Remembered Lines

The following is a guest post by Ellen Terrell, a research and reference specialist in the Library’s Science, Technology, and Business Division. Ellen is a regular blogger for the Science, Technology, and Business Division’s Inside Adams blog.

Last year my Inside Adams co-blogger Jennifer Harbster wrote a post for From the Catbird Seat about her connection to Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” After rereading her post recently I was inspired to think about poems that I remember from my own school days. I should start by saying that, like Jennifer, the only poem I had to memorize was one by Robert Frost: “Fire and Ice.” I don’t remember whole poems now, but particular lines. For example, the lines “Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink,” from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, have always made me think of the utter frustration, and even desperation, of being surrounded by something vital and necessary without being able to partake in it. After my hometown of New Orleans got hit by hurricane Katrina, these lines took on additional meaning.

Other lines I remember because of their emotional impact. One example of this that my father and I shared is the world-weary concluding lines of Wildred Owen‘s “Dulce et Decorum Est.” I can almost hear the tone in Owen’s voice as he speaks these lines:

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

These are lines that hit hard, though I am not sure I will ever feel them as powerfully as Owen felt them. You can feel his anger–feel that for him there was nothing glorious about war, and the Great War in particular. While I didn’t know exactly what the lines meant when I was younger, I came to better understood them after I knew more about World War I and saw John Singer Sargent’s painting Gassed, which shows a line of blindfolded soldiers being led–and leading each other–off the battlefield after being gassed.

Of course, there are a few examples of lines that I remember because they are just written so very, very well and make me wish I had a talent for writing. First is a line from the idyll “Lancelot and Elaine,” part of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King: “And faith unfaithful kept him falsely true.” The line’s wording always makes me do a double-take and is a clever, if subtle, insult that sounds good with a southern accent. Then there are the opening lines from Canto I of The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope, which I always feel I need to recite like a circus ringmaster: “What dire offence from am’rous causes springs, / What mighty contests rise from trivial things,”–and Canto III has one of my all-time favorite lines: “Oh thoughtless mortals! ever blind to fate, / Too soon dejected, and too soon elate!”

After spending some time thinking and writing this post, something occurs to me: the poetry that I studied in school left more of an impression than I would have ever thought when I was rolling my eyes in class and wondering how it was going to help me “when I grew up.”

I thought I would end with a question: What lines of poetry do you remember?