The Duchess of Cornwall believes that teaching children to memorize poems will benefit them for the rest of their life.
She asserts in a new podcast that the task forces them to concentrate. ‘If you have to learn something by heart, you should look at it carefully rather than just reading it,’ Camilla advises.
‘I also believe it’s a great item to keep.’ You can have a tiny store where you save all your poetry for the rest of your life and then bring them out and talk about them at some moment, like today.’
She recalled childhood memories of reading with her father, Major Bruce Shand, to broadcaster Gyles Brandreth and actress Dame Joanna Lumley at Clarence House for the Commonwealth Poetry Podcast.
‘It was about a child being woken up at midnight,’ she explains, reciting lines from Rudyard Kipling’s A Smuggler’s Song. My father used to recite it to us. We had to sing the chorus after he read the poem. And then there was The Owl And The Pussy-Cat, which we all had. We all set out in our lovely pea-green boats.’
Camilla comments on the success of her Reading Room project, which many people had predicted would be a “complete flop,” and names Christina Rossetti’s poem Echo as a favorite.
‘It’s a book club, something I concocted in lockdown,’ she continues. Many people came to me after I suggested a few books to read, and it went so well and I received so many messages that I thought, why not start doing it on a larger scale?
‘There were a few folks who were confident it wouldn’t take off and would be a complete flop, but happily I was able to disprove them.’
The podcast, which is part of a series honoring Commonwealth authors, was created by students at Chester University, where the Duchess has an honorary degree as Countess of Chester.
Camilla will also inaugurate the Chalke Valley History Festival, sponsored by the Daily Mail, on June 20 in Broad Chalke, Wiltshire, near Salisbury.
l The Commonwealth Poetry Podcast is now available on iTunes, Spotify, and Amazon Music, as well as at commonwealthpoetrypodcast.co.uk.