The late Dame Patricia Routledge - a profound, life-long love of poetry
A few years ago for the Festival of Chichester, Festival patron Dame Patricia Routledge read Keats’ immortal Odes to mark the bicentenary of their composition.
It was a chance for Dame Patricia, who has died at the age of 96, to explore her life-long love of poetry.
“I am reading the Keats Odes which will be an enormous challenge,” Dame Patricia said. “It is the richness of the language, the music of the language, the profundity of his emotional and spiritual experience.
“I do remember learning Ode to Autumn at school which is probably the favourite. It was de rigueur at school to learn great chunks of poetry. I do remember my mother would be cooking lunch and something would spark off a memory of some well-expressed poetic form and she would launch into a few lines of Morte d'Arthur and then get on with making the gravy!”
Dame Patricia recalled that it was through the poetry of Walter de la Mare that she gained her own understanding of poetry.
“I do think that modern poetry now is on the whole highlighted prose without paying attention to the technique, the rhymes, the rhythm, the assonance, the consonance. To me, poetry is about shape and form, and you get that with poets like Milton and Keats and Hardy and the great Seamus Heaney.”
Dame Patricia considered it tragic that poetry simply isn’t learnt by heart at school these days: “I think it is a wonderful discipline to learn a piece of poetry. It is a great comfort for later on in life. If you remember Terry Waite, it was the memory of the poetry and the prose and the Bible that he had learnt that saved his sanity.”
For Dame Patricia, Keats was certainly a particular favourite: “In this day and age we are more realistic and down to earth and even cynical, so it is wonderful to have one’s spirits lifted by romanticism, something which really is pooh-poohed a great deal now. But also it is the sheer beauty of the language. It is stunning.”
Adding to the pleasure were Keats’ Chichester connections. Dame Patricia was delighted to be invited to unveil the Keats sculpture by Vincent Gray in Eastgate Square, Chichester some years go: “It is absolutely lovely that you can sit down next to Keats, and it is beautifully placed across the road from where he stayed. You have got Keats looking down East Street towards the cathedral. It is lovely.”