Kia ora koutou, the way poetry was taught when I went to school was by rote. We were given a poem, we had to learn it off by heart, then, on the Wednesday nominated, we’d all stand up and say the poem, the teacher’s eyes upon us. If her look didn’t make us forget the words we’d known perfectly the night before, then our neighbour’s stifled giggles would.
Do you remember an inn, Miranda? Do you remember an inn? And the tedding and the shredding of the grass for the bedding and the flees that tease in the High Pyrenees and the wine that tasted of taaaar?
And thirty three voices inflected upwards in varying degrees of enthusiasm when they reached that question mark. It all depends, it seemed, not on a red wheelbarrow, but on whether you were a girl or a boy or whether you were simply waiting for this horror to end.
Yes, Tarantella by Hilaire Belloc. It must have taken some courage on the part of the teacher to enter that classroom every Wednesday at 2pm. Most of us were not in the mood for poetry anyway. Tedding and shredding? WTF? Although my worst swear word was bugger at this time and it had to be whispered or (much safer) thought.
And then of course good old Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman. Seventeen verses to learn off by heart by next Wednesday. Great melodramatic lines and I loved every one of them. Three quarters of the class ignored the teacher’s request/order and the other quarter (including me) learned the poem. It was relatively easy because it was a ballad so had story and sequence – the Highwayman rides to visit the landlord’s beautiful daughter, Bess, who sits, combing her long black hair, while she waits for him. The soldiers want to catch the highwayman, so they tie up Bess, attach a rifle pointing towards her breast, say if she presses the trigger to warn her lover, she will die. Oh God, the first time I read it and didn’t know the way the story went, by the time I got near the end, I was no longer breathing – Bess hears the tlot tlot tlot of the horse’s hooves, and she moves, oh no, her finger pressed the trigger and warns him with her death…oh the horror, poor Bess, the poor Highwayman, who turns his horse and gallops away from danger – then he discovers what the soldiers had done and that Bess had sacrificed her life to warn him…
Back he screamed like a madman
shouting a curse to the sky…
and then – oh horror…
…they shot him down on the highway/ down like a dog on the highway/ and he lay in his blood on the highway/ a bunch of lace at his throat…
Even the boys were caught up by these lines. It didn’t matter how well we knew the poem or how often we said it, by this stage the whole class and the teacher were hoping against hope for a miracle…Tess would not die, the Highwayman would not be shot down, there would be a happy ending, but Sir Alfred Noyes knew his stuff, and a ghostly voice finishes the poem…’and still of a winter’s night they say/when the wind is in the trees/and the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas/the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor and the Highwayman comes riding, riding… and he comes back to relive this story of love, life and death… and every now and then, so do I.
Renée
And still of a winter’s night, they say
when the wind is in the trees
and the moon is a ghostly galleon
tossed upon cloudy seas…
When the road is a ribbonof moonlight
over the ppurple moor
the highqwayman cos rifing, ridinf, riding,
The Highwayman comes riding
up to the old inn door.
