Dancing by the Light of the Moon Read online

  Gyles Brandreth

  * * *

  DANCING BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOON

  Contents

  Prologue

  The Owl and the Pussy-cat

  by Edward Lear

  Chapter One

  How I Got into This

  And how this book can change your life

  Chapter Two

  Thanks for the Memory

  It’s all in the mind

  Chapter Three

  How Do You Learn a Poem by Heart?

  Getting down to the nitty-gritty

  Chapter Four

  There Was a Young Man from Peru

  Whose limericks stopped at line two

  Chapter Five

  On Westminster Bridge

  Seventeen sonnets

  Chapter Six

  A Lot of Nonsense

  From Edward Lear to Monty Python

  Chapter Seven

  Animal Magic

  Welcome to the menagerie

  Chapter Eight

  The Upstart Crow

  ‘Speak the speech, I pray you’

  Chapter Nine

  The Seven Ages

  A life in poems

  Chapter Ten

  Year In, Year Out

  Poetry for all seasons

  Chapter Eleven

  Thirty Days Hath September

  Useful poetry

  Chapter Twelve

  Come Live with Me, and Be My Love

  Romance guaranteed

  Chapter Thirteen

  The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck

  Poetry in performance

  Chapter Fourteen

  Nowt So Queer as Folk

  From Kubla Khan to Vincent Malloy

  Chapter Fifteen

  Funeral Blues

  Poems at the end of the road

  Chapter Sixteen

  A to Z

  An alphabet of poets

  Epilogue

  Everything Is Going to Be All Right

  Acknowledgements

  Permissions

  Index of Poems and Poets

  If you are looking for a poem by a particular poet start here

  Index of First Lines

  About the Author

  Gyles Brandreth is a writer, broadcaster, actor, former MP and Government Whip, now Chancellor of the University of Chester and the founder of the Poetry Together project that encourages young people and old people to learn poems by heart and share them over tea and cake. Probably best known these days as a reporter on BBC’s The One Show and a regular on BBC Radio 4’s Just A Minute, as a journalist he writes for the Telegraph and Daily Mail and is a columnist for the Oldie. On stage he has appeared in pantomime, in Shakespeare (most recently in Hamlet and Twelfth Night), in The Importance of Being Earnest (as Lady Bracknell) and in Zipp!, his own musical revue in London’s West End. On TV he has featured in Have I Got News For You, QI, Room 101, Countdown and This Is Your Life, as well as too many programmes featuring the word ‘Celebrity’, including Celebrity Mastermind, Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, Celebrity The Chase, Pointless Celebrities and his personal favourite, Celebrity Gogglebox. The founder of the National Scrabble Championships, his books about words and language include the international bestseller Have You Eaten Grandma? His novels include seven Victorian murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde as his detective (he is President of the Oscar Wilde Society) and he has published two volumes of diaries, two royal biographies and The 7 Secrets of Happiness, based on lessons he learned from the psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare. The Brandreth forebears include George R. Sims, who wrote the ballad Christmas Day at the Workhouse. As a schoolboy, Gyles won a number of ‘poetry by heart’ competitions and, aged eight, shook hands with T. S. Eliot. He has written a few poems himself and edited poetry anthologies with both Spike Milligan and Roger McGough. He is married to writer and publisher Michèle Brown and has three children, seven grandchildren, and lives in London with his wife, several rooms full of poetry anthologies, and Nala, the neighbour’s cat.

  www.gylesbrandreth.net

  Twitter: @GylesB1

  For Michèle

  (see page 93)

  Prologue

  The Owl and the Pussy-cat

  by Edward Lear

  I

  The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

  In a beautiful pea-green boat,

  They took some honey, and plenty of money,

  Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

  The Owl looked up to the stars above,

  And sang to a small guitar,

  ‘O lovely Pussy! O Pussy, my love,

  What a beautiful Pussy you are,

  You are,

  You are!

  What a beautiful Pussy you are!’

