Every so often, a synapse in my brain will unexpectedly free a line or two from a poem from the place where Mrs. Owen-Early embedded it in my brain my seventh grade year at Moultrie Middle School.
Petite and always stylish with a blonde bob, she was no school marm. Mrs. Owen-Early never recited Walt Whitman from the top of a desk like Mr. Keating’s character in Dead Poets Society. Still she knew how to connect with the tween crowd. But she was also big on memorization.
Educators have moved away from rote memorization as a pedagogical tool. Committing something to memory doesn’t always translate to understanding or knowledge. So perhaps that is for the best.
But learning to recite a poem from memory in front of your entire class feels like a long-lost rite of passage. The evenings of practice in front of your parents in the den. The nervous repetition of lines on the bus on the way to school. The butterflies building over lunch as fifth period and the moment of truth drew nigh: name called to stand upon pliant yet trembling knees and words quivering as they took shape. Please let them be in the right order. Relief at the last utterance. Box checked. “A” for effort.
Sometimes I’m driving down Longleaf Road, feeling the ache in my now forty-something year old knees with the late afternoon sun flashing through the trees, when Robert Frost’s words surface, unbidden:
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep… . ”
They are like a watermark, a stamp in my memory such that I can’t easily see it unless the light or the moment is right.
Walking to the kitchen and a painting of the marshland of South Carolina catches my eye, and Poe muses: “It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea . . .”
By the time I’m standing in front of the sink, I have forgotten my purpose. There is nothing like a poem to spark a daydream.
There were other poets, the classics, whose words my English teachers engraved lightly in my soul: Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, Shakespeare, Langston Hughes. And the words come.
At my child’s graduation, Robert Herrick echoes: “Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying… .”
From inside the clamor of an MRI machine, the Psalmist whispers: “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters… .”
On sleepless nights, William Blake ponders:
“Tiger! Tiger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
When I was 12 and awkward and knock-kneed and stumbled through Frost’s lyrical words, I was completing an assignment. But I think I’m finally understanding the lesson.
