The Workshop of Worship
On Recovering Poetry for Our Children
by Steven Faulkner
I drive my children several miles every school day to a brick, one-room school house. On the way, I turn off the radio and ask them to teach me the poems they have been memorizing. At first they thought this was splendid fun, teaching slow-witted Father the poems they pick up so quickly.
But children tire easily and now they often don’t feel like going to the trouble of repeating, “Blow, blow, thou winter wind;/Thou art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude.” But I usually press on and begin repeating the lines myself. Soon they chime in and we are off and running together again, shouting “Hey ho, the holly! This life is most jolly!”
Children love poetry. They love the sound of it, even when they have no idea what is being said. The rhythms of the meter and the sounds of well-chosen words naturally appeal to them. Plato said that this was a gift from the gods intended to charm us toward the Good.
Plato thought that children should be taught to sing poems in chorus and dance to music so as to bring order to their wild little souls. He says that since virtually all children find it impossible to keep their bodies still and their tongues quiet, they need rhythm and harmony to order their movements and voices. For Plato, education was more than filling little minds with information; it was a training in the virtues, an ordering of the appetites, for which poetry was necessary.
Of course not all rhythm and music is good for the soul. In Book Two of The Laws, Plato investigates the kinds of music and dance that move the soul toward the Good and those that debase the soul. It is an obvious indictment of our times that young people are given over to every kind of perverse lyric, sensual music, and chaotic dance that disorder the appetites, while adults shrug this off as impossible to change.
We seem to think this a new problem, that other ages did not have to contend with children’s proclivity to sensual music and barbaric dance. Five hundred years ago, in the age of Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney was complaining that “measure, order, proportion be in our own time grown odious.” It is a persistent problem that many through the ages have recognized as typical of youth.
Charming Us to the Good
Plato thought that a society concerned about the virtues must seek to order the passions of their children by teaching them good music and good dancing. If the definitions of “good” dance and music “give us the slip and get away,” Plato said, “it will be pointless utterly to prolong our discussion of correct education, Greek or foreign.” If Plato is right, educational reform in this country is in a lot of trouble.
One way of charming children toward a good and ordered life is teaching them to memorize poetry. Most parents and teachers today would probably respond that their children are not charmed by poetry, that poetry is difficult and boring. And their children would agree. There are many obvious reasons for this attitude, including television and parents who themselves do not love poetry. Another reason is that the schools teach children to analyze poems before teaching them to memorize them.
Steven Faulkner teaches creative writing at Longwood University in southern Virginia. He is the author of Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts (2007) and Bitterroot: Echoes of Beauty and Loss (2016). Both books are memoirs of father-son journeys that followed the paths of missionary priests: Marquette (in Waterwalk) and De Smet (in Bitterroot).
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