  II

  Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl!

  How charmingly sweet you sing!

  O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

  But what shall we do for a ring?’

  They sailed away, for a year and a day,

  To the land where the Bong-tree grows

  And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

  With a ring at the end of his nose,

  His nose,

  His nose,

  With a ring at the end of his nose.

  III

  ‘Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

  Your ring?’ Said the Piggy, ‘I will.’

  So they took it away, and were married next day

  By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

  They dined on mince, and slices of quince,

  Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

  And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

  They danced by the light of the moon,

  The moon,

  The moon,

  They danced by the light of the moon.

  CHAPTER ONE

  How I Got into ThisAnd how this book can change your life

  Welcome to Dancing by the Light of the Moon – a title inspired by my favourite poem, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ by Edward Lear, the first poem I remember learning by heart.

  This is an anthology of poetry to read, to enjoy, and to learn by heart. It includes more than 250 poems, some of them the best-loved in the English language, others relatively unknown; some funny, some moving, many (I hope) surprising, all (by definition) memorable.

  W. H. Auden said poetry is ‘memorable speech’. Robert Frost said: ‘Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.’ Frank Sinatra said: ‘doo-be-doo-be-doo’.

  As a rule, Frank Sinatra didn’t write the songs he sang, but ‘doo-be-doo-be-doo’ was all his own work and turned out to be one of his most memorable (and profitable) phrases. He earned millions of dollars from the song ‘Strangers in the Night’ and ‘doo-be-doo-be-doo’ is the only part of the song he actually wrote. For many, it’s the bit they remember best. Why?

  Whether it’s song lyrics or nursery rhymes, Sinatra (‘doo-be-doo-be-doo’) or Shakespeare (‘to-be-or-not-to-be’), why do we remember the words we remember? And what impact do those words have on our lives?

  That’s what this book is about: the power and importance of poetry. Read on and discover the extraordinary brain-boosting, heart-lifting, life-enhancing way in which learning poetry by heart can change your life.

  Speaking poetry to babies (even unborn ones), infants and young children can improve the speed at which they learn to speak and read – and even write.

  Learning poetry by heart as a child can improve your ability to succeed at school, in exams, in interviews, in life.

  Children who learn poetry by heart do better academically, concentrate more effec
tively, sleep better, and do better professionally in later life.

  Learning poetry by heart as an adult gives you a happier and more successful life (including a happier and more successful love-life: oh yes! See Chapter Twelve on page 242); improves your ability to communicate (and consequently the quality of your relationships); improves your memory; increases your brain capacity; and – glory be! – keeps dementia at bay.

  These are bold claims, but I can back them up with the latest research from the Memory Laboratory at Cambridge University, from neuroscientists at Columbia University, and from recent studies undertaken by teachers and language experts across Asia, America and Europe.

  Poetry can make you laugh and cry. Poetry can make you think and feel. Poetry can teach you, and sustain you, and surprise you. Learning poetry by heart can – literally – transform you.

  This chapter explains how I got into all this. In Chapter Two we delve into the science and examine the nature of memory. In Chapter Three we get down to the nitty-gritty of how to learn poetry by heart. And then we get on with the poetry proper, starting on the dolly slopes, in Chapter Four, warming up and working out with the short stuff: couplets, haikus, limericks and the like, including the three shortest poems ever penned.

  Anyone can learn a two-line poem in a matter of minutes: learn seven of them and you have mastered the equivalent of a sonnet. You are ready then for lift-off, which begins with a selection of sonnets in Chapter Five, and culminates, in Chapter Sixteen, with an A to Z of poets who have created classic poems to learn by heart. From Auden to Zephaniah, at a fortnight a piece, you could learn them all inside a year and become a walking, talking anthology of versified wonder, wit and wisdom.

