�鶹��

Available for over a year

Because my university course, English language and literature, ran from the eighth century to nineteen fourteen, probably well over half our syllabus was poetry. Two or three weeks into my first term, when our tutor told us to read Tennyson and Browning for next week, my tutorial partner dropped his bombshell. “I’d rather not if you don’t mind,” he said. “I don’t like poetry. Why can’t people just say what they mean?” Last year saw a twelve percent rise in sales of poetry; two thirds of buyers under thirty four. Poet Helen Mort said on this programme yesterday this happens in troubled times. We use poetry for weddings and funerals, she said: to make sense of the world. For much of civilisation, poetry has been the default, even ancient shopping lists in verse. It goes back to the very beginning, not just of civilisation but of life. The lullabies in your cradle; the stories on your parent’s knee. Three Billygoats Gruff, clip-clop, clip-clop; the three bears of Goldilocks, too-hot, too-cold, just-right; poetic structure aiding memory. The money, too, is in the mnemonic and the metre: the most catchy advertising jingles having rhyme, alliteration, assonance. Not only is verse, as any actor will tell you, far more memorable; but it’s much more precise and concise. My cousin sent me a poem last week, apologising that it wasn’t high art. But it did, she said, do the job: a few lines summing up a sensible, sage sentiment. Or how could the following be any more succinct: “Better by far you should forget and smile, Than that you should remember and be sad.” The most important truths in the world can perhaps only be told poetically. You are my sunshine. I love you to the moon and back. I can’t live without you. All you need is love. Teenagers ask why Romeo and Juliet fall in love in sonnet form... perhaps because they’ve never yet done so themselves. Re-read your own love letters, and see how much more eloquent you were than usual. Small wonder, then, that so much of faith should be so expressed. Flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. The Lord is my shepherd. Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Clearly this is simile; not strict, simplistic stipulation. Just as well: I keep doves and my son keeps snakes, and both are among the stupidest species alive. When people talk of taking the bible literally, respecting it as literature is usually the last thing they mean. “All the scriptural imagery,” CS Lewis wrote, “is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.” At junior school we memorised a verse of scripture a week. Something I might return to. So here is one, at random, to keep you through today: Come unto me all ye who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.