January 2024 – Learning curve

No doubt we all learned something from the poems we heard about ‘Lessons’, a theme which we had planned to tackle in March 2020 when the session had to be cancelled because of Covid restrictions.

Many of the selections presented a jaundiced view of school lessons. The exasperation of the teachers in Michael Rosen’s ‘The register’ and Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Like earning a living’ is matched by that of the Eskimo Master in RAK Mason’s post-Apocalyptic ‘Latter-day geography lesson’ and exceeded by the contempt felt by DH Lawrence in ‘Last lesson of the afternoon’, which in turn is trumped by murderous violence in Roger McGough’s ‘The lesson’. From the point of view of pupils, acrostic poems on Maths, School, Class and Homework suggest my granddaughter Elsie is none too keen on these, while performance poet Janine Booth tells of many who have given up on school in ‘Who’s the refuser’.

We heard the beginning of Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times where only ‘Facts’ are taught in Mr Gradgrind’s school. Michael Rosen’s ‘Guide to education’ requires that children are only taught how to pass tests. Howard Nemerov in ‘To David, about his education’ suggests that learning some useless stuff is requisite to becoming a grown-up.

Tony Harrison is not inclined to take lessons in pronunciation in ‘Them and [uz]’.

Polonius gives his son Laertes lessons for life, in his first speech in William Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’.

In Clive James’s ‘Leçons de ténèbres’ the terminally ill poet learns some life lessons from which it’s too late for him to benefit.

Emily Dickinson’s two short poems ‘Experience’ and ‘Experience is the angled road’ I find respectively clear and baffling.

Lewis Carroll’s ‘Poeta fit, non nascitur’ is full of useful advice on writing poetry.

Ken Nesbit’s enthusiastic pupil in ‘Homework stew’ finds he hasn’t been paying sufficient attention. Charles Causley’s hapless ‘Timothy Winters’ would be unlikely to deliver any homework, but I imagined him turning his fortunes around in a sequel, ‘Timothy Winters regained’ which you are welcome to read on this site.

In Wesley McNair’s touching ‘My mother’s penmanship lessons’, she tries hard to teach her shaking hand to write as beautifully as it used to. Seamus Heaney’s ‘Alphabets’ (Part I) is also concerned with the shape of letters.

‘The lesson’ that Edward Lucie Smith learns is that however devastating, bereavement may have an upside.

Wendy Cope’s ‘Reading scheme’ puts early readers Peter and Jane into a fraught family drama. The same poet’s ‘Tich Miller’ is an indictment of insensitive school PE lessons.

In ‘Arrow-maker’, Ken Gambles feels again the pang of that first love-dart from long-past schooldays.

In Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘The good teachers’, a woman looks back from adulthood to the crushes and rebellions of her schooldays. In the same poet’s ‘The Captain of the 1964 Top of the Form team’ a man in dissatisfied middle age relives his youthful glory. The poem includes a reference to the last line of WB Yeat’s ‘Among school children’.

We also heard two poems by Brian Patten; ‘Schoolboy’ and ‘Tall story’. The only thing I can say about these until I can re-read them, is that the former ends with the curious line “Death is the only grammatically correct full stop”.