• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 822 0

aspect to the process: some readers will hear the signal, and some will not. A reader who has never encountered the classical epic (or read any of the critical scholarship) may miss the fact that Joyce’s Ulysses is based on Homer’s Odyssey. More basically yet, that reader may not register the importance of an English-language poem designed or written in twelve books (Spenser’s plan for the unfinished Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, both reflecting on Virgil’s Aeneid), or hear the echoes and revisions of Milton’s poem in Wordsworth’s Prelude. All of these were standard literary-historical expectations for students of the canon in the middle of the twentieth century—as indeed was the Virgilian sequence of pastoral elegy, eclogue, and epic in the evolution of a poet. Or the notion of the “elegy on the death of the poet,” written by a mourning, and surviving, successor.

Such allusions are formal, not verbal, although some tropes can be both, like the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales, or of Paradise Lost, passages the English student was in the past often expected to memorize and know by heart (in an idiom that goes back to Chaucer). Even the number of lines—the first eighteen lines of The Canterbury Tales, the first twenty-six lines of Paradise Lost—were engraved upon memory. Here they are:

Whan that Aprill with his shouers soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour:

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

5

Inspired hath in every holt and heath

The tender croppes, and the younge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale fowles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

10

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sundry londes;

And specially from every shires ende

15

Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blissful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

—Geoffrey Chaucer,

“General Prologue,” The Canterbury Tales

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

5

Sing, Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed

In the beginning how the heavens and earth

Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill

10

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed

Fast by the oracle of God, I thence

Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar

Above th’ Aeonian mount, while it pursues

15

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

And chiefly thou O spirit, that dost prefer

Before all temples the upright heart and pure,

Instruct me, for thou know’st; thou from the first

Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread,

20

Dovelike sat’st brooding on the vast abyss

And mad’st it pregnant, what in me is dark

Illumine; what is low raise and support;

That, to the height of this great argument

I may assert Eternal Providence,

25

And justify the ways of God to men.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book 1

I print these two blockbuster passages together not because one refers to or alludes to the other but because between them, they could be said to author the English literary canon. How many students, even graduate students, can recite them now? Memorization, learning by heart, is out of fashion as a pedagogical skill, though students of all ages regularly memorize the lyrics of popular songs, the Pledge of Allegiance, and “The Star-Spangled Banner”—although the latter is often committed to memory phonetically rather than in terms of units of sense, like the famous and comical rendition of a religious hymn as “Gladly the Crosseyed Bear.”

But there is much to learn from these passages committed to memory and recited out loud. The sequencing of ideas and rhythms