The Old Oaken Bucket. Abou Ben Adhem. The Voice of Spring. Herve Riel. To America. The “Three Bells” of Glasgow.

—Poems Every Child Should Know, Mary E. Burt.

The Flight of the Birds. The Beautiful Snow. The Wind in a Frolic. April, Ever Frail and Fair. November. The Bees. Break, Break, Break. The New Year. When Icicles Hang by the Wall.

—Poetry of the Seasons, Mary I. Lovejoy.

148. Poems Suitable for the Upper Form: (Many of the following poems should be committed to memory.)

	Selections from Hiawatha	Longfellow.
	The Blue and the Gray	Finch.
	My Country ’Tis of Thee	Smith.
	Death of the Flowers	Bryant.
	Breathes There a Man With Soul so Dead	Scott.
	The Builders	Longfellow.
	The Quality of Mercy is Not Strained	Shakespeare.
	The Planting of the Apple-Tree	Bryant.
	To a Skylark	Shelley.
	October	Bryant.
	What Constitutes a State	Jones.
	Concord Fight	Emerson.
	The Chambered Nautilus	Holmes.
	Honest Poverty	Burns.
	Address at Gettysburg	Lincoln.
	Pippa’s Song	Browning.
	Crossing the Bar	Tennyson.
	Recessional	Kipling.
	March	Wordsworth.
	Selections from Snow-Bound	Whittier.
	Selections from Sir Launfal	Lowell.
	Selections from Evangeline	Longfellow.
		(Cary, 105)

Let us assume that Elsie’s teacher is a diligent and responsible instructor, who is both fond of poetry and keen to follow the directions in the manual for its most effective presentation in the classroom—as far as is practicable, that is. She intends to get through a good number of the poems in the list with her upper-form students, but will only set them one work to memorize (Cary, 19). This came as no surprise to Elsie; each of her previous five years at school has had its designated poem, and she can easily recite any and all of these works when required to do so, as indeed she has been at the end of each academic year to demonstrate the successful completion of her course of study. (Her favorite is the ditty she learned when she was seven, “Good-Night and Good-Morning”—although she tends to think of it not by its title, but its first line: “A fair little girl sat under a tree …”).¹ The teacher—Miss Holland, who is twenty-four years old—began working on this year’s poem for Elsie and her fellow sixth-years a couple of months ago. Miss Holland has chosen Longfellow’s “The Builders.” It is not an old friend, not one of the poems she herself learned at school (although quite a few on the list are), but she is rather taken with its seriousness, and thinks it will serve as a fine extension to the morally improving “Memory Gems” that she regularly requires her charges to get by heart (she has a stock of these stored in her head, and the manual provides over forty more snippets in its appendix). Up to now the full-length works her students have memorized have mostly been fairly gentle poems about nature; “The Builders,” she feels, will give them a bit more backbone.

As the manual suggested, Miss Holland spent considerable time preparing so that she was “thoroughly at home with the selection” and could “be perfectly at ease before her class” when she read the poem “expressively” to them (103). She had followed that performance with “thought analysis,” hoping “to get the pupils to see clearly the pictures suggested by the poem” (103). If you talked to her students, you would probably decide that Miss Holland has done a satisfactory job in this respect. Elsie, for instance, may not like this poem all that much, but she does have two images in her mind’s eye when she thinks about it—one of a tumbledown house, with “yawning gaps” and “broken stairways,” and the other more like an illustration she remembers from her fourth-year reading book, of a castle solidly constructed of massive and regular stone blocks. Truth be told, though, this is about as far as it goes for either Elsie or her classmates. Miss Holland was unsure how much further she should press with her questions; the manual had said she should “encourage her pupils to abandon themselves to the selection and respond to its beautiful thoughts and music” once she had ensured that they were reading each line with “sufficient expression,” so she did not to quiz them directly about the poem’s meaning nor exert much energy on explanations of its use of analogy (104). Now she readies herself to listen carefully to Elsie’s recitation, to make sure that she is word-perfect throughout each of the poem’s thirty-six lines, and that her inflections and emphases fall in the right places. In a few weeks time, after all the children in Elsie’s year have demonstrated on multiple occasions that the poem is firmly committed to memory, Miss Holland will have them perform it together. She agrees with the manual’s assertion that “there is nothing more inspiring than the recitation of a soul-stirring poem by a class reciting in concert”; she is confident that the piece will provide an excellent and uplifting finale to the school concert at the end of the year (103).

