I'm setting Ana to learning Barbara Frietchie

[conuly]

Two couplets at a time. She memorized The Eagle over the summer (and despite her groaning I think she really likes that poem) and believe it or not, I think this one might be simpler. Longer, but simpler to learn when she does it.

However, 60 lines is ambitious, so I had her write out the first eight tonight, explaining that the very act of writing helps most people to memorize things. The first eight lines are ever one of them scene-setting, so then we talked a lot about the scene that it set, the peaceful town with the rebel horde approaching. I don't know if it'll help her memory, but it shouldn't hurt.

I haven't picked a poem for Eva yet, though! It's not that memorizing poetry is so crucial, I just think it's good practice for learning to remember things in general. You could practice by memorizing baseball stats or license plate numbers, but when you use poems you sound ever so much more cultured and erudite. I could just tell her no new poem until she has her times tables cold, but that's mean, she likes poems. So I have to think fast.

I just want something short, neither horribly grown-up or depressing nor childish and cutesy. Available online is a plus. That shouldn't be too much to ask. Maybe I'll set her on Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Day, Ana must have been about that age when she learned it.

Comments

[siderea]

*Points up to adrian_turtle's comment* It's absolutely obvious if you live in a New England wood, to say nothing of having grown up in one and had it impressed upon you since infancy that if you go wandering off in there in the winter, you have about 30 minutes before hypothermia gets you.

One Labor Day weekend -- no snow in sight! -- I road tripped with a friend who grew up in Brooklyn to an SCA event at a Boy Scout camp deep in a national forest in NH. We started out late, so it was fully dark by the time we started the final five mile single-lane-with-occasional-turn-offs dirt road drive to the camp, through a tunnel of trees. She started quietly freaking out. "It feels like the trees are hostile. I think they want to eat us." I thought a moment and assured her, "Yeah. They totally do." And I had a thought. "You know, I just realized: I grew up in Mirkwood."

It's a poem rhapsodizing something as lethal as a gun.

And if that weren't all obvious on the face of it, there are all the other poems he wrote in which he was more explicit about forest (+/- snow) == death.

ETA: Don't get me wrong: I love the poem and in fact have it memorized. It's a poem about not committing suicide, and as such is life-affirming, but unlike the vast majority of literary attempts to treat suicidality it doesn't get preachy or moralizing. To the contrary, it presents in a way which is entirely sympathetic and non-judgmental just how beautiful and alluring death can appear. It is entirely brilliant and humane.

[conuly]

I'm still not entirely convinced. At any rate, on the gloom and doom front I meant more like Richard Cory (a poem my teachers in high school had a positive obsession with) than anything where you have to think to get to the death and suicide.