I can't think of any poems in English with school-nostalgia, but one of Robert Louis Stevenson's comes close. (Did he even attend school as a child? He was ill so much, he must have been educated mostly at home.) It's "Keepsake Mill," which ends, "You with the bean that I gave when we quarreled, / I with your marble of Saturday last, / Honoured and old and all gaily apparelled, / Here we shall meet and remember the past."
I enjoyed your description of your boys' French rentree. I grew up in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and the word rentree actually makes me think nostalgically of the school days of characters from books I read in school. I think of Le Petit Nicholas, and of the young Marcel Pagnol whose father was a teacher and I think school administrator. And in English, the Mallory Towers books and how lovely it was to see the swimming pool by the sea!
Thank you Leila, RLS is a great comparison actually. Lots of his poems were in the anthologies I had as a child and I think if anywhere in the UK were still doing primary school poems of the type and in the way that they do in France, he would probably still be a stalwart of them. This one moved me a lot as a child: https://poets.org/poem/where-go-boats
I also loved "Where Go the Boats," and many other RLS poems. "Windy Nights" especially.
In the US, through the early 20th C at least, the poet whose works were most memorized by school children was Longfellow (as I learned researching Frost's early schooling). The shorter poems were recited on Longfellow's birthday (which schools across the country marked with celebrations) and longer ones were learned for end-of-year ceremonies. Again, I don't know of any works specifically about school itself, but there's one recalling a schoolboy's memories, "My Lost Youth." https://poets.org/poem/my-lost-youth. It was from this poem that Frost took the title for his first collection, "A Boy's Will."
I was sad to see that my daughter's elementary school here in the US didn't have students learning any poems, and only one or two songs. But we did send her to a French school here in Southern California for summer sessions, so she got a good dose of songs and poems, including many that were new to me, like Bruit de la Mer.
This is lovely. Will think about relevant English-language poems. The only ones that jumped to mind immediately on reading this were the doggerel of very early childhood: Mary and her little lamb that followed her to school one day, or “Say say oh playmate” and climbing apple trees and sliding down cellar doors.
But in French, the first school-related poem that came to mind was Jacques Prévert's Le Cancre. It's funny, because it's as far from my own school experience as could be! But it's such a vibrant poem, somehow. And I always vaguely assumed that the “huées des enfants prodiges” was meant to evoke the huées at the end of Baudelaire's L'Albatros.
Our three children discovered French schools at the ages 9, 6 and pushing 3. 'Nine' was in 'Français Spécial' for a year; 'six' went cold turkey into the first year of primary school; 'two' did the drop-in crèche before entering nursery school. What haunts me still is the ritual Friday 'dictée,' a text the child took home to prepare and which would be corrected /20, in red ink, with a point off for each spelling mistake and a half point off for a missing accent. Mostly 'we' ended up in the negative range. As for the poems, I remember learning La Fontaine.
Oh yes the dictées are really brutal! They are still just like that. We have had several La Fontaine fables too, actually in general lots of good poems, bits of Baudelaire and Hugo and Desnos and so on. In 6ème last year my eldest learnt to write alexandrines and also had to write his own fable in the style of La Fontaine, first in prose and then put it into verse. The week he had to learn how to write alexandrines I wrote a very silly English poem for the children (about finding a finger in a bag of beans) with the final couplet in alexandrines, to show him what they sounded like in English.
Very interesting, also given the earlier responses, about how difficult it is to think of English poems nostalgic about school (especially given the large amount of English prose school stories, which do cast warm rosy glances at cold benches and lumpy porridge). Is there any French prose equivalent of this latter literature?
Maybe the first part of Betjeman's Summoned by Bells is an example of school-nostalgia, when he talks about the Dragon? The part about his secondary school is much darker. Stalky&Co is quite nostalgic as a book, but the poem-prelude is much more grudging (And they beat on us with rods - // Faithfully with many rods - // Daily beat us on with rods, // For the love they bore us!) . Vitae Lampada (which I liked as a child) is nostalgic, but its emotional world died at the Somme. 'A Teacher's Tale' by Wendy Cope is a long positive poem about primary school, but from a teacher's perspective.
