Learning ‘Sunday Morning’ By Heart Lynn Chandhok

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Learning “Sunday Morning” by Heart

By, Lynn Chanhok

January 31, 2016

 

When I started teaching high school English 25 years ago, I didn’t teach much poetry.

I didn’t teach it for the reasons some say they don’t like poetry—it’s too hard, too ambiguous, too many dead white writers in the canon. I knew I was supposed to admire Keats, Wordsworth, Frost, Stevens, but canonical poems felt alien–written by people who were nothing like me, about philosophical abstractions, in “iambic pentameter,” full of “enjambment” and “caesuras”—

Terms I wouldn’t require my students to memorize – too old-fashioned! And I’d never make them do anything as rote as memorize a sonnet. In my mind, sonnets were foreign creatures threatening the literary landscape I was cultivating: my literary landscape made me feel connected, not left out.

I taught novels—and some poems—that got my students talking, and they were learning to write clearly. I was doing my job.

Flash forward 25 years. Today, if I could, I’d teach only poetry to my students. Hard poems. Traditional poems. Not just a few canonical poems—but a lot of canonical poems.

How did I go from there to here? How did I learn to love the sonnet?

About fifteen years ago, I started writing poems. That’s a long story I can’t tell now. I wrote free verse at first, but my teachers encouraged me to try traditional forms. They helped me find my way in to that world.

They taught me about the flexibility of iambic meter, the pleasures of subtle rhyming—why I should care about enjambment and caesuras (which are just …pauses…!) —

Most importantly, they taught me this: I needed to memorize other people’s poems. It didn’t matter if I understood the poems. That wasn’t the point—not at first. I just needed to get them inside me, to learn them by heart, repeat them every day, until I could call them back up to the surface and speak them out into the world.

So I memorized.

I didn’t analyze. I didn’t think. I just listened. And absorbed.

And what a relief! If I couldn’t understand the little creatures, I could master them.

I memorized the longest, hardest poem I knew: Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,”—140 lines of gorgeous iambic pentameter—the central figure is a woman who isn’t going to church one Sunday morning, who instead asks questions about faith and Christ’s sacrifice. She doesn’t feel entirely okay about not being at church, or maybe she does. It’s ambiguous!

In Stevens’ hands, her questions sound like this:

“Why should she give her bounty to the dead?/What is divinity if it can come/Only in silent shadows and in dreams?/

The answers come from a disembodied, voice-y-narrator-type thing:

“Divinity must live within herself: Passions in rain, or moods in falling snow/grievings in loneliness or unsubdued elations when the forest blooms; gusty/emotions on wet roads on August nights…./These are the measures destined for her soul.”

I spent months with the poem. Parts still totally confuse me. But memorizing “Sunday Morning” changed me.

Knowing it by heart gave me two things: first, a companion of sorts in this woman questioning everything; second, memorizing the poem gave me interior access to lines I wanted to emulate: those Gusty/emotions on wet roads on August nights became my experiences—embedded in my memory, alive.

Or maybe I just became entranced. Lulled into submission by the pretty rhythm. That’s scary, for someone raised UU: to forgo wrestling with what something means, and just internalize it. Aren’t we supposed to think critically about everything? Especially stuff about God?

But how can we really know something complex and foreign until we’ve committed it to memory? Until we’ve absorbed the whole of it? How can we know the merits of what we think until we know the language of others? How would I be able to write about my beliefs until I knew his “Sunday Morning”?

Pretty soon, my own poems started really happening.

And, of course, my teaching changed…

**Here’s an example. I stole this lesson one of my teachers: it’s not memorization, exactly. I read Robert Frost’s sonnet “Acquainted with the Night,” out loud to my students. They’ve never heard it before. I read it slowly, word by word, announcing capital letters and commas and line-breaks. They have to write down everything I say, so that after about 15 minutes, they have made the sonnet themselves by hand—they have caught the sound in the air—and re-created, actually created the poem on the page with their hands.

They essentially take dictation. But in those 15 minutes they really “get” the poem. They could discuss it for days and they’d never reach the depth of understanding—the revelation—they have after they’ve made it, from nothing, letter by letter.

They inhabit the scene, feel the speaker’s physical movement and his loneliness in a way that goes beyond anything I could teach—

To make the poem on that blank page, they must drop their own language and accommodate fourteen lines, roughly 140 syllables, 70 beats. They make room for someone else’s experience, rhythms, and metaphors—inside themselves.

 **When we say we “get” a poem, we feel we’ve made a connection to another human being. We feel less alone. You can carry a poem around in your wallet, but when you memorize it, it’s inside of you. It’s alive.

 When we memorize, we hold someone else’s perspective permanently near our hearts. Remember– iambic meter is just the heartbeat meter (di-dum, di-dum, di-dum). The first meter we ever hear, before we’re born, while we are still one thing inside another, literally close to someone’s else’s heart. Memorizing a poem is a little like being pregnant: We hear that person inside us. We don’t know who she is or will be—but we make this safe space for her. I make room in my being for a separate existence near my heart.

Up until maybe fifty years ago, everyone in this country memorized poetry in school. The same poems. I sometimes romanticize that time when everyone knew bible passages by heart. I know! UUs are not supposed to romanticize stuff like that! But losing this tradition, this practice, this kind of collective meditation, we’ve lost something important—

*** Along the way, it’s become okay to say “I don’t get it, it’s too hard” or “It’s not worth the effort.” If poetry is all about what it means to be human, when did we stop wanting to know what that means in all its difficulty?

Why was I so comfortable in that point of view as a young teacher?

These days, when I don’t understand a poem, I sit with it, until it’s no longer foreign. Keats or Stevens, Claude McKay or Claudia Rankine. It takes both time and humility to accommodate, and hold, each others’ language by our hearts. But doing so makes it easier to feel open to strangers, to our political adversaries, to newcomers in the pew…

What if we all started memorizing poems we didn’t think we’d like or understand?

What if we memorized so many other people’s poems that it became impossible for us to forget that our experience is one of many?

Wouldn’t that make us less fearful and less lonely? Wouldn’t that be the actual embodying of empathy? Maybe not the ultimate act of empathy, but certainly a way to practice it.