Poetry and Gilligan’s Island
If you are a younger reader, you may not know the iconic tune from Gilligan’s Island, a TV show from the ‘60’s. According to Wikipedia, it had only 3 seasons. It was syndicated after that, which is perhaps why my impression was that it had been on longer. At any rate, if you are familiar with the show, you almost certainly know its theme song, which we often short-named, “A Three-Hour Tour.”
I got a kick out of this reference to the tune in an article on “The Pleasures of Reading,” an email written to Jancee Dunn by Alan Jacobs, linked from one of my favorite Substack newsletters, “English Teacher Weekly.” by Andrew Campbell. Here’s what it said:
I always smile when people tell me they don’t enjoy or don’t understand or are intimidated by poetry. I ask them, “How many songs can you sing from beginning to end?” The answer is probably: hundreds. And songs are poems set to music. A fun exercise: look for poems in rhyme and meter and see if you can find a good tune for them. The easiest poet to do this with is Emily Dickinson, because she always wrote in what’s called “common meter” or “hymn meter.” So you can sing all of Emily Dickinson’s poems to the tune of “Amazing Grace” — or, even more enjoyably, to other songs that are not hymns but are in that meter. For people of my generation, I would suggest the Gilligan’s Island theme song. And then you can do a Gilligan’s Island / “Because I could not stop for death” mashup. Sing it with me:
Because I could not stop for death
He kindly stopped for me
The carriage held but ourselves
And immortality,
And Gilligan, the skipper too,
The millionaire and his wife…
If you want to develop a love of poetry, reconnect it with music, which is its origin. You’ll not only appreciate poems better, you’ll find yourself memorizing them! Then you can gradually move on to poems that are less obviously musical. (Though all really good poems have music to them.)
When I read it, I had to sort of slide into the tune, singing, “A three-hour tour, a three-hour tour…” which enabled me to go on to the verse, “Just sit right back, and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip…” changed to “Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me…” It made me laugh (and still does) to picture the horrible image of the Grim Reaper of Death holding a scythe, dancing a jig to the jaunty tune. What dissonance.
Another Emily Dickinson poem I know is “Hope is the thing with feathers.” It works, too, if you sing some of the words with several notes:
“Hope” is the thing with fea - eh - thers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all - …
So there you go. Try learning poetry by singing it. It made me think of teaching my kids our home phone number. When they were little, I wanted to be sure they would know our number by heart, so if anything happened, they could always call home. I had heard it is easier to memorize when the words are made into a song, so I made up a song for our number (our landline, which we no longer have):
Let’s get it straight!
It’s 2 - 6 - 8 -
1 - 7 - 9 - 2
and I love you!
I don’t know if the tune is something I heard or if I made it up, but it worked. Years later, one of my adult kids said they still had to sing it to remember.
It made me think, too, of seeing references to the names of tunes in the hymn book. When I got to pick favorites, I learned to look for Welsh and British tunes, knowing that it was likely I would enjoy them. Speaking of hymn books, there is a long tradition of the Psalms made into hymns. In fact, as far as I understand, the Psalms were songs in their original language and time.
I will close with a link, once again, to my current favorite Psalm set to music.
https://open.spotify.com/track/6XyN7Ps4VpGJbZm716VNgD?si=e6b8e8f3f3fa4d89