Poetry Leaves Lasting Memories

Friday, July 9, 2010 - Alma M. Womack

When I was a little girl, I loved to read poetry. Free verse was unknown to me, for poems were stories that rhymed, and if they didn't rhyme, they weren't poetry. It is easy and simple to be a child and have absolute convictions of right and wrong, proper and improper, without any alien ideas messing up an orderly little world. (Some would say I never left that world.)

I read all types of poetry, but was especially seized by those poets who told us to buck up and get on with life. Rudyard Kipling was one of the leaders of this particular type of poetry, along with Edgar Guest, another favorite. They believed there was no point wasting time longing for what never was or what might have been, just get on with life.

You would never have caught me memorizing love poems, even though I did read some of Robert Burns because he was a Scot. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” was as far as I ever got on that one by Browning.

Story poems were so worthwhile, like Little Orphant Annie ,The Blue and The Gray, The Highwayman, Ostler Joe, Mary, Queen of Scots, Over the Hill to the Poorhouse, Little Boy Blue, Hiawatha, The Ride of Paul Revere, Kentucky Belle, Casey at the Bat, and the really good The Cremation of Sam McGee . I never learned all of The Ancient Mariner, but I read it enough to be able to know that it never said, “Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink."

Patriotic poetry was fine, too, for the poets of the 1800's and early 1900's believed in America, in the goodness of her people, in the justice of her laws, in the outright incontrovertible evidence that if we weren't already the greatest nation on earth, we soon would be.

Memorizing historical and patriotic poems gave me an edge when it came to studying history and having to know dates. I learned one poem that went from 1492 to the Great War's end in 1917. It was an old poem, to be sure, but it got me through a lot of American history. Then there was the president's poem that began “First stands the lofty Washington, that noble, great, immortal one,” and goes on down the line to Woodrow Wilson, (another oldie).

Poems about John Brown, Sheridan, and Maud Muller were Yankee poems, of course, because they celebrated the wrong side of the War Between the States, but I still read them anyway. The Bonnie Blue Flag was my favorite from that time period, for not only was it a good poem, but an excellent song, encouraging our courageous countrymen in their fight for liberty.

It would be difficult to pick a favorite poem from all the ones I loved. I use to memorize them just for the sake of doing it; there was no teacher prodding me to learn something for next week's English lesson. Even though we did memorize poems in the elementary grades, it was usually for some contest with another class or in class competition.

In fifth grade, in Ms. Ollie Sanson's room, we had several students memorize poems for the literary rally competition, held in Harrisonburg each spring. Carolyn Thompson learned “Father William” and I did “Johnny Appleseed.” I can't remember what the boys did or who ended up going to the rally, but by the time our practice sessions were over, we could do each other's poems as well as our own.

One year, for Mother's Day, I was going to memorize a poem for Mama called “Only One Mother.” I was on the front porch, in a rocking chair, going over my lines again to make certain they were just right. I was rocking and reciting, and when getting to the line “only one Mother the wide world over,” I rocked right off the porch onto the very hard ground. This was a drop of about five feet, which is pretty far if you're sitting in a non-bouncing wooden chair.

The fall stunned me for a bit, but after determining there were no broken bones or broken chair parts, I quietly put the chair back on the porch. Lucky for me there were no little brothers around, or they would have told on me and I would have been in trouble for not paying attention to what I was doing.

In high school, we all had to memorize poems, and sometimes the entire class had to do the same poem. I can still hear my friend, Mildred Mount, reciting “Tell me not in mournful numbers, life is but an empty dream; for the soul is dead that slumbers and things are not what they may seem.” Mildred did not like poetry at all, but a grade was involved, so she did it, with a lot of coaching from me.

One year, probably junior year, our whole class had to pick a favorite poem to read in Mrs. Helen Riley's class. Of course, nerd that I was, I picked some long winded poem like Kentucky Belle, while classmate Ken Foster picked the shortest one in our book, Fog. He was kinder to the class than I was.

We also had to memorize the Preamble to the Constitution, the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and a Lady MacBeth soliloquy from MacBeth, to name a few. My favorite memory from those recitations is from James White and his delivery of the Gettysburg Address in Mr. Reece Breithaupt's history class. James was doing fine until he got to the part about “this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,” when he made a little slip.

Already nervous at having to do this insane assignment, he blurted out that “this Nation, by God, shall have a new birth of freedom!” He sat on the row next to me, and he was my friend, so I just laid my head down to keep from laughing. I can still see his earnest young face, just trying to get through the ordeal. Two years later, he was killed in Viet Nam, fighting for the freedom and liberty he talked about that day in history class.

His words still resonate with me now, for we are facing a new birth of freedom in our country, and may God be with us in our struggle to regain the freedoms we have lost. Maybe we all ought to read The Concord Hymn, to see where we started, all those many years ago.