Poetry and Holding the Center

Much as there might be to say today about things falling apart, my point has less to do with the disintegration of civilization and more to do with the way that a poem committed to memory holds things together.

Back in the early days of COVID 19, when churches were shutting out their parishioners and the economy seemed to be in free fall, I received an email from a recent graduate of Wyoming Catholic in which he reflected on the pertinence of having memorized the famous poem by W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming.” As Yeats puts it,

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Much as there might be to say about things falling apart, my point today has less to do with the disintegration of civilization and more to do with the way that a poem committed to memory holds things together.

Since the first classes in 2007, our students have memorized poems in the Humanities sequence. Anyone can elicit a boisterous group recitation simply by reciting a first line: “The time you won your town the race” (Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young”) or “Much have I traveled in the realms of gold” (Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”)—and there are literally dozens more. In an article for First Things in May of this year, the British writer Dan Hitchens reflected on what it meant to have poetry memorized, to have it “by heart,” as the old expression goes. He quotes a number of poems that have had a personal meaning to him or to others; as he puts it, they often don’t produce an epiphany, but rather “make sense of a feeling.”

What he means is a little different from the way that literature illuminates experience by making us see the real world more perceptively. The other afternoon, my daughter Julia was reading to me from the The Little Town on the Prairie, the seventh in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series, and in this scene, Laura tries to teach a young calf to drink milk rather than to suck it from her mother. She has to counter the calf’s instinct to butt the cow’s milk bag because the calf would knock over the bucket. After Julia finished reading, we went inside to dinner, and through the glass door we could see a fawn and a doe (mule deer are everywhere in Wyoming) close by in the adjoining pasture. The fawn repeatedly butted its mother’s milk bag, swinging its head up violently as it tried to nurse, obviously with the same instinct as the calf. It was like an illustration. Would we have noticed it in the same way if we had not just read Wilder’s description?

Hitchens, however, does not mean this kind of illuminating effect. Rather, a poem gives language to a feeling—again, “makes sense” of it—and this “sense” does not have to be uplifting. It is more important, Hitchens says, that the poem word the feeling than that it offer a solution to a problem. I think, for example, of some of the “Terrible Sonnets” of Gerard Manley Hopkins, which describe the depths of near-despair in the dark night of the soul. In one of them, the poem ends on this agonized note:

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Agonized or not, the lines offer a consolation to anyone in a similar spiritual condition. Why? Because Hopkins makes sense of the feeling of trying to lift oneself with “selfyeast (self-yeast) of spirit,” which is the “leaven of the Pharisees.” Self-help “a dull dough sours.” The punishment of “the lost” is to be themselves, nothing else. The speaker of the poem feels the full ghastliness of damnation at the same time that he draws back from the despair that would lead him into it. He awaits — though he does not say so — the renewing movement of the Holy Spirit. To one who knows the poem by heart, the phrase “selfyeast of spirit” might prompt right recognition at the right moment.

Two nights ago, I wrote the poet and critic Dana Gioia to praise his book Studying with Miss Bishop and to mention several poets we discussed on the afternoon we spent together several years ago. My wife asked me if I’d seen Dana’s letter in First Things in response to Hitchens’ article. I had not, but it is directly to the point of what we do at Wyoming Catholic College:

For two generations now, memorization has been dropped in American schooling—from elementary to graduate education—and has been replaced by critical analysis. Poems are presented as conceptual problems to solve, which has transformed poetry into an intellectual subject. Students write papers rather than memorize, perform, and hear poetry….

When poems are memorized and recited, it becomes obvious to both the reciter and the listener how small a part abstract ideas play in a poem’s impact. The emotions, images, and physical sounds all carry meaning. Poetic language is human language: It is holistic and experiential. Ideas, emotions, intuition, and physical intelligence all communicate together without asking us to separate them—just like everyday speech, but raised to a higher level. Learning poems by heart, if we trust the truth of the traditional metaphor, means bringing poetry into the center of our being. Memorization and performance synchronize the crafted rhythms of the poem with the natural rhythms of the body.

I like to think of our students on their outdoor trips all over the Mountain West this week breaking into recitations of the poems they know so well. Whether that happens, I cannot say, but I would be surprised if it did not. They hold these poems in common, and they will have them for life. Ideally, the whole education at Wyoming Catholic College would synchronize the life of the mind with “the natural rhythms of the body.” The whole education would be like a poem known by heart. It would keep unfolding itself to thought as the circumstances of life change; it would keep offering new recognitions from “the center of our being.”

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.

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