Have it by heart

Earlier this year the Education Secretary Michael Gove suggested that primary school children ought to learn a poem by heart. Even if the teaching unions had not objected I would have needed no further convincing. I was converted to Gove’s idea years ago, by Terry Waite.

Having haphazardly discovered poetry on my own at state school, it was slightly later that I heard Ronald Runcie’s hostage-negotiator-turned-hostage give a sermon on a cold Sunday evening in chapel. Within ten minutes he had introduced me to a new poem and a new idea, which is a good average for a sermon. The poem was ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of T.S. Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’. ‘Footfalls echo in the memory/ Down the passage which we did not take/ Towards the door we never opened/ Into the rose garden.’ Hearing the lines for the first time, I realised I had to keep them. The next day I took ‘Four Quartets’ out of the library.

The idea was more idiosyncratic. Waite explained that one of the things that had got him through his captive years in Lebanon was having Eliot, and other poetry, in his head. Though this eventuality would be unlikely to sell the Education Secretary’s plans, something of the idea should be retained. Even if the worst never happens, it is worth filling your head with the best words in their best order because it gives you the greatest company as well as guidance throughout your life.

As a self-taught memoriser, learning poetry by heart is worth it for many reasons, but two in particular: for exercising the mind, and furnishing the soul.

Today very few adults know any poetry by heart. On a recent edition of Question Time none of our political elite (three politicians and a former director-general of the BBC) had any poetry at all in their heads, though the journalist on the panel had plenty.