I’ll say it all in the first sentence, so if you don’t feel like reading the rest, you don’t have to: if you immerse your mind and imagination in beautiful sounds, words, images and ideas, your faculties will first imitate all that beauty, and then you’ll actually live that way. You become that with which you surround yourself, and as real poetry is full of those eternal three—truth , beauty and goodness—we ought to sink ourselves into it.
In her book The Harp and the Laurel Wreath, Laura Berquist writes, “We should foster in our children a love of the beautiful and true and a corresponding distaste for what is ugly and false” (8). When we are children, imitation of the beautiful or the ugly comes naturally. If we really want to love the beautiful, we need to begin by imitating the beautiful. This is where poetry comes in. “Poetry is one of the forms of the beautiful that is relatively accessible to children” (ibid). An appreciation for the patterns and sounds of beautiful words, and a knowledge of the way to put them together, becomes almost second nature to the minds steeped in poetry.
All of this helps us to understand why we need it in our formative childhood years. But what about when we’re older? There comes a time when, delightful as nursery rhymes and humorous children’s poems might be, they cease to push the intellect to its full potential. And yet, having been nurtured on poetic rhythms and lovely sounds, it would be devastating to leave them all behind (maybe devastating is too strong a word, but think how comforting the children’s books are that your parents read to you; to be eternally deprived of them would be devastating). Luckily for us older people, poets did not stop at the level of Mother Goose compositions. We have our A. A. Milnes and Lewis Carrolls, but we also have poets like Yeats and John Donne. If you’ve been lucky enough to have been encouraged, cajoled, and sometimes forced to memorize poetry as a young child, you will have gained the tools of poetic comprehension in your study of those simple rhymes, and you can begin to access the higher and complex truths found in more advanced poetry.
This accession does not always happen right away. In the same way that you might sing a song twenty times before you realize what the lyrics mean, you can say a poem over and over again, delighted with the mere sounds of it, and suddenly, the music of the words begins to mean something beautiful and real and deep. Poetry is a form of music, and it acts on and effects the imagination and emotions the same way that music can and does. It draws us in superficially at first, and later we can move onto an appreciation of its deeper meanings. In more advanced poetry, those real meanings are philosophical and even theological questions and answers. When we begin to ask those questions, as all men should and must, what better way to start than with the music of poetry? For we happy few (name that play!), it will be a music to which our ears have become accustomed, in which our hearts have long delighted, and our minds have learned to love.
So, if you don’t have any poems committed to memory, open a book and learn one. Now. Good ones that aren’t too long: When You Are Old, by W.B. Yeats; Woman’s Constancy, by John Donne; Richard Cory, by Edwin Arlington Robinson. Also, as proof of what I said in the last paragraph, I realized something new when I re-read Richard Cory ten minutes ago. It happens! It really does! And if you don’t feel like memorizing a whole poem, choose a stanza of a long one that you like. Keats’ Odes have some intensely powerful passages. I’m thinking particularly of the sixth stanza of Ode to a Nightingale. Yeats’ Prayer for my Daughter (stanzas 3-4) and also his Adam’s Curse (aching sadness in that one) are also worth several read-throughs. Finally, let’s not forget T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. If you want to memorize all of that one, I’ll be mightily impressed. Now, you have your assignment. Onward!