“No coward soul is mine,” she reads, and if she doesn’t quite understand what she’s saying, it doesn’t matter. She likes the way the words roll around in her mouth and how they sound when she speaks them aloud. I am the only one paying attention; her sister is browsing through another poetry book for the words she wants to share, and her brother is downing his tea as fast as he can. It isn’t a picture-perfect poetry teatime, but it’s still magical.
Charlotte Mason says in Home Education, that children’s books should “include a good deal of poetry, to accustom him to the delicate rendering of shades of meaning, and especially to make him aware that words are beautiful in themselves, that they are a source of pleasure, and are worthy of our honour; and that a beautiful word deserves to be beautifully said, with a certain roundness of tone and precision of utterance.”
The girls have each chosen three volumes of poetry for today’s tea. When we began this tradition, they would grab books randomly, but now each book is selected on purpose. T.S. Eliot shows up a lot. We like his practical cats, and agree that Andrew Lloyd Webber’s are great as individual songs but not all at once. We watched the musical just once; it was enough.
My husband joins in when he’s at home. He likes to read contemporary poets. By contemporary poets, I mean Christian rap artists. I bet Walter de la Mare and Robert Louis Stevenson never, in their wildest imaginings, dreamed they would share teatime with Lecrae.
Sometimes we share our own poetry, even my son who is not yet a reader. His rhymes are less accidental than they used to be. It’s wonderful to see. I try to record him so that I can write them down later, but if he notices, then he gets silly for the camera. My daughters love to make up rhyming couplets, even nonsensical ones. Sometimes they mimic the style of the poets they’re currently reading for school.
Poetry teatime isn’t ordinary teatime. Instead of drinking out of mugs, we use my beautiful flower-painted tea set. This tea set was a wedding gift from my godparents. The cups are a little bit chipped, and the sugar bowl has long since lost its lid, but the teapot is enormous, bottomless and magical. There is always enough for a second cup for everyone. We have a special treat on a pretty plate: sometimes fancy biscuits, sometimes cupcakes or Lamingtons.
Is it the tea or the poetry that makes poetry teatime so delightful? Or is it the tea-drinking children who pick poems with words they can’t always pronounce, or read something they’ve read a dozen times because they just love to read it? My eldest is currently enjoying Middle English poets. She can’t get enough of “Sumer is icumen in.”
Maybe it’s all of the above. Maybe when you take children and add tea and generous doses of poetry, you get the magic.
“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” So says Percy Bysshe Shelley, and he would know.
Poetry teatime is slow-down time. It’s a deliberate setting aside of everything else. It takes time to find the right tablecloth, to set out the cups and arrange the biscuits and sweet treats. It takes time to steep the tea, to pour it out, to let it cool enough so that you don’t burn your tongue on that first sip. It takes time to savour the words, to listen to each other read. Teatime cannot be rushed, because in the hurry, that magic is lost.
There is too little magic in the world these days. So put on the kettle, grab a book of poetry off the shelf, gather your children together, and let the poetry work its magic.
Melanie Blignaut is a home-educating, tea-drinking, poetry-reading mom. She lives with her husband and three children in Johannesburg, South Africa. She has more books on her To-Read list than she will ever have time to read. Her current reads include “London” (Edward Rutherfurd), “Crime and Punishment” (Dostoevsky), “The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers” (edited by Carole Vanderhoof), Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford Chronicles”, “Mama Bear Apologetics” (Hillary Morgan Ferrer and Amy Davison), “Consider This” (Karen Glass), and Charlotte Mason’s “Home Education”.
Thank you Melanie,
I love that your husband does that 😆