Poetry That Lasts

I usually ask taxi drivers where they come from. It often leads to an interesting journey. When a recent driver said Assyria, I was bowled over. I told him he was the first Assyrian I had met in my life and that I had learnt a poem about the Assyrians at school. I then launched into:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.

I don’t think it made much sense to him, but we went on to discuss the place of Assyria in the world.

A few days later I mentioned the incident to a couple of friends in our writing group and to my surprise one of them said:

And the sheen on their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

She had had “The Destruction of Sennacherib” by Byron at school too. We then discovered we had lots of great poems stored in our memories from primary school.

I had always thought that my store of poetry was due to a nun who loved poetry at my primary school, but one of the writing group went to a state school in New South Wales and the other to a girls’ boarding school in Victoria, so this feast of poetry was being spread widely around, at least in Victoria and New South Wales, fifty years ago.

The Assyrian attack on Jerusalem, which is celebrated in Lord Byron’s poem, is recorded in the Old Testament and took place in 701 BC. In the biblical account, in the Book of Kings, Yahweh’s Angel slaughtered thousands of Assyrians during the night and Sennacherib took the survivors back to Assyria the next day. In Assyrian annals it is recorded that the Jews paid tribute to the Assyrians, and Hezekiah, the Jewish king, remained in office as a vassal to the Assyrians. As the United Nations have had trouble recently finding early records of Jerusalem perhaps they should consult the annals of Assyria.

So many of the poems we remembered have strong images and are a pleasure to read.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to the sunless sea.

This wonderful poem gives a picture of a beautiful pleasure garden. It was written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge when he awoke from an opium-induced dream, after reading Marco Polo’s account of the summer palace of Kubla Khan, the Mongol emperor. We of course heard how the person from Porlock bailed up Coleridge to talk about business as Coleridge was writing the poem and deprived the world of the rest of it.

Sometimes my mother took me to afternoon tea at the Myer Mural Hall in Melbourne. This was a special occasion for me because there I saw the paintings on the walls, by Napier Waller, of the Lady of Shalott, as in Tennyson’s poem:

She left the web, she left the loom,

She made three paces through the room,

She saw the water lily bloom,

She saw the helmet and the plume,

As she looked down to Camelot.

It was sad and romantic. Knights were very glamorous in our eyes, particularly Sir Lancelot and the other knights of King Arthur’s Round Table.

The thing that pleased me about these poems that we chanted in class each week was that they were easy to chant, like Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman”:

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

And the highwayman came riding—

Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

“The Man from Snowy River” was another great one for saying out loud. Another poem we enjoyed was John Masefield’s “Sea Fever”.

These poems always seemed to have a rhythm that went with the words. “The highwayman came riding—riding” had a different pace from “There was movement at the station” or “The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold”, or

I must go down to the sea again,

To the lonely sea and sky.

This must be one reason why we remember them years later.

I don’t think we did Browning’s great poem “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” in school. The source for me may have been one of the poems in the story books we got for Christmas. The Pied Piper is a great story about

Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats.

They bit the babies in their cradles

And licked the soup out of the cook’s own ladles

and so on.

Also when friends or family got together to sing around the piano, sometimes a good singer sang on their own and someone might recite a poem. A poem like Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” with its stirring verses

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred

stays with you for life.

Another poem, “The Wreck of the Hesperus” by Longfellow, has supplied some weather forecasting lore that I’ve never forgotten:

Last night the moon was ringed round,

Tonight no moon I see.

This warning of a severe storm was made by an old sailor to the captain of the Hesperus. The captain had brought his daughter aboard and was too proud to listen to the forecast of an old sea dog. A violent storm destroyed them all.

Another poem we didn’t learn at school, has stayed with me—“Vitai Lampada” by Sir Henry Newbolt. I never translated the title and there are other words in it I’ve never understood but it didn’t matter. I think this poem must have fitted into the spirit of the times of my childhood. When I saw a map of the world with a lot of red dots I felt proud to be a part of the British Empire. Also there are times in life when one needs strengthening and the words “Play up! play up! and play the game!” are a great help.

On one occasion, while eating in a Spanish restaurant in Sydney with my husband, I quoted Browning’s poem “Home Thoughts, from the Sea” because Browning wrote them off the coast of Spain. To our surprise a man at a nearby table quoted the next lines. He had studied the poem at school in England. We compared notes and concluded that the curriculum in English was much the same in England and Australia. To my surprise, looking up “Vitai Lampada” today I discovered that in 1920 Henry Newbolt had laid out a plan for the teaching of English. For many years it was the standard work for English in teacher training colleges in England. It is very likely that it was used in Australia too.

The only Shakespeare we had in primary school was when one of the nuns got her class to put on the Mechanicals, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, playing Pyramus and Thisbe. I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen.

I’m grateful to the teachers who read Dickens’s Little Nell to us and The Wind in the Willows, although they left out the seventh chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”. I’m grateful for all those poems. I don’t know if they were great poetry but they were enjoyable enough for me to remember them with pleasure, at least parts of them, for a lifetime.

Hilary Weisser lives in Sydney.