Tell people you’re asking children to learn a poem by heart and you get very mixed reactions. Some people will immediately start saying a few lines of verse they learned as a child; these lines usually come with a warm story, perhaps a memory of a family member who shared the poem with them or a particular teacher who brought poetry alive for them. Other people will tell a moving story of a loved relative able to recite a poem whole and intact through the ravages of dementia. A very small number of older people will shudder and remember being punished for faulty memorisation of a poem assigned to the class to learn. And others, like me, have no such stories: learning a poem by heart just wasn’t something we encountered as children, in school or at home.

When you learn a poem by heart, it becomes part of you; anytime, anywhere, you can breathe it into being again. Children tell us about ‘my’ poem; our judges praise how well they have ‘owned’ the poem. If the poems we offer for learning are diverse and inclusive, this ownership offers a powerful form of participation in cultural life. Togetherness Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘My Heart and I’depicts the distress of a newly widowed woman. The speaker reveals how she feels after her husband’s death. By repeating the word “tired” a number of times, she never lets readers forget her pain. She even admits that she would rather be dead than continue to live as she has to without her husband. Adults are regularly surprised by the facility children seem to have for learning by heart, with varied reasons proposed such as less fear, the pliability of young brains, and more time to devote to it. There’s a general consensus that once you’ve learned one thing it’s easier to learn more things, a poem being a very good place to begin. Oracy A Process in the Weather of the Heart’is a free-verse poem by Dylan Thomas. This poem taps on the theme of death. The dry and arid imagery of this piece makes a reader think of oblivion. After reading the text, it becomes clear that Thomas wrote this poem with a heavy heart, maybe lamenting his loved one’s death. In general, it is a topical poem about death that delves into the juncture when the heart gives up. Let’s have a look at the last few lines from the text:

Clips

His first port of call is the Duchess of Cornwall, Patron of the Royal Society of Literature, who shares a passion for poetry, and more particularly poetry learned by heart. He also calls on Dame Judi Dench for advice on learning and some insights into how she sustains her reservoir of learned verse. In Poetry By Heart children choosing to learn a poem with others usually think they’re taking the easier option. In fact, speaking a poem with others demands cooperation, trust and coordination – and to do it well involves breathing together, being in the moment together and becoming part of something beyond yourself. Understanding Poetry by Heart is a national poetry speaking competition for schools in England. It is open to young people in Key Stages 2-5. Pupils choose a poem, learn it by heart, and perform it. Those with warm memories are often ardent, lifelong advocates of learning a poem by heart, but their experience can be so embedded in particular relationships and contexts that it can be harder to tease out a more generalisable set of ideas about the value to children’s learning. What exactly are the benefits to children of learning a poem by heart? In ten years of running Poetry By Heart we’ve listened avidly to the stories and testament of many thousands of teachers, librarians and pupils who have taken part, in every school type and every corner of the country. Here are nine things we’ve learned. Achievement

Poetry By Heart, the national poetry speaking competition for students in England, recently announced the line up for the Grand Finale of the competition. Now in its tenth year, this was the biggest competition yet, with over 2,000 entries and more than 37,000 young people taking part in schools across England. The Poetry by Heart competition features a classic category where participants learn one pre-1914 and one post-1914 poem, and a freestyle category when they can choose any poem. A curated collection for them to choose from includes a wide range of poets, from Beowulf to contemporary poets such as Wayne Holloway-Smith, Roger Robinson and Romalyn Ante. No one can learn a poem by heart for you. You have to create your own relationship with the poem, discover what memory tactics work best for you, and keep going when it seems too difficult. More managed curriculum activities don’t always have this scope and teachers are often delighted by the gains in learning independence. Language 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. We call it learning by heart, and I think such learning can only make our hearts bigger and stronger.” Simon Armitage, Poet Laureate Poetry is often taught through the rather mystifying lens of Latinate terminology. Fun for some but many children need more experience of poems to make sense of it. Learning a poem by heart seems to develop that experience in an accessible and embodied way through children feeling rhythm on their pulses, noticing how rhymes knit a pattern and hearing the music of sequences of words.Julie Blake, co-director of Poetry By Heart, said: “In the last couple of years many teachers have asked us if we could develop some resources for younger children and we are delighted to have done that now. A national poetry recital competition has launched a set of interactive resources for primary school children and their teachers. Teachers also tell us about younger children’s gains in reading fluency, vocabulary enrichment and the musicality of English. I prefer the description a teenager gave of the value to them of being able to articulate what they know they don’t yet have the words for and of trying out different adult voices to explore where they might fit. Memory