I can't think of any poems in English with school-nostalgia, but one of Robert Louis Stevenson's comes close. (Did he even attend school as a child? He was ill so much, he must have been educated mostly at home.) It's "Keepsake Mill," which ends, "You with the bean that I gave when we quarreled, / I with your marble of Saturday last, / Honoured and old and all gaily apparelled, / Here we shall meet and remember the past."
I enjoyed your description of your boys' French rentree. I grew up in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and the word rentree actually makes me think nostalgically of the school days of characters from books I read in school. I think of Le Petit Nicholas, and of the young Marcel Pagnol whose father was a teacher and I think school administrator. And in English, the Mallory Towers books and how lovely it was to see the swimming pool by the sea!
Thank you Leila, RLS is a great comparison actually. Lots of his poems were in the anthologies I had as a child and I think if anywhere in the UK were still doing primary school poems of the type and in the way that they do in France, he would probably still be a stalwart of them. This one moved me a lot as a child: https://poets.org/poem/where-go-boats
I also loved "Where Go the Boats," and many other RLS poems. "Windy Nights" especially.
In the US, through the early 20th C at least, the poet whose works were most memorized by school children was Longfellow (as I learned researching Frost's early schooling). The shorter poems were recited on Longfellow's birthday (which schools across the country marked with celebrations) and longer ones were learned for end-of-year ceremonies. Again, I don't know of any works specifically about school itself, but there's one recalling a schoolboy's memories, "My Lost Youth." https://poets.org/poem/my-lost-youth. It was from this poem that Frost took the title for his first collection, "A Boy's Will."
I was sad to see that my daughter's elementary school here in the US didn't have students learning any poems, and only one or two songs. But we did send her to a French school here in Southern California for summer sessions, so she got a good dose of songs and poems, including many that were new to me, like Bruit de la Mer.
I loved the Nicholas books as well. Almost more than Asterix, though not quite!
This is lovely. Will think about relevant English-language poems. The only ones that jumped to mind immediately on reading this were the doggerel of very early childhood: Mary and her little lamb that followed her to school one day, or “Say say oh playmate” and climbing apple trees and sliding down cellar doors.
But in French, the first school-related poem that came to mind was Jacques Prévert's Le Cancre. It's funny, because it's as far from my own school experience as could be! But it's such a vibrant poem, somehow. And I always vaguely assumed that the “huées des enfants prodiges” was meant to evoke the huées at the end of Baudelaire's L'Albatros.
Our three children discovered French schools at the ages 9, 6 and pushing 3. 'Nine' was in 'Français Spécial' for a year; 'six' went cold turkey into the first year of primary school; 'two' did the drop-in crèche before entering nursery school. What haunts me still is the ritual Friday 'dictée,' a text the child took home to prepare and which would be corrected /20, in red ink, with a point off for each spelling mistake and a half point off for a missing accent. Mostly 'we' ended up in the negative range. As for the poems, I remember learning La Fontaine.
Oh yes the dictées are really brutal! They are still just like that. We have had several La Fontaine fables too, actually in general lots of good poems, bits of Baudelaire and Hugo and Desnos and so on. In 6ème last year my eldest learnt to write alexandrines and also had to write his own fable in the style of La Fontaine, first in prose and then put it into verse. The week he had to learn how to write alexandrines I wrote a very silly English poem for the children (about finding a finger in a bag of beans) with the final couplet in alexandrines, to show him what they sounded like in English.
Very interesting, also given the earlier responses, about how difficult it is to think of English poems nostalgic about school (especially given the large amount of English prose school stories, which do cast warm rosy glances at cold benches and lumpy porridge). Is there any French prose equivalent of this latter literature?
Maybe the first part of Betjeman's Summoned by Bells is an example of school-nostalgia, when he talks about the Dragon? The part about his secondary school is much darker. Stalky&Co is quite nostalgic as a book, but the poem-prelude is much more grudging (And they beat on us with rods - // Faithfully with many rods - // Daily beat us on with rods, // For the love they bore us!) . Vitae Lampada (which I liked as a child) is nostalgic, but its emotional world died at the Somme. 'A Teacher's Tale' by Wendy Cope is a long positive poem about primary school, but from a teacher's perspective.