An Audio Guide to Poetry Recitation - 17. Kay Ryan remembers her grandmother
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Kay Ryan remembers her grandmother
How does someone first fall in love with poetry in great language? Kay Ryan remembers her grandmother reciting Longfellow.
[Voice of Kay Ryan] I loved my grandmother, my old grandmother who would recite poetry to me and she would look me right in the eye and she had false teeth and her voice was a little bit floppy, the way old people's mouths get the kind of juicy and floppy and she would say,
"Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not written of the soul. "
and I loved that. I didn't really know what it meant but I thought it was very great and she was also a very loving grandmother, so I associated her reciting poetry to me with being loving.
The only reason poems last is because they are so amusing and so effective they last in us, they are the best language. So they stay in us because they are the most beautiful and usful language. So that by learning poems you really are keeping the very best of English speech or English expression. And you have it to pull out when you need it like, let's say your friend gets in a big car crash and is really badly hurt, you don't think of a novel,you think of a little snatch of a poem that you learned that you always pull poetry out when it's really desperate. Poetry is for desperate occassions. It works in those occassions. It's efficient to a desperate occassion.
A Psalm of Life
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)
TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!—
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,—act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o'erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
