I’m thankful now that my Grade 8 teacher made me memorize 400 lines of poetry | Canada Voices

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On the first day of Grade 8, our roomful of hormone raging near-adolescents was greeted by Mr. Lemke, who would be our English and home room teacher at Ottawa’s W.E. Gowling Public School. Mr. Lemke was in his 30s, bespectacled with a tweedy jacket and rumpled light brown hair. This was 1963, we knew nothing about the personal lives of our teachers, but the tiny detail we gleaned about him was that his first name was Joachim, which made him sound foreign and exotic. Mr. Lemke enunciated each word with precision, purpose and measured warmth, letting us know that he would be running a tight ship.

Mr. Lemke announced that first day that we would be learning 400 lines of poetry over the course of the school year. By heart. He would instruct any of us at any time to stand “on command” and recite from among those poems we had learned.

At 12, I was awkward and restless with a yearning heart. It was a time of wishing I was someone else, that I lived in another body, another family, another neighbourhood, another city. Of trying to figure out who I was in my left-wing secular Jewish family in a sea of church-going gentiles and a puddle of more traditional Jews in conservative Ottawa. I was tall and gangly with too thick eyebrows and wild, untameable hair. I wondered: How would I ever learn 400 lines of poetry?

As the days and weeks passed, Mr. Lemke didn’t just have us memorize the poems. He would offer us a poem as if it were a delectable dish to be savoured with each of our senses. He invited us to tune into its rhythm and its mood, to inhale and taste it. We would learn to discern its meaning and the underlying layers of its meaning, its ambiguities, its rhyming scheme, its cadence, its message. We would learn how to parse. We would study the poet’s life and imagine the event which might have triggered the poem or the sentiment that inspired it. Only then would we imbibe the poem into the recesses of our memories to recite on demand.

One of our first poems was To Autumn by John Keats, written in 1819 two years before Keats died from tuberculosis at 25.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run.

The poem is an ode to the season of the harvest and nature’s abundance. At the same time, it speaks to the imminence of death and decay. Keats cautions us not to dwell on the future: “Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.” Keats’s mother and brother had already died of tuberculosis. There was no cure. Could Keats have known then that he was dying, too? My heart ached for the young John Keats.

Naturally, we complained about having to memorize To Autumn and 20 or so other poems that year. There were romantic poems, funny poems, quirky poems, poems that rhymed and poems that didn’t. I’d shut myself away in my bedroom and go over a poem line by line until I could recite it by heart. I’d wait anxiously to see who Mr. Lemke would call upon to stand and recite one of the poems. I’d be relieved when it wasn’t me, but somehow I’d get through it if it was.

That year, I fell asleep in Mr. Atkinson’s geography class and had to write out pages of the textbook on the blackboard after class. I flushed the poached eggs I had to make in Miss Russell’s cooking class down the toilet because I knew I’d gag if I tried to eat them. I tried Clearasil for my pimples and torturous brush rollers the size of fat sausages to straighten my hair. I watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show and longed for hair that was straight enough for a Beatles’ haircut. I played volleyball, had too many fights with my mother and brooded endlessly in my room.

Somehow, I got through Grade 8. When I went to high school I still felt like an odd-ball, but at least there were a few more odd-balls around. That fall, when the leaves started to turn their brilliant colours, I found myself incanting the lines, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness …” And the autumn after that and after that.

It took me years to realize the gift Mr. Lemke had given me. He had given me the gift of poetry and welcomed me in to explore its inner sanctums. He had given me keys to appreciate where a poem had come from and what it might mean. He believed that poetry could even make me a better person. But mostly he had invited me to treasure poetry, to make it part of who I am. He taught me what learning “by heart” was all about.

Tamara Levine lives in Ottawa.