The mother of the nine muses of Greek mythology, each with her own area of inspiration, is Mnemosyne. She is the goddess of memory, and she is scarce heard.
The term “scarce heard” comes from Lieutenant-Colonel John McRae. He was a physician in the Canadian Army during World War I. He wrote “In Flanders Fields” and discarded it on the battlefield. Another soldier retrieved it and submitted it to Punch which published it in 1915.
Countries around the world– including the United States on Chaplins Hill at Arlington National Cemetery– have adopted it as the poem of remembrance for those killed in war. These two lines appear in the first stanza:
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
Many children in Canada– and other Commonwealth Countries– had to memorize and recite the poem. I am not sure that is true anymore, but one still hears the poem at NHL games around Remembrance Day, usually recited from memory by a veteran.
Having a large number of people memorizing the same poem creates a unique cultural bond. When I meet a Canadian in the United States, I ask him or her to recite the poem. Many are able to do it, or at least a portion of it, usually the first stanza:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
I cannot think of a poem in the United States as commonly recited from memory as Canadians recite “In Flanders Fields”. The closest we come to this bond might be the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg address.
When I was in high school in the United States, we had a teacher who had taught at the school for more than forty years. He required all his students in his senior English class to memorize and recite Sonnet 29 by William Shakespeare. The rhyming couplet at the end is:
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Shakespeare wrote at least 154 sonnets. They all follow the same, regular, simple, rhyme scheme, and the last couplets are easy to remember. We, of course, had to memorize all fourteen lines.
That teacher is deceased, and I wish I had asked him why he chose “Sonnet 29” of Shakespeare’s 154. I am not aware of another teacher at our school requiring the students to memorize the same, or any, poem.
When I meet an alumnus, even one who was in a graduating class decades before me, I ask him to recite the poem. Most can still do it. One alumnus who was Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 1986 until 1990 could do it until he died in 2019.
I recently read Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem by Catherine Robson. Her thorough discussion of three, only three, poems reminded me of September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem by Ian Sansom, an entire book discussing W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” about the moral collapse leading to World War II.
Robson chooses three poems that were once largely memorized and recited for pedagogical reasons in British or American schools: “Casabianca”, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, and “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna”. The “only three” is a compliment. Dedicating a third of a book to analyzing a poem, or an entire book in Sansom’s case, is necessary to understand the poem.
Memorizing a poem so one can recite it anywhere, anytime, orally, sotto voce, over decades, rewards the reciter with a unique, deeper understanding not attainable from quick reading on the page.
Robson explains the decline in memorization and recitation of poetry in school in the United Kingdom and the United States: “Eventually the twentieth-century classroom became a much quieter place than its nineteenth-century counterpart.” (Robson 81). I expect a similar decline in deep understanding of a poem.
And in a quiet classroom, Mnemosyne is scarce heard.
I. Librarian
Works Cited:
Evans, G. Blakemore, and J. J. M. Tobin, editors. The Riverside Shakespeare. Houghton Mifflin, 1974.
McCrae, John. “In Flanders Fields.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields.
Robson, Catherine. Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. Princeton UP, 2012.
Sansom, Ian. September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem. Liverpool University Press, 2019.
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