  Let me begin by introducing myself and explaining how I presume to be your guide on this journey. My name is Gyles Brandreth (it’s not an easy name to rememberfn1); I am a husband, a father, a grandfather, an author and a broadcaster. I am British, born in a British Forces Hospital in Germany in 1948. My father was a lawyer (who had reams of poetry in his head); my mother was a teacher (who specialized in teaching children with reading difficulties). I have loved poetry for as long as I can remember and I have a weakness for name-dropping.fn2

  That weakness for name-dropping leads me to say this: if ever we meet be sure to shake my hand. Over the years, I have been lucky enough to meet some poets of significance – T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes among them – so, when you shake my hand, at one remove you are shaking theirs. It may not be much, but it’s something – and there’s more: I went to school with the children of Robert Graves and Cecil Day-Lewis.

  When I was at school (a co-educational boarding school in Hampshire called Bedales) I played Scrabble on Wednesday afternoons with the school’s founder (John Badley, 1865–1967) and he had been friends with Oscar Wilde and Rabindranath Tagore – so I have shaken the hand that shook the hand of both the man who wrote ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ in 1897 and the man who became the first Asian poet to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.fn3

  You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water.

  -

  Faith is the bird that feels the light when the dawn is still dark.

  -

  The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.

  Rabindranath Tagore (1861– 1941)

  In the 1980s, by chance, I became a friend of Christopher Robin, the son of A. A. Milne, so I have also shaken the hand that held the paw of Winnie-the-Pooh and inspired some of the most memorable children’s verse in the two books his father wrote for him in the 1920s: When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. I am friend of the poet Pam Ayres (she and my wife were born on the same day; my wife was born in Swansea; my wife’s mother went to the same school as Dylan Thomas … oh, there’s no end to my poetic connections!) and of Roger McGough.

  Roger is a neighbour and sometimes lets me see his work before it is published. Not long ago he dropped by with this:

  New Poem

  So far, so good

  As well as being a poet, Roger is the presenter of the BBC’s Poetry Please, the longest-running poetry programme broadcast anywhere in the world. My first BBC radio series, back in 1971, was a panel game all about poetry, called A Rhyme in Time.fn4 Since then I have made hundreds of broadcasts about all sorts of subjects – some amusing, some serious – but only one of them has inspired a book: this book.

  Last year, with an award-winning BBC producer, Tom Alban, I made a radio documentary called ‘Gyles Brandreth’s Poetry by Heart’. The programme was commissioned in the run-up to National Poetry Day in the UK to test my instinct that learning poetry by heart is ‘a good thing’ for one and all. It turned out that it is, of course, but much more fundamentally than even I could have imagined.

  The poems we learn when we’re young stay with us for the rest of our lives. They become embedded in our thinking, and when we bring them to mind, or to our lips, they remind us who we are as people, and the things we believe in. They become personal and invaluable, and what’s more they are free gifts – there for the taking. We call it learning by heart, and I think such learning can only make our hearts bigger and stronger.

  Simon Armitage (born 1962)

  My head is full of snatches of poetry – as is yours, I’m sure. Mine is mostly verse I learnt as a child – and if you’re of a similar generation (a post-war baby-boomer) it’s likely to be similar stuff:

  A. A. Milne (‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace …’), Lewis Carroll (‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe …’), John Masefield (‘I must go down to the seas again …), Rupert Brooke (‘If I should die, think only this of me …’), bits and pieces I learnt at home or at school, the first few lines of which have stayed with me across nearly seven decades. Rattling around inside my head I’ve got lyrics from Gilbert and Sullivan operas, from the songs of Flanders and Swann (‘Mud, mud, glorious mud …’), from the popular music of my childhood (‘doo-be-doo-be-doo’), snatches of Shakespeare and Milton, the opening of love poems (by John Keats and Christina Rossetti), bits of Edward Lear and John Betjeman – and I am not alone.

