Making the Most of Self-Isolation #Learn a poem by heart
If, like me, you are over seventy, it seems that any day now you are going to be asked to ‘self-isolate’ – for four months!
What on earth are we going to do? There are only so many episodes of Frasier and Murder She Wrote that you can watch in a week.
Well, I’m not going to waste time and energy arguing about whether mandatory oldie self-isolation is the right thing to do (let’s face it: nobody really knows), I’m going to use it as a unique opportunity – an opportunity to do all sorts of exciting and challenging things, many of which I’ve been meaning to do for years but somehow haven’t ever found the time (or incentive) to get around to. As the weeks go by (assuming I survive) I’ll share some of them with you here.
I’m going to start by learning a poem a week. It shouldn’t be too difficult. Even an old codger like me should be able to learn two lines a day. Learn just two lines a day and in a week you can learn a complete sonnet. And with four whole months of self-isolation, you could probably manage ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.
Successfully learning a poem by heart is deeply satisfying. You’ll emerge from your splendid isolation with a whole repertoire of party pieces – inspiring or amusing according to taste.
You can entertain family and friends with your recitations – and help transform the lives of your grandchildren. For real. Read on.
Learning poetry by heart is good for you.
It’s good for all of us. It’s particularly good for children and for older people.
This weekend the great Dame Judi Dench and I had fun in her kitchen recording a little video to remind people to wash their hands thoroughly – taking at least twenty seconds to do so. We chose to time our twenty seconds by reciting the first verse of one of our favourite poems: ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’ by Edward Lear. We’ve both known the poem since we were small children. It’s the rhythm and the rhyme of the poem that’s helped lock it into our heads for all these years.
I learnt about the science of this when I went to visit Usha Goswami, professor of Cognitive Developmental Neuroscience at Cambridge University. The research undertaken by the professor and her team is providing measurable proof of what my gut instinct has long told me: as you start out in life, having your parents and grandparents recite poetry and sing songs to you will help you with your linguistic skills; as you grow older, learning poetry by heart can help keep dementia at bay.
Professor Goswami has been studying and measuring what goes on inside the brains of babies and young children – measuring the neural oscillations (the brainwaves as it were) that encode the signals through which we begin to learn and understand speech. The professor and her team can measure the speech-sound awareness of babies, toddlers and young children and, on the basis of the data, accurately predict speech, reading, and even spelling development.
Essentially, what the professor’s studies of the ‘rhythmic synchronization across modalities’ establish is that the more you recite poetry to your children – before they are born as well as when they are babies and toddlers – the better they will be able to communicate, both when it comes to spoken and, later, even when it comes to written language.
And why do we remember best the poems we learnt as children, I asked the professor? ‘First in, last out, is the principle of it,’ she explained, trying to put it in layman’s terms for me. And why is the stuff we’ve learned later more difficult to recall? ‘It’s all still in there,’ she said, reassuringly. ‘It’s just sometimes difficult to retrieve because there is so much in there.’
The brain is a computer into which we are loading more and more stuff as the years go by. Those infamous ‘senior moments’ occur not because we have lost anything, but because it has been temporarily mislaid. It’s a retrieval issue, not a memory one. Concentrate and focus and you should be able to bring it back.
‘At whatever age you are,’ according to Professor Goswami, ‘you still have the capacity to learn new things if you put your mind to it. There’s no shortage of brain cells as you grow older.’
Recent research from the department of neurobiology at Columbia University has established that new brain cells grow as quickly when you are in your seventies as when you are in your twenties. Remembering things, it seems, does not have to get more difficult as you grow older. According to the scientists at Columbia, gradual mental decline ‘is not the inevitable process many of us think it is.’ The researchers made their discovery after counting the number of new cells growing in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that processes memories and emotions.
The scientists at Columbia found that around 700 brain cells were created each day in the hippocampus, even in the oldest people they studied, and that there was no difference in the hippocampus in young and old brains.
Back at Cambridge University, Professor Goswami was unequivocal: learning poetry by heart is good for the brain. ‘So it’s true what they say,’ I suggested to her, ‘The brain is a muscle: if you don’t use it, you lose it.’ ‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘You’ve got the keep the brain active. I have colleagues here at Cambridge in their seventies, eighties and nineties – none of them has dementia. The exercise and discipline of learning a poem by heart is certainly going to help keep dementia at bay.’
Did you hear that? There is no excuse. If you want to do it, you can. And these coming months of self-isolation are your opportunity!
When I was a little boy I got to meet the great English actress Dame Sybil Thorndike, Bernard Shaw’s original Saint Joan. She lived near my parents’ flat in London and we used to see her sometimes waiting at the bus stop. She was a Christian Socialist and a natural enthusiast. ‘Oh Lewis,’ she said to her husband, Lewis Casson, when they were both in their eighties, ‘if only we could be the first actors to play on the moon!’ Dame Sibyl lived into her nineties and famously made herself learn a new poem every day to keep her brain active.
Poetry is good for you. That’s official. Speaking poetry to unborn and new-born babies (and toddlers) will help them with their language skills to a marked degree. Speaking poetry to babies, infants and young children can improve the speed at which they learn to speak and read - and even write. What’s more, there is hard evidence that children who learn poetry by heart do better academically, concentrate more effectively, and even sleep better at night. And learning poetry by heart as an adult improves your ability to communicate (and consequently the quality of your relationships); improves your memory; increases your brain capacity, and – glory be! – helps keep dementia at bay.
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. And now, thanks to Coronavirus and the imminent government self-isolation edict, you have a wonderful opportunity to master a poem – or two. Or 22. Go for it.
The secret of learning a poem by heart is to learn just two lines at a time. Try this for starters:
There was a young man from Peru
Whose limericks stopped at line two.
That’s it.
Easy, eh? Don’t try to learn more than two lines a day. Just keep repeating the two lines as you pace about your home, take a shower, do the dishes, WASH YOUR HANDS. Master two lines and then repeat those two lines the next day before you start on the next two lines . . .
If you learn just two lines a day, in a week you can learn a sonnet.
It’s not a bad idea to start by re-learning a childhood favourite. Here is Dame Judi’s and mine: The Owl and the Pussy-Cat by Edward Lear (1812-88). It regularly tops the poll as Britain’s most popular childhood poem:
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!”
Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing!
Oh! 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.
“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.
PS. Looking to the future, here’s a project that might interest you. www.poetrytogether.com encourages young people (schoolkids) and old people (living in care homes and sheltered housing) to learn a poem by heart – the same poem – and then to get together for tea, cake and an intergenerational poetry slam. We launched the project last year and more than two hundred groups of old and young took part.
A school from Wales learnt poems in English and Welsh - and Polish, too, because one of the old gentlemen had been in the Polish air force during the war. Chelsea Pensioners (old soldiers in their eighties and nineties) teamed up with children from a local state primary school and began marching round the tea-room together reciting A A Milne’s ‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace.’
We are doing it again this year – with the tea parties happening from 1 October, National Poetry Day. Learn your poems in self-isolation, then share them over tea and cake once this pandemic is over.
(Incidentally, my anthology of poetry to learn by heart, Dancing by the Light of the Moon, is published by Penguin Michael Joseph, £ 14.99. If you don’t feel you can risk a visit to the bookshop, you can have it delivered to your door by Amazon. Enjoy. Make the most of self-isolation!)