There has been some debate lately (*runs to check latest*) across The Pond over whether schoolchildren should be required to recite poetry from memory.
It has given some there the mental image of a squirming 10-year-old boy in knickers (in the US, those are short trousers for boys) struggling to get passing marks from his scowling schoolmaster as the child stumbles over a selection from "The Lady of Shallot" (Tennyson's poem that eventually led him to write The Idylls of the King [see The Top Ten in my archive {April 14, 2010}]).
I can testify to this: they made us when I was 11 or 12 do Leigh Hunt's much easier "Abou ben Adhem" -- and it calls to my mind memories of me howling with laughter to one poor girl's minor fumbles, only to have me make a complete ass of myself with the same thing a few weeks later (it was a one-student-per-week attempt -- you got to volunteer which week).
I have always been bad at rote memorization. The students who were good at it back then also were the ones who got straight As in every other subject and ended up going to Ivy League or other high-quality private colleges in later years. I don't know if there's a connection to be made with that or not. My Abou ben Adam humiliation was 45 years ago.
Things have changed since then. Substantially (except for me being humiliated).
Here is what I can offer (and, since this blog has been about renewing traditional poetry, I feel I should): the words in Greek for memory (there, of course, are more than one) stem from "mnaomai", which means "to be mindful of a person or thing". We get from that "mneimonikos", which means "of or for remembrance", or "memory". Another word that means the same thing is "mnemosunei" (The "u" is usually transliterated as a "y", and the "ei" in my transliteration is spelled in Greek with a letter than looks like a little "n" with a long tail, named "eta".).
The name for the mother of the Muses is "Mnemosyne" -- which is really just the (traditionally transliterated) proper noun form of "mnemosunei".
The first part of the last sentence is my point. The Greeks realized that memory is the "mother" of poetry, which in turn is the source for its sibling arts.
It turns out recent research shows that the cave paintings I referred to in my posts Old Long Since and What I Meant (I think) {Nov. 29 and 30, 2010} may indeed have referred to ancient lost poems. These poems would have had to have been composed mentally and preserved by memory. The paintings are some 30,000 years old. Writing dates from about 7,000 years ago and the Greek alphabet from about 3,000 years ago. My information on all that may itself be "dated". You should double-check it yourself for accuracy, because I am writing from memory. (Yep. That thing. That I'm not so good at. That I used to make my customary B grades in school. That I got from just listening in class, because I had trouble memorizing stuff I was supposed to study at home. That didn't work for math ... that -- I'll assume you get my drift here.).
Reciters of these lost "cave" poems could have used the cave paintings to jog their memories, because the poems were likely long ballads commemorating (yep) a successful long hunt for a huge beast that would have fed the whole tribe for as long as the cooked meat could have been preserved back then (i.e., not that long).
There would have been other poems written by Ug the Fire Priest (see my post Ug! Fire! {August 8, 2009} for more on him), memorializing (uh-huh) his discovery of the lightning-sourced flamey stuff his people used to preserve that mastodon meat for as long as they could. These poems would have sounded more like "hymns" -- a word that in Greek refers to a poem written "in praise of" a person or thing.
And Oa the wife of Ug may have kept a few bits he composed to her while they were wooing, called by the Greeks "odes". If you wrote one of those to be sung with a lyre, then it was a "lyric" ode. (Again, double check all this for yourself. I'm usually off-base on something or other.). Maybe she had a few odes of her own. Personal ones -- ones so personal she would have had to burn them later with some of that flamey stuff if she'd ever dared to write them down (if she'd had anything to write them down on, if there was something to write them down with, if there was writing, if ... ) -- see my post Ouch! {November 7, 2008} for more.
The balladic instinct is tribal, the hymnic is familial and the odic is individual. That's a lot to keep in mind, I admit. But it may be worth remembering. (Yeah, I know: ouch.)
Obviously, we need something more current than "The Lady of Shallot" to wrap all this in one bundle, so schoolchildren can recall (ouch) the entire poetic experience instinctually without having to read a mountain of books first, and then mull them over by themselves for decades and then somehow boil it all down in a blog and then hope somebody ... .
There have been a lot of poems written in English since "The Lady of Shallot" was published. But how many do you remember?
Line by line?
And then can get a 12-year-old to recite?
It seems there is more work to do, don't you think?
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I don't allow links on this blog, so I'll include back dates here in {brackets} and from now on. Also, I've since amended the "dates" for writing and Greek alphabetics -- I was thinking 5,000 BC and typing "years ago"!
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