An experiment

I am presently reading, for the second time, the book at reference 1. Church was a literary gent, who, inter alia, wrote poems and novels, did literary journalism - and whom I have already noticed a few times over the past months. This book prints a number of his own poems.

Then yesterday, not for the first time, I wondered why it was that despite being keen on words, owning (and using) a fair number of dictionaries and doing a fair bit of reading, I did not do poetry. I have done a bit of Milton and I do do a bit of Shakespeare from time to time, but I am far from being a reader of poetry. I do not, for example, carry a book of poems to read on the train. It is true that I have a rather weak sense of rhythm, but still and all.

I had been reading the poems included in this book, but without their making much if any impact. Then I thought to try reading aloud the one called 'The return to the orchard', a poem which looks back to his first marriage and written not many months after it had ended. Snapped above.

Sight reading it aloud seemed to work well enough, in the sense that I read it properly - but the reading completely blocked inner thought. I tried again this morning and the blocking was not quite so complete. Perhaps if I memorized it and then recited it, it would really start to work in the way intended? Will I persist?

I remember something of the sort happened when I used to read stories or to tell stories to the children when they were young; that the act of reading or telling more or less blocked any other conscious activity. One was certainly not 'thinking' about the story in the usual sense of the word. Not the story just past, the story in the present or the story to come.

And as far as I can remember, reading poetry aloud was not a big part of my time at school. Not completely absent, but certainly thin on the ground. This despite the fact that the school had had some quite well-known teachers of English, the last of whom retired shortly after my arrival. I haven't been able to recover his name, but Google did turn up a chap called Caldwell Cook, something of an eminence in the field at the beginning of the twentieth century. And the brand new school which I joined did include a class room fitted out as a small teaching theatre.

PS 1: the same afternoon: the name has now come back to me: Douglas Brown, on who Google turns up the snap above. Along with reference 4, which must be one of those annoying sites which so arranges things with Google that any even vaguely relevant search key hits. Hotel booking sites are particularly annoying in this regard.

And a bit further down we get the snap above. Available online for $42. 

For the avoidance of doubt, I did not do very well at my English O-levels and did not go on to do A-level, this despite having a gifted and charismatic teacher. A fan of F. R. Leavis as I recall, whom I now know to be another old boy and a chap on whom Church was not keen at all, making remarks about cloistered academics banging on about 'literature' and worshiping at the shrine of D. H. Lawrence.

PS 2: I wonder if there was some complicated jealousy going on here. Leavis served in the first war, albeit in the Friends' Ambulance Unit as a conscientious objector, and had a proper university education. Church did neither and makes quite a lot of how this made something of a gulf between himself and many of his contemporaries. But more of that in due course.

PS 3: I have been prompted to check on who owns WhatsApp - and the answer is Facebook. So as a conscientious objector to the stance taken by Meta on various matter of public interest - not to say concern - WhatsApp will remain offside as far as I am concerned. And sucking up to Trump does not help their case - although, to be fair, a lot of others are at it too.

References

Reference 1: The voyage home – Richard Church – 1964. 

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Caldwell_Cook.

Reference 3: The play way; an essay in educational method - Cook, Henry Caldwell - 1917. To be found at https://archive.org/details/playwayanessayi00cookgoog.

Reference 4: https://www.brock.ac.uk/.

Reference 5: The use of English and of General Studies - Douglas Brown - 1960.