During those beautiful sunny days we had this autumn, the first words of John Keats's Ode to Autumn kept bouncing into my brain, and I found myself saying the few lines I could remember. I do not have a great memory. I have real difficulty recalling with accuracy material I have memorised in the past, including the recent past. But it's in there somewhere.
It’s like fishing in a muddy river. With patience, something will ripple to the surface, and, bit by bit, I reassemble the original poem or speech – with help from the internet, if truth be told.
What I do salvage is always rich in image, in metaphor and in meaning. The essence of the piece becomes clearer with each remembering, and the older I get the more I see. It is a great benefit of age to be able to recall words once memorised but not fully understood, and to have them finally give forth a deeper meaning than my younger self could have appreciated.
There's a charming and astonishing YouTube video of a three-year-old reciting Billy Collins's poem Litany by heart. It's hard to credit that one so young could have memorised something of which he can have understood very little. But the evidence is there.
The capacity of young children to absorb language is enormous, and it’s such a pity that the learning by heart of poetry and other material has gone out of fashion in our schools. Stocking our minds with poems and songs at an early age can fill us with resources for our declining years, as anyone who has spent time with very old people can tell you. Give them one line of a poem they learned at school and they’re off.
A highlight of the 2015 Dublin Theatre Festival was, for me, a performance entitled By Heart, by a fine Portuguese actor and theatre producer, Tiago Rodrigues.
He invited 10 audience members to fill the 10 empty chairs that constituted the set, and announced that by the end of the show they would all have learned a Shakespeare sonnet. Which they did, as did most of the audience members. It’s not easy to describe the magic that took place, as people whose lazy brains had lost (or maybe never had) the ability to memorise text did what at first seemed impossible.
The learning was interspersed with the true story of Rodrigues’s grandmother, now blind and in her 90s. A woman of humble background, she was an inveterate reader, and when he visited her in the nursing home in which she now lives he brought, at her request, more and more books. But one day she asked him to stop bringing them. She was losing her sight and would no longer be able to read. But she had one last request: in the remaining months of her sightedness she wanted to learn a book by heart, and she asked him to choose one for her.
After much deliberation he brought her a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets in a very good Portuguese translation. And she set about learning them to furnish her mind for the bookless years ahead.
His recounting of the story included many references to George Steiner and sent me in search of his book Real Presences. To learn by heart, says Steiner, affords the text "an indwelling life force and clarity"; what we commit to memory and can subsequently recall constitutes the "ballast of the self".
Under censorship and persecution in Russia, poetry was passed from mouth to mouth. Nadezhda Mandelstam, it is said, memorised one of her husband Osip’s banned poems and taught it to 10 people, who in turn taught it to others. There were no copies.
They cannot take it from you, says Steiner, if you learn it by heart.
Doireann Ní Bhriain is a voice coach
