So ... What Poems Did I Memorise?

Niall Campbell with Mahon and Housman on the Camino de Santiago

Ours was the last leg of the ‘French Way’ of the Camino de Santiago, and we left on Easter Sunday. Elsewhere, large groups of pilgrims had timed their walks to reach the cathedral at Santiago to coincide with the Sunday’s celebrations, and so our roads – far from this end-point – were quieter than usual. Our first day’s journey was 23km from the town of Sarria to the little scenic outpost by the water, Portomarín. We left before dawn and walked out of the quiet streets in the dark. Soon we crossed a bridge then a railway line, and then we seemed to quickly hit open fields. That first morning, we walked until it was light, stopping only when we reached the first roadside café, one whose television in the corner played a late-night Honduran music cabaret. The music was bad, the coffee the best of the trip. It was only after lunch, with 15km under our feet, that I took out the first printed poem from my backpack. I opted to begin this with Derek Mahon’s ‘Everything is Going to be All Right’.

Why this poem? I recalled the debate around whether it was a poem of comfort or not – and was drawn to start with something suitably ambivalent. As a poem to memorise, I found it quite absorbing. There is life in it. It jumps around a little, even while repeating images (clouds, light). Where do I fall on its irony or reprieve? In the mouth, it has the taste of the apocalypse. I can see something happening outside the window of the poem’s room. It also reminded me of James Wright’s ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’, but with a significant difference. The end of Wright’s poem seems to come to him like a thunderbolt. It is as unexpected to the poet as it is to the reader; Mahon’s poem feels the opposite. Mahon has been mulling on the phrase long before it is uttered. It feels like a childhood memory of a parent trying to soothe him – or like a friend who had recently tried to console him. Everything is going to be all right. Things will work out. But the world keeps suggesting otherwise. Yes, it feels like a poem of grief for hope. Hope finally lost. But how beautiful in the mouth.

The first day we walked for nearly eight hours. We arrived in our new town at close to 3pm, totally exhausted. But with no blisters. (We had been washing our feet with surgical spirits for a month beforehand).

The second day took us from Portomarín to Palas de Rei. This was closer to 24km. This was also a good day – being so close to the Minho, the longest river in Galicia, the surrounding area was especially damp in the early morning. So when we climbed the first hills outside of the town, we watched the light catching the mist in the valley.

This day followed the pattern of the first. We walked and stopped, then walked some more. To please my son, at lunch we stopped at a café selling beef burgers. This day’s poem was by A.E. Housman. I was so pleased to see it suggested because I recalled it very loosely from an old interview with Harold Bloom.

Bloom is asked ‘What poem do you think will be in your heart when you draw your last breath?’ He recites Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad XL. What I find curious is how little I thought of the poem when I originally heard Bloom recite it. In the interview, Bloom is praising all the reasons to read literature, all the while looking like every reason not to go near literature with a bargepole. (Interestingly, he also makes a mistake when reciting it – and I’ve learned that mistakes when memorising poems are noteworthy – they suggest something about your own take on the poem. He recites the last line as ‘and cannot go again’ when it is ‘and cannot come again’). But yes, the poem in his recital seems simplistic, maybe veering towards sentimental. But memorising it not far from Palas de Rei, I loved it.

Compared to Mahon, it glides from the tongue. It flows. It is the crispest, clearest water. I would recommend this one too.

An impressively multitasking Campbell pechs and stomps though ‘A Shropshire Lad’

After our second long day, our hotel in Palas de Rei was depressing. I had specified a room with beds for three (myself, my wife, and son) – but their large room was in the attic and the roof slope was so severe that I had to crouch doubled over to reach the beds at the far side of the room.

On the third day it rained. We walked to Melide under hoods, sweating beneath our raincoats. I didn’t take a poem out the whole day as I’m not sure the page would have survived – here’s a nice photo of how weathered the Mahon poem was after taking it in and out of my pocket on that first day.

The fourth day was when I decided to attempt the challenge. Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple Picking’. However tricky I thought it was, it proved to be even more difficult. This was when we walked the paltry 13km between Melide and Arzúa. The day was so short that we started late – and we noticed the trails growing busier as ‘The Primitive Way’, a different camino, met our ‘French Way’ and both walks converge towards Santiago. For the first time, there were school groups on the path too, which we either tried to outpace or stopped to let pass us by, since we wanted a quiet road.