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. And yet he didn’t belong to any particular movement: unlike his contemporaries William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens he was not a modernist, preferring more traditional modes and utilising a more direct and less obscure poetic language. He famously observed of free verse, which was favoured by many modernist poets, that it was ‘like playing tennis with the net down’. Love and the Gentle Heart’is a sonnet with an irregular rhyme scheme. This poem reveals the nature of love and heart. In the first two quatrains of this piece, Dante describes how love and heart are the same at the same time two distinct things. Whereas the concluding section talks about how virtue wins a woman’s heart and her love. Let’s have a look at the last few lines from Dante’s sonnet. The finale will be at Shakespeare’s Globe on Monday 26th June to an audience of invited guests, celebrating with poetry performances from the 2023 finalists, alongside guest readers featuring previous winners of Foyle Young Poets of the Year, and concluding with the awards to the Poetry by Heart winners. The list of finalists can be seen here. But there's science behind all this, supplied by Professor Usha Goswami, the Director of the Centre of Neuroscience at Cambridge University, who'll explain to Gyles the latest thinking about the way the brain records and retains poetic meter and particularly the strong, rhythmic meter of the twice-told rhymes of childhood. Many of his poems are about the natural world, with woods and trees featuring prominently in some of his most famous and widely anthologised poems (‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Birches’, ‘Tree at My Window’). Elsewhere, he was fond of very short and pithy poetic statements: see ‘Fire and Ice’ and ‘But Outer Space’, for example.

The grand final of the competion, which is now in its fourth year, will be held in March 2016 for students in secondary schools and colleges. Housman (1859-1936) may not have revolutionised poetry in the way that some of the other names on this list did, but of all the poets included here, he is perhaps the one whose work most easily lends itself to being learned by heart. His fondness for regular rhyme schemes and verse forms, his plain and direct use of language, and his ability to articulate deeply felt sentiments in affecting and moving verse, all make Housman a join to learn, and carry around, ‘by heart’. The competition is created by The Full English and supported by the Department of Education with a consortium of partners including The Poetry Society, Homerton College, the University of Cambridge, The Poetry Archive, Stephen Spender Trust, The English Association, National Poetry Day, CLPE, Shakespeare’s Globe, OED and NATE. My Heart’s in the Highlands’was written in 1789 by Robert Burns. This song is sung to the tune of “Failte na Miosg”. Through this piece, Burns reveals how close he is to the Scottish highlands. He presents beautiful natural imagery and repetition to express her love for the place. His close attachment to the hills of highlands is captured in these lines:

This poem, which sees Housman’s ‘Shropshire Lad’ observing the cherry blossom on the trees and reflecting, as a young lad of twenty, that he has only fifty years left of his biblical three-score and ten, is a case in point: Any selection of poems to memorise should feature this classic example of nonsense verse. The full poem first appeared in Carroll’s 1871 novel Through the Looking-Glass, his superb follow-up book to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and as well as giving us several new words now in common use (see the link above to discover more, and to read the full poem), it is also a glorious short narrative poem about a hero slaying a monster. What’s not to like?

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The poems have been chosen by Morag Styles, retired professor of children’s poetry at the University of Cambridge and trustee of the Poetry Archive. Each one is accompanied by a suggested activity. Dr Julie Blake, FEA, FRSL(Hon), co-directs Poetry By Heart, the national poetry speaking competition for schools. She researches and writes about the history of poetry for children, creates digital and print anthologies of poems for children and young people, teaches poetry pedagogy and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of poetry in the school English curriculum.