What We Can Know

by Ian McEwan

First-year students of literature or history who come to our department at the University of the South Downs have no interest in history. They prefer things that are new, like the latest toys and novelties of Nigerian pop culture. The few that make the effort are surprised to discover how approachable the past is, and how easy it is to understand the voices of historical figures. We like to tell them that their surprise should be all the greater. Writing in the late twentieth century, the poet James Fenton made the same point. Poetry and prose from the mid-sixteenth century onwards could be read without a dictionary. So, in Fenton’s and Blundy’s time there was already a continuous, 450-year tradition of comprehensible literature in English. That continuity, of course, stretches to include us. We on our sleepy overlooked archipelago-republic are the proud inheritors of that tradition. We introduce the students to Wyatt’s most famous poem, ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’. They have little trouble understanding that ageless refrain of low and high culture – she loved me, now she doesn’t. Always a good moment then to introduce the kids to the pleasures of rhyme royal and the joys of the iambic pentameter. We teach the orthodoxy, as demanded by the dean, but no one really believes that iambs form the basic rhythm of natural spoken English – look at all the trochees in this sentence. By their stresses, even iambs are trochees. That’s another matter – and there are ...