For Frost’s poem – I got the sensation of staggering between thoughts, even in those early lines that I had presumed would be easily approachable.

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

toward heaven still,

and there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

beside it, and there may be two or three

apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Look at where ‘beside it’ and ‘apples’ are placed. The enjambment easily discombobulated my first few attempts. I also found the ‘didn’t fill’ and ‘didn’t pick’ strange at first – but then used their informality to anchor those early parts of the poem.

Across this fourth day, I broke the poem into portions – there was the opening six lines. Casual, chatty, swaying between rhythms. Then the gear-change – that also functions as a sort of interlude:

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I found this quite straightforward. The images are clear. The lines even. The same with this next long piece – my favourite part to recite – it feels as though the poem is now in full eloquence:

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

But then it turns against eloquence. It stutters and stalls. The poem felt more like a four- or five-part play; part of the skill of memorising this poem proved to be giving each section its own character.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

I learned to recall this section only by imagining the phrases themselves were drunk. They seem like half-formed statements that then twist and run on. But then it quickly returns to task, sobriety and effort, clean lines.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

All in all, I memorised 21 out of the 42 lines. But it was a fight every step of the way. Which is not to say it was dispiriting. It was oddly exhilarating to pin the poem down – or this half of it.

Four days into the walk, we reach Arzúa – and we noticed the suspicious pattern also emerging with our hotel lodgings. We had poor hotel, good, poor, good, and now poor again. So never consistently bad enough to leave us angry, and never too comfortable to eat into the organiser’s profits. This night, we were lodged on the small town’s main road – and wherever the trucks were headed, they passed directly by us and shook our whole room through the night. It felt like sleeping in one of those houses you see near airport runways. This was also around the time, after 74km, that my feet got their first blisters.

The fourth day, I wanted a reprieve and didn’t return to Frost. But leaving Arzúa on the 18km journey to the beautiful village of O Pedrouzo, it was thrilling to be able to recite the Mahon, Housman and my portion of Frost. It felt like a catalogue was forming. I felt like a budding guitarist with the makings of a repertoire. On this day, I opted for Emily Dickinson’s ‘“Hope” is a Thing With Feathers’.

This route was again through small forests. The early part of the day being cold, the rain hung over the fields until nearly noon. It is not miserable to walk in the rain. And like the Housman piece, the Dickinson was an effortless piece of grace to commit to memory.

The middle section seems my favourite of the poem.

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

So spare – but with little extravagances, such as the cousinship of sounds between ‘sore’ and ‘storm’ in the second line, that is replicated by ‘abash’ and ‘bird’ in the next. My experience was that the deepest gratification came from the most tuneful pieces. It is the music that draws one on into a deeper connection with the poem. And perhaps this speaks to why so many of the poems suggested were from earlier times, when this was their foremost consideration. Whatever the merits of most poems from our age, perhaps they do not invite, insist or reward being committed to memory in such a way.

But after so much progress, let me talk a little of failures. I didn’t manage to memorise a poem on the last day. This portion, our sixth day, completing our 118km walk, was from O Pedrouzo to Santiago. And the weather was to be hot. 28C. Which might as well be 50C for a Scotsman. We left the hotel in the dark again with the intention of getting as much of our walking done before the midday sun. We were mostly successful. We passed through San Paio, Lavacolla, Vilamaior – but still, the last five or six kilometres were done under the real heat. I didn’t burn – but my feet were shredded by the end. I hobbled, and didn’t read poems. We limped into Santiago at around 3pm – and made our way to the cathedral, where my son informed me, in his usual dramatic fashion, that he had “three minutes of energy left”. How can one not respect such accuracy! We touched the walls of the cathedral, then we limped back across the city to our hotel. And in this way, we were done. It was wonderful.

So, six days – and three and a half poems memorised. Fifty-one lines. Which I think isn’t bad. Not bad for a novice. Not when taking a twelve-year-old on such a trip. And the poems are now firmly lodged in my mind, with so much else beside them. I can recall that wonderous open road outside Mirallos, the surprise of all the robins in the fields of Spain, and reciting Mahon’s the sun rises in spite of everything/ and the far cities are beautiful and bright. I can recall the Dickinson as I do that steep hill outside Salceda. And sings the tune without the words / and never stops at all.

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