“ ‘The Builders,’ by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. ‘All are architects of faith …’ ” As Elsie Hernsbusher begins to speak, let us now travel to Charles William Bond’s British classroom. Three years ago, his headmaster (a Mr. G. Greenwood) was sent an inspection copy of W. and R. Chambers’s Poetic Gems: A Selection of Good Poetry for Young Readers, the preface of which explained that Part I “will be found suitable for children of ten or eleven,” Part II for “those of eleven and twelve,” and so forth.² The table of contents runs as follows:³

PART I.

	The Brook	Alfred, Lord Tennyson
	In a Garden	A. C. Swinburne
	Vitai Lampada	Henry Newbolt
	The Coming of Spring	Mary Howitt
	Little Golden-Hair	Will Carleton
	Lady Clare	Alfred, Lord Tennyson
	The Baby’s Kiss	G. R. Emerson
	Robert of Lincoln	William C. Bryant
	The Forest Fire	Charles G. D. Roberts
	The Voice of Spring	Mrs Hemans
	The Slave’s Dream	Henry W. Longfellow
	The Angel of Patience	John G. Whittier
	John Gilpin	William Cowper

PART II.

	The Charge of the Light Brigade	Alfred, Lord Tennyson
	To a Skylark	William Wordsworth
	The Burial March of Dundee	William E. Aytoun
	To a Cuckoo	M. Bruce or J. Logan
	The Soldier’s Dream	Thomas Campbell
	The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers	Mrs Hemans
	The Frost Spirit	John G. Whittier
	Young Lochinvar	Sir Walter Scott
	To the Cuckoo	William Wordsworth
	Edinburgh after Flodden	William E. Aytoun
	The Skylark	James Hogg
	Lament of the Irish Emigrant	Lady Dufferin
	The Daffodils	William Wordsworth
	Douglas and Marmion	Sir Walter Scott
	One by One	Adelaide Ann Procter
	Fidelity	William Wordsworth
	I am Monarch of all I Survey	William Cowper
	The Green Linnet	William Wordsworth
	Horatius at the Bridge	Lord Macaulay

PART III.

	The Coming of the Snow	James Thomson
	A Man’s a Man for a’ That	Robert Burns
	Battle of the Baltic	Thomas Campbell
	The Cloud	Percy Bysshe Shelley
	The Pied Piper of Hamelin	Robert Browning
	The Home of Evangeline	Henry W. Longfellow
	A Day in June	James Russell Lowell
	The Stag Hunt	Sir Walter Scott
	To a Waterfowl	William C. Bryant
	Hiawatha’s Canoe	Henry W. Longfellow
	My Native Land	Sir Walter Scott
	To a Daisy	Robert Burns
	The Heavens and their Creator	Joseph Addison
	The Eve of Quatre Bras	Lord Byron
	Morte d’Arthur	Alfred, Lord Tennyson

PART IV.

	Recessional	Rudyard Kipling
	Sir Galahad	Alfred, Lord Tennyson
	The Combat	Sir Walter Scott
	On the Receipt of my Mother’s Picture	William Cowper
	To Autumn	John Keats
	The Village Preacher	Oliver Goldsmith
	The Armada	Lord Macaulay
	Gradatim	Josiah Gilbert Holland
	The Chambered Nautilus	Oliver Wendell Holmes
	England, with all thy Faults	William Cowper
	Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard	Thomas Gray
	Introduction to “Endymion”	John Keats
	To a Skylark	Percy Bysshe Shelley
	King Robert of Sicily	Henry W. Longfellow
	The Fall of Wolsey	William Shakespeare
	A Father’s Advice to his Son	William Shakespeare
	The Quality of Mercy	William Shakespeare
	Life as a Drama	William Shakespeare
	A Lesson from the Bees	William Shakespeare
	Lancaster’s Dying Speech	William Shakespeare

