SHARE A RHYME?
Reciting was what people did before binge-watching. Way before binge-watching. At least you’d think so, if -- like me -- you grew up on Anne of Green Gables, and the Little House on the Prairie books.
Take Little House: seems like every time the Ingalls clan is stuck at home, Mary and Laura are reeling off Bible verses, usually in some kind of edgy little competition that Mary always wins because she’s the good one. And then you want to smack Mary and you feel bad, and…Anyway, reciting isn’t nearly as fraught, or as religious, in Avonlea. There, giving poetry and other literary pieces starts as a form of recreation, and eventually becomes a performance art at which our girl Anne is quite skilled – of course!
Whatever the emotional baggage, recitation makes good sense as nineteenth-century entertainment, because it’s the perfect hybrid of the old oral tradition and the new reading culture. And people apparently did quite a lot of it.
That also makes sense, because while people had access to books, they were still very expensive for many families, so you only bought the books you really prized, and you got as much as you could out of them. Hence memorizing the Bible. Or poems, if you were of a literary bent. If you were lucky enough to have a library in your town, you might well memorize verses or passages from books that were special to you…or perhaps write them out in your journal so you could remember them.
Recitations as performance are also entirely consistent with late-nineteenth century culture. Most people didn’t have the luxury of living in New York, where on any given night, you could see a really good show in a great theatre…or at least a decent one, if you had the money. Even with a strong vaudeville circuit, in many towns, professional theatre was a rare treat. So if you wanted entertainment, it was often: “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!”
Which meant that plenty of people were at least competent at memorization and recitation…and that it was an expected accomplishment for many a young lady. Or a gentleman who hoped to court a young lady.
For Ella Shane, of course, used to memorizing opera scores in several different languages, it’s no great achievement to know the moving final lines of Walt Whitman’s “When Lilac Last by the Dooryard Bloom’d.” But it certainly comes as a surprise to her that the Duke knows them too. When they find themselves reciting them together at dinner with her family one night in A FATAL FINALE, it feels like something very special has happened -- and it has.
Reading poetry together was another of those entirely respectable activities for courting couples that could feel very romantic indeed in an age when one spent a lot of time exploring a person’s mind and soul because their body was strictly off-limits. So even though they’re just reciting a mournful tribute to a man they both revere, Abraham Lincoln, Ella and her new friend come away feeling like they’ve just touched each other’s spirits. Hard not to with these lines from Whitman:
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
And we’ll leave it there for this week. Have an idea for the next Throwback Thursday? Tell me in the comments!
Take Little House: seems like every time the Ingalls clan is stuck at home, Mary and Laura are reeling off Bible verses, usually in some kind of edgy little competition that Mary always wins because she’s the good one. And then you want to smack Mary and you feel bad, and…Anyway, reciting isn’t nearly as fraught, or as religious, in Avonlea. There, giving poetry and other literary pieces starts as a form of recreation, and eventually becomes a performance art at which our girl Anne is quite skilled – of course!
Whatever the emotional baggage, recitation makes good sense as nineteenth-century entertainment, because it’s the perfect hybrid of the old oral tradition and the new reading culture. And people apparently did quite a lot of it.
That also makes sense, because while people had access to books, they were still very expensive for many families, so you only bought the books you really prized, and you got as much as you could out of them. Hence memorizing the Bible. Or poems, if you were of a literary bent. If you were lucky enough to have a library in your town, you might well memorize verses or passages from books that were special to you…or perhaps write them out in your journal so you could remember them.
Recitations as performance are also entirely consistent with late-nineteenth century culture. Most people didn’t have the luxury of living in New York, where on any given night, you could see a really good show in a great theatre…or at least a decent one, if you had the money. Even with a strong vaudeville circuit, in many towns, professional theatre was a rare treat. So if you wanted entertainment, it was often: “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!”
Which meant that plenty of people were at least competent at memorization and recitation…and that it was an expected accomplishment for many a young lady. Or a gentleman who hoped to court a young lady.
For Ella Shane, of course, used to memorizing opera scores in several different languages, it’s no great achievement to know the moving final lines of Walt Whitman’s “When Lilac Last by the Dooryard Bloom’d.” But it certainly comes as a surprise to her that the Duke knows them too. When they find themselves reciting them together at dinner with her family one night in A FATAL FINALE, it feels like something very special has happened -- and it has.
Reading poetry together was another of those entirely respectable activities for courting couples that could feel very romantic indeed in an age when one spent a lot of time exploring a person’s mind and soul because their body was strictly off-limits. So even though they’re just reciting a mournful tribute to a man they both revere, Abraham Lincoln, Ella and her new friend come away feeling like they’ve just touched each other’s spirits. Hard not to with these lines from Whitman:
Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.
And we’ll leave it there for this week. Have an idea for the next Throwback Thursday? Tell me in the comments!
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