Speak the Speech

 

My stuttering is often in total remission for long periods of time. Then  without warning, the tendency to stutter returns, to stay for a while. During times of speech blocks, to keep myself “fluid,” to ease speech, I relied on poems and other lyrics to keep me speaking—not with contemporary free-verse poetry but with “old fashioned” verse of rhyme and rhythm. They kept my speech “mechanisms,” so to speak, oiled, when reciting to myself or out loud to others. Many listeners enjoy poetry even if they don’t read it. Here are some of my favorite lines:

 

I’ve made for you a song,

And it may be right or wrong,

But only you can tell me if it’s true.

(Rudyard Kipling talking to Tommy Atkins, his GI Joe.)

 

Grow old along with me!

The best is yet to be,

The last of life, for which the first was made.

(Robert Browning, “Rabbi Ben Ezra”)

 

You are old, Father William, the young man said,

And your hair has turned very white.

Yet you incessantly stand on your head.

Do you think at your age that it’s right?

(Folk verse)

 

By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ eastward to the sea,

There’s a Burma girl a-settin’, and I know she thinks of me.

(Rudyard Kipling, “Mandalay”)

 

Rhyme and rhythm helped me, as Shakespeare wrote, to “Speak the speech trippingly on the tongue.” Memorizing poetry is a worthwhile activity in itself, even for the speaker to “show off” to friends and family while reciting with confidence.