Miss Helen Turner was the senior English teacher back when I was a senior at S.D. Lee High School. I think most of the students liked her, especially those of us who were on the staff of The Mirror, the student newspaper. She was its sponsor.
As a teacher she was tough in one respect: She believed strongly in memorizing. We had countless “spots” in literature that we had to “pass off.” Some spots seemed especially difficult, and some students resorted to extreme measures to memorize. I was not in the same section as the fellow who could remember “Il Penseroso” only by singing it to the tune of “Little Brown Jug.” I heard, though, that he had to perform it in front of the class: “Come, pensive nun, devout and pure, sober, steadfast and demure … ” he sang.
By whatever means of memorizing, we had to recite countless passages of English literature. It was a burden, but today I thank her for it.
Most of the poetry in our day rhymed. I got to wondering what it is about fitting a story or an emotion into a pattern that emphasizes it, but it is true. Maybe the rhyme scheme makes it more memorable. Maybe fitting a thought into a certain meter increases its value. If the thought is important enough to confine to both rhyme and meter, doesn’t that underline its value? Well, maybe not, but it seems to stick better. Some of those assignments are with me still.
They may provoke sobering thoughts like these from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard”:
“Let not ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destinies obscure;
Nor grandeur hear with a disdaining smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth, e’er gave,
Awaits alike the inevitable hour —
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”
Perhaps even more sobering are these words of William Blake from “The Tiger”:
“Tiger, tiger, burning bright in the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
When the stars threw down their spears and watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
Then there was this admonition from Alexander Pope:
“A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep or taste not the Pierian spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”
In American literature Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Psalm of Life” encouraged us:
“Life is real, life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returneth was not spoken to the soul.
Not enjoyment and not sorrow is our destined end or way;
But to act that each tomorrow find us father than today.”
Of course, being from “that inland river,” we memorized Francis Miles Finch’s “The Blue and the Gray.”
“Under the sod and the dew, waiting the Judgment Day,
Under the one, the Blue; under the other, the Gray.”
We may have thought too much at that young age about the drama of death. We quoted Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”:
“Sunset and evening star and one clear call for me;
And may there be no mourning at the bar, when I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep, too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep turns again home.”
(Miss Etoile Schofield, a beloved teacher, had died just before I started junior high school, I think; and that poem was read at the memorial chapel service they had for her when school began the fall semester. I did not even know Miss Schofield, but the idea tore me up.)
In spite of how it might seem, all our memory work was not didactic or sad. Rhyme was good for laughter, too. Perhaps we did not commit the whole poem to memory, but we enjoyed the sob story ending of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s heartbreaker:
“Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville — Mighty Casey has struck out!”
Who among us children back then was not well-acquainted with James Whitcomb Riley’s Little Orphant Annie, who had the unenviable task of making her juvenile charges behave? Threats had to suffice:
“Onc’t there was a little boy who wouldn’t say his prayers —
An’ when he went to bed at night, away upstairs,
His mammy heered him holler, an’ his daddy heered him bawl,
An’ when they turn’t the kivvers down, he wasn’t there at all!
An’ they seeked him in the rafter-room, an’ cubby hole, an’ press,
An’ seeked him up the chimbley-flue, an’ ever’wheres, I guess;
But all they ever found was thist his pants an’ roundabout!
An’ the Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you don’t watch out!”
So on that warning note, I’ll leave you to wander the nostalgic road of rhyme-time. Maybe this little walk will stir up the dust of some of your own old favorite memories.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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