Memorize you a poem for great good!
The first rule of poetry memorization is to never recite a poem for someone you're trying to impress, even if you have very good reason to think they would be impressed and even if you think its timeless wisdom is extremely apt for this particular situation and especially if you have written the poem yourself. Trust me. At best you will, high on your own Culture, forget some lines or the whole thing, and at worst you won't.
Don't say, "Oh that reminds me of this poem by John Milton have you heard of him anyway it's called Paradise Lost have you heard of it let me see I think I know it haha I guess I've just read it so many times."
Say instead, "'A word is dead when it is said'." The single quotes are invisible in real life. (But they're there, so technically it's not plagiarism.)
Here are some reasons why memorizing poems is good.
Rizz.You are less frequently bored. I take the bus to and from work and the walk to the bus stop is twelve minutes (if I walk fast). Not really enough time to make listening to a podcast worth it, since I'm going to read on the bus, so I can recite a poem in this interstitial time. One benefit of wearing masks was that you could always recite a poem to yourself and nobody could tell.
You understand the poem better. Paradoxically you do this by forgetting it. I'm just going to quote Helen Vendler for this one (emphasis mine):
I found it necessary to learn the Sonnets by heart. I would often think I “knew” a sonnet; but then, scanning it in memory, I would find lacunae. Those gaps made me realize that some pieces of the whole must not yet have been integrated into my understanding of the intent of the work, since I was able to forget them. The recovery of the missing pieces always brought with it a further understanding of the design of that sonnet, and made me aware of what I had not initially perceived about the function of those words. No pianist or violinist would omit to learn a sonata by heart before interpreting it in public performance, but the equal habit of knowing poetry by heart before interpreting it has been lost. I first memorized many of the Sonnets (from my mother’s copy) in the heartfelt way of youth, and I hope I have not lost that “heartfelt” sense of the poems. But I have since learned to love in a more conscious way Shakespeare’s elated variety of invention, his ironic capacity, his astonishing refinement of technique, and, above all, the reach of his skeptical imaginative intent.
The world becomes more poetic. Allow me to demonstrate:
You look out the window in the winter, and it's cloudy, but there is a godray, but somehow foreboding: "There's a certain Slant of light".
You feel some ineffable and beautiful mystery is lost because you can ChatGPT everything: "'Arcturus' is his other name — / I'd rather call him 'Star'".
You've stayed up all night to finish an essay but you see the fingers of dawn and it's not even close: "O Sun! To tell thee how I hate thy beams, / That bring to my remembrance from what state / I fell".
It be April: "April is the cruellest month".
You cross an extremely normal bridge: "L'amour s'en va, comme cette eau courante".
Your life becomes more