For a long time, I thought WB Yeats's An Irish Airman Foresees His Death was the first poem I had learned by heart. On seeing it read aloud in the film Memphis Belle as a 10-year-old, I found there was something that thrilled me more than bombers and spitfires dogfighting over Europe.
In the film, the poem is somewhat schmaltzily read by the token Irish-American character, but manages to draw a little sense from
the surrounding chaos. It is still, to my mind, one of the most beautifully constructed poems: a meditation on the futility of war hinging on that "lonely impulse of delight".
But in fact, I now realise the first poem I ever knew by heart was the one we would read together as a family each Christmas Eve. It is the poem generally thought to be responsible for the popularisation of the idea of Santa Claus in the English-speaking world: The Night Before Christmas by Clement Clarke Moore. In the edition we had at home, it was accompanied by the slightly fevered illustrations of William Wallace Denslow.
Moore and Denslow make strange bedfellows. The former famously opposed the abolition of the slave trade and owned several slaves himself; the latter was a political cartoonist mainly remembered for his illustrations to The Wizard of Oz, which made explicit the story's allegorical potential, representing the hardships of the rural American poor.
The version we had, with its broken spine and foxed pages, eventually gave up the ghost and became too delicate to pass around. It became a kind of familial artefact, a document of the faith we had in childhood. Even late into my teens, my parents and I would make our excuses from parties or pubs and reconvene at home to read the poem. We found we were reciting it from memory.
Now I know there are readers who will see the poem as tawdry and commercial. (A handwritten copy recently changed hands for $280,000 (£189,000).) Others may condemn it as a piece of sugary doggerel. And, as has been repeatedly pointed out, it's hard to defend as a piece of literature.
But for this child, sitting up late, reading the poem marked a crossing-over into another world – as children across the globe will discover this 24 December. Read aloud, this modern myth connects us with the ancient sense of mystery and complicity that families reciting poetry together have shared since long before the birth of Christ or the invention of Santa Claus.