I woke this morning with a piece of poetry in my head.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
I’m not even sure why it was there. I sit here wondering what other stretches of poetry are hidden away in the more remote corners of my mind. Might I know the whole of Jabberwock? Entire stretches of “The Iron Man” by Ted Hughes?
Sometimes I recall individual lines from books I have read many years before - like the line from the Christmas Stories where Dickens tells us “Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it”. If only I could tie these disparate pieces of memory together into some kind of cohesive whole - I might actually appear intelligent.
The same phenomena affects my memory of song lyrics, and of chess positions. I can routinely sing along with most songs through the first few lines, but then my memory dries up. It’s bizarre - the memory is obviously there, it’s just not wired up correctly. I’ve often wondered if my memory is more atuned to music than words. I typically listen far more closely to the melody than the lyrics.
W has just wandered into the room and informed me after glancing at this text of the reason the poetry was in my head. We watched a television programme late last night called “Torchwood”, and a girl in it said it in the background. It makes me wonder how much of the everyday world that we think passes us by is actually being absorbed - I would tend to think far more than we realise.
If you’re wondering about the image at the start of this post, it’s from the Torchwood website. It’s “Dr Who for Grownups”, and I imagine we are getting to see it a year or so before America. Shock news - it’s much better than Dr Who. (and if you are wondering, yes, Torchwood is an anagram of “Doctor Who”).