I choose here to hypothesize that Mr. Greenwood liked the volume so much that he ordered separate paper-bound sets of its constituent parts for the school’s top four classes. Charles is one of the older students in Standard V, and thus has temporary ownership of a copy of Part II. Somewhat against the inclinations of Miss Robertshaw, his teacher, the pupils in Charles’s class have each been allowed to choose which poem they will memorize and recite. Miss Robertshaw is forty years old; when she herself was in Standard V back in 1882, she had been required to recite 100 lines of verse in front of an inspector to pass the year’s examination, and to her mind, this is still the right number of lines for a twelve-year-old child—indeed, as she well remembers, that stipulation was part of the Elementary Code until just ten years ago. But she is thoroughly familiar with the document that has taken the code’s place—the Handbook of Suggestions for the Considerations of Teachers—and she knows that there are new ways of thinking about recitation. For one thing, it is now believed that “[t]here is no necessity for every child to learn the same passages (for a passage never makes the same appeal to all children) or the same number of lines” (33). In Miss Robertshaw’s opinion this creates a great deal of extra and unnecessary work. But she has done what she can to direct her pupils’ choices, and is pleased that although the girls are by and large favoring the poems by Hemans, Procter, and Wordsworth, most of the boys—Charles included—have opted for Macaulay’s “Horatius at the Bridge.” Their book provides two hundred lines from the Lays of Ancient Rome, but she has told them they need memorize no further than “But will ye dare to follow / If Astur clears the way?” Which is a shame, in some ways, as this breaks the story off at an exciting point, but she has read the complete extract to the whole class several times and is confident that they have an understanding of what the handbook calls “the general scope of the poem” (34). She is aware that it then goes on to suggest that “with the older children some of the distinctions in diction and form between prose and poetry might be considered,” but there really isn’t enough time to explore these matters, and in any case, it also states that it “is better to do nothing in this direction than to attempt too much, for the unskilled or irreverent dissection of a poem is destructive to the sense of beauty” (34). She has, however, written the definitions of Macaulay’s more difficult words on the blackboard and given the boys plenty of help with their pronunciations (“Herminius” is a particular problem).

Given that such large numbers of the children are preparing this poem, Miss Robertshaw thinks it a pity that the handbook is so set against recitation in unison (“Such a device is the merest mechanical drill, and destroys any value recitation may have” [33]). But she knows that the many occasions on which the boys hear their classmates recite “Horatius” play a helpful part in drumming the lines into their heads—and, if some of them are still shaky on the sequence of the stanzas in the run-up to the end of term when Mr. Greenwood will mark each child’s performance out of ten for their reports, she may well revert to a few sessions of group recitation as a remedial measure. Today, however, she has just called on Charles with confidence; if his past performances are anything to go by, he will require only a few promptings to make it all the way through (“Come on, lad: ‘Meanwhile, the Tuscan army …’ ”). And Charles is quite looking forward to his moment in the sun. He has always been good at repetition, and is pleased to have a decent poem this year (the worst time was in Standard I, when the teacher made them all do “A fair little girl sat under a tree”—although he does remember how useful it was, when he practiced at home, that his stepmother already knew the soppy thing off by heart).⁴ This time around, though, he has worked on his lines alone; he really likes the way the beats of the poem fit the stride of his steps as he marches along the village lanes. But there won’t be any moving around in the next few minutes; Charles takes a deep breath, puts his arms straight by his sides, and dives in.

The simplest explanation for the huge success of the memorized poem runs as follows: rote memorization long constituted the dominant method for teaching both reading and other subjects in Britain and the United States, and poetic material worked especially well...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Memorized Poem in British and American Public Education
• Part II: Case Studies
• Afterword
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index