'Or So Very Little Longer'

Already as a teenager Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) had a gift for memorizing the poems she liked. She claimed the act was nearly effortless, with commitment to memory following naturally from enthusiastic reading. I never found memorization that simple. In junior high school I wanted to start carrying T.S. Eliot with me, beginning with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Instead of doing homework, I devoted entire study halls, each lasting fifty minutes, to a focused reading of the poem. Walking home from school I would test myself, seeing which lines remained shaky. Almost sixty year later, most of the Eliot I memorized remains in place. When I go for a walk, Eliot beats earbuds. 

In Greene on Capri (2000), Hazzard describes her first meeting with Graham Greene. He and a friend were dining and Hazzard eavesdropped on their conversation, with Greene quoting from memory Browning’s “The Lost Mistress.” He was unable to remember the final line. As she was leaving the restaurant, Hazzard passed his table and supplied it: “Or so very little longer.”

 

Her biographer, Brigitta Olubas, tells us Hazzard as a seventeen-year-old in Hong Kong was reading a motley collection of English poets – Rupert Brooke, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Bridges, among others  -- when she discovered Thomas Hardy. When she read his “After a Journey,” Olubas reportd, she was “galvanized by a shared sense of loss.” Hardy wrote the elegy in 1913, months after the death of his first wife. He had left Dorset and was visiting Cornwall where he first met Emma in 1870. The poem describes his attempts to follow her ghost along the Cornish cliffs where they had wandered together forty-three years earlier. Olubas quotes from an interview Hazzard gave in 2000: “I understood absolutely what this man was feeling about the death of this love and that life.”

 

Olubas says Hazzard returned to Hardy’s poem and “her early and instant affinity for it” for the remainder of her life. In a remembrance published in The Paris Review shortly her death, Matthew Specktor writes:   

 

“At one point in that first conversation [in 1999] she brought up a poem by Thomas Hardy, and recited [“After a Journey”] from memory. As she did, her voice broke a little, and her eyes clouded. It was perhaps the most immediate reading of a poem I’d ever encountered. And yet there, too, the distance between the poem and its meaning to her, whatever memories it carried, seemed to collapse altogether.”

 

Poems remembered are a consolation. As always, memory is complicated. We remember the poem, remember memorizing it, remember subsequent recollections of it, all crusted with associations. “Prufrock” sets off memories of Henry James and of his “poor, sensitive gentlemen.”

    

One of the ways trendy theorists and their followers have destroyed public education is by anathematizing memorization, whether of Latin verb conjugations, atomic masses in chemistry or Shakespeare’s sonnets. Our forebears knew better. Anthony Esolen writes in Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (2013): “It is not surprising that, for the Greek mind, the Muses—of epic, history, astronomy, music, dance, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry, and sacred poetry—should be daughters of Memory.” A well-stocked memory is a gift for life, pure sustenance.

[Brigitta Olubas’s biography is Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022).]