  Making the radio programme, I met up with a number of my contemporaries and found that we had very similar stocks of stored memories. For example, Michael Rosen (poet and former Children’s Laureate) and I were at university together, and, fifty years on, on the radio, unrehearsed, we found ourselves able to recite, in unison, Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ – or at least the beginning of it:

  I met a traveller from an antique land

  Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

  Stand in the desert …

  I began my research for the programme with HRH The Duchess of Cornwall, because she had just taken over from the Queen as Patron of the Royal Society of Literature and is actively involved in a number of charities that promote literacy and the importance of language and reading. She knew Ted Hughes (Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death in 1998) and he read some of his poetry to her children. One of her favourite poems is ‘The Christmas Truce’ by another Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy. ‘It moved me to tears,’ the Duchess told me.

  Was poetry part of her childhood? I asked. ‘Very much so,’ she said. ‘My mother loved poetry. Her favourite was “Right Royal” by John Masefield.’ It’s a narrative poem that tells the story of a steeplechase, the winning horse, and the jockey’s relationship with his beloved which is placed in jeopardy by the race – all rather apt, I suggested, given the Duchess’s love of horses and her own royal story. She agreed. ‘At school I had a Scottish teacher who got me into Burns. “My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here …” And a wonderful teacher who read to us from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.’ Her favourites from her schooldays include Christina Rossetti, Walter de la Mare and John Betjeman, but not Lord Byron. ‘I never got to grips with “Child Harolde”. But I love the poetry of Oscar Wilde. I still read Wilde.’ (The D
uchess of Cornwall has a curious connection with Oscar Wilde: her great-great-grandfather, Alec Shand, was secretly engaged to Constance Lloyd, who went on to marry Oscar Wilde.)

  The poems that have stayed with the Duchess over the years are ‘the poems with rhyme and rhythm’. Leaning towards my microphone, brow slightly furrowed, she launched into W. H. Auden’s ‘Night Mail’:

  This is the Night Mail crossing the Border,

  Bringing the cheque and the postal order,

  Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,

  The shop at the corner, the girl next door …

  Could she remember the first poem she learnt as a girl? ‘Oh yes, definitely, “Matilda”’ – one of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales ‘designed for the Admonition of Children between the ages of eight and fourteen’. ‘“Matilda told such Dreadful Lies, It made one Gasp and Stretch one’s Eyes” … I think I was made to learn it because of some fib I’d told. I can still remember most of it.’

  I put the Duchess to the test and she managed a good few lines. ‘It’s not so easy when you’re under pressure,’ she said. ‘I knew it all last night. It’s much easier for you, Gyles, because you’re an actor.’

  Only now and then – and then not much of one, if the critics are to be believedfn5 – but I do know someone who, when it comes to acting, is indisputably the real deal; so, leaving the Duchess, I went on to see Dame Judi Dench.

  It was September and I found Dame Judi in her country garden, enjoying the late summer sunshine, sitting with a friend called Pen (yes, a Pen friend!) who was helping her learn the lines for her next screen role.

  What was the first poetry the great actress had learnt by heart? Was it A. A. Milne? Or Hilaire Belloc? Or Edward Lear? ‘Oh, no. It was Shakespeare. Even when I was very little I knew lots and lots of Shakespeare. I don’t know if I understood much of it, but I loved it. My older brother Jeffrey – he always wanted to be an actor, so even when he was a boy he was quoting Shakespeare. I don’t remember reading it. I think I just picked it up from Jeff. I learnt lots of Shakespeare when I was a girl – the plays, the sonnets. I can give you lots of sonnets – and I can do all of Twelfth Night by heart and all of Midsummer Night’s Dream, every word, I promise you.’ I believe her. Her love of Shakespeare is palpable. ‘My sight’s going now. If we had to go on stage and read a sonnet, you’d have it written on just one page, but for me the print would be so big I’d need fourteen pages.’ She laughs, but she’s not joking. ‘Now I learn my lines with my friend, Pen. She reads me the lines and I repeat them. I can’t drive any more and I find that difficult, but I manage. But I couldn’t live without Shakespeare.’