'How It Sounds When Read Out Loud'

Our eighth-grade English teacher, Miss Clymer, had us open the textbook to a poem written seventy-five years earlier and picked students to read aloud each of its four, eight-line stanzas. She suggested we pay attention to who is speaking, as the poem is written as a dialogue among soldiers. I wasn’t chosen to read but instantly memorized the final lines of the stanzas, all the same but for a word or two. I also added another four syllables (two iambs) of my own, and to this day that’s how I recite it (silently, in my head): “An’ they’re hangin’ Danny Deever [at five o’clock] in the mornin’.” 

The poem is Kipling’s, of course, written in 1890 and published in Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). I walked home from school singing lines from the poem, along with lines from Dylan and the Beatles. I didn’t yet understand it but knew intuitively that the primary quality of poetry is not its content but rhythm, the beat. Nige has published in Slightly Foxed a remembrance of a time not terribly long ago when students and their parents, regardless of class or education, might read and commit to memory lines from favorite poems. Even non-prodigies like me could recite John Greenleaf Whittier and William Ernest Henley (I still know “Invictus” by heart). Nige writes:

 

“. . . I still believe that learning ‘by heart’ is an excellent way of really getting to know a poem, to know it, as it were, from the inside – and the same goes for reading aloud. The musicality of a poem, how it sounds when read out loud as well as in the head, is essential to its nature, and both learning by heart and reading aloud can open up a poem to us more effectively than just reading it on the page. And yet it seems that both are now largely things of the past.”

 

Nige touchingly recalls his father’s copy of Lyra Heroica: A Book of Verse for Boys, edited by Henley and published in 1891. The final two poems in that anthology are Kipling’s: “A Ballad of East and West” and “The Flag of England.” Granted, one generation’s soul-stirring inspiration may be another’s doggerel, and vice versa, but no one reads Ezra Pound or Charles Olson for pleasure. Millions read Chesterton for that reason. With the coming of High Modernism, for all its beauties and achievements, we lost an older tradition of popular poetry – published in newspapers and magazines, memorized voluntarily, read and recited for pleasure and appreciated by non-academics.

 

Nige mentions Kingsley Amis’ The Faber Popular Reciter, the 1978 anthology of, in the words of Amis’ introduction, “poems that sound well and go well when spoken in a declamatory style, a style very far indeed removed from any of those to be found at that (alas!) characteristically twentieth-century occasion, the poetry recital, with all its exhibitionism and sheer bad art.”