Bog Myrtle & Peat

My father’s generation believed that poetry was something to be learnt by heart. They made a virtue of recital, and it sometimes seemed that you couldn’t really claim to love words without knowing them inside-out. Ted Hughes was a particular champion of memorised verse, and while I would follow that man to the ends of the earth, I railed against his enthusiasm because I personally found it hard to remember poetry. It didn’t seem to work for me, and my only progress was based upon a deep and joyless scarring – a repetition of lines said over and again so often that I couldn’t remember why I had ever wanted to learn them in the first place.

But in recent years, there have times when I have felt constricted by a dependence upon paper. I reached for the words I wanted and couldn’t find them. I was also tantalised by the idea of poetry as oral culture; the notion that poetry books are just “word warehouses” in which beautiful lines could be kept in silent storage until somebody needed them. But I need them, and on the basis of that dependence, surely they should come to hand and accompany me without cue, clue or scribbled note? 

In reality, it’s extraordinary what human beings can learn and recount – there are some astonishing Burns enthusiasts who can recall almost every word of his poetry; Islamic scholars work on Hifz for years in order to memorise the entire Qu’ran. It’s well known that vast narrative poems existed for centuries in human memories without a single syllable ever touching the earth, and it’s certainly true that headspace and capacity is not in short supply. It can be done – and I felt increasingly keen to make the attempt.

So I set off to learn some pieces of poetry by WB Yeats. I chose one of his earliest poems; a strange, miasmic narrative called The Wanderings of Oisin, which follows the mythical progress of an ancient hero as he moves through a landscape of fantasy and exploration in pre-Christian Ireland. It’s an extremely long story and it takes a while to build momentum – so I picked a turning point in the poem and started there, about two thirds of the way through book three – just as Oisin addresses “the king of the nails of gold”. 

And yes – it’s hard work. Certain verses have been easier to grasp than others, and it happens that some specific sentences have taken me a full day to pinpoint. For no reason that I can comprehend, the sibilant half-sentence “slow dropping a sound in faint streams” became a nightmare which took hours of constant teasing to unravel. But it also seems to be getting easier as time goes by. Like a muscle, the ability to recall this language fittens and tautens with use until I find that I can write down my verse-of-the-day in the morning and recall most of it from a couple of reads. The pace is gathering, and the store has grown continuously until I find that a full recital of what I’ve learnt from beginning to end takes about twenty minutes.

As repayment for this effort, I now have a lengthy and thrilling story in my head, as clearly as if it were written on a page. Faced with the most boring day-to-day chores, I can switch off and enter into Oisin’s world – I can bury myself there, walking around in the words and inspecting every one of them in turn. There’s an astonishing degree of immersion on offer – reciting it aloud to myself in the car, I can play with emphases and roll pronunciations however I choose; sometimes my Oisin is bold and forthright, in other moments, he’s soft and frightened. I can perform the poem as a dramatic act – I can sing it noisily or (my favourite) I can deliver it in the Derry accent of Seamus Heaney. It’s an entire pleasure of its own, and something I never understood as a child forced to chant my way through Tam o’ Shanter in a bored monotone.

The Wanderings of Oisin is regarded as one of Yeats’ lesser works, but it’s a phenomenal achievement; dense, evocative and entirely drawn from a perfectly observed landscape of ghostly battlefields, silent screams and the gentleness of April snow. I’ve always liked this poem. Now I have grounds to claim that I love it.

Crucially, it’s given me a level of confidence to attack poets like Yeats, who has often felt intimidatingly dense and overwhelming. I have skirted around his work in the past, knowing some of what he means but feeling shy of a deeper engagement. Learning Oisin feels like I’ve brought him down to size; or brought myself up to size because the poet is only the sum of his words after all. No matter how many technical academic studies are written on the subject of Yeats, he wasn’t writing to be dissected by cloistered analysts. He was writing for the wet fields and the overnight rain, and while academics often claim to clarify, they can easily obfuscate much simpler truths. By learning Yeats, he is suddenly workable – he’s beckoning and passionate, and it feels like these words actually want to be remembered and spoken aloud. Even if I never learn more than I already have, I’ve found new respect for the workings of memory, recitation and the spoken word – it turns out that silently reading poetry from a book is only a shadow of the full experience.

Wrapped in the wave of this music, with weariness more than of earth

The moil of my centuries found me; and gone like a sea-covered stone

Were the memories of the whole of my sorrow and the memories of the whole of my birth –

And a softness came from the starlight and filled me full to the bone.

In the roots, in the grass, in the sorrel, I laid my body down low –

And pearl-pale Niamh lay beside me, with her head in the midst of my breast.

Then the horse ran away to the distance, and year after year ‘gan roll

And the green squares of ivy grew over us, binding us down to our rest.

And, man of the many white croziers, a century there I forgot

How the fetlocks drip blood in the battle, how the bodies on bodies were rolled; 

How the falconer follows the falcon in the weeds of the heron’s plot

And the name of the demon whose hammer struck Conchubar’s sword-blade of old.