Learning by Heart

Over the Christmas holiday of 2008, I read Norman Doige’s wonderful book “The Brain that Changes Itself” (2007). It was exciting, challenging and inspiring. I told all my friends to read it and my mum at 80 years of age was one of the first to do so. Another enthusiastic friend took the core message about neuroplasticity to heart in her typically creative fashion. She emailed her friends inviting us all to learn poetry and to recite to one another. I believe her personal mission has contributed to the collective forestalling of neurological decay amongst my peers! Through the sharing of stanzas and couplets, we have also shared ideas, images and experiences heart-felt.

Thus, what we now know affectionately as the Poetry Project, was born. Norman Doige MD, psychiatrist, psychotherapist and himself a poet, though I’ve only just discovered this, would be proud! After my first Shakespearean sonnet, my mother bequeathed me some of my father’s old poetry anthologies, complete with annotations in his own hand. It has been quite an emotional experience to read the words he once read and to establish a lyrical connection untrammeled by time and his untimely death.

Recitations have taken place at some wonderful dinner parties, mostly between main course and dessert. Just enough wine to soothe the nerves but not too much to interfere with rhythm and memory. Once the friend who had inaugurated the Poetry Project recited her poem with her jumper over her head! She was frozen by the presence of an audience, yet able to recall perfectly each phrase when she was ensconced in her own woollen world. On account of this peculiarity, we critically examined and debated the mechanisms of memory and recall. We have laughed a great deal and we have been clumsy, eloquent and at times, completely blank. We have been moved by Auden, Donne, Shakespeare, Wordsworth and some of our own wonderful Australian poets.

Which brings me to the reason for this blog. As mother nature assiduously touches up her white Stockholm canvas with little flurries of snow every now then, I often think of home. Our colours are so different. Stark, bright, bold. Australian Dorothea Mackellar wrote “My Country” when she was homesick in England in 1907. This well-known second stanza of her poem tells of a vastly different place…

I love a sunburnt country
A land of sweeping plains
Of ragged mountain ranges
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons
I love her jewel sea
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me

Dorothea Mackellar 1907

...and yes, I do know the other verses!



http://www.normandoige.com/
http://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/
Storm photo from Reader Photo Gallery Melbourne Herald Sun 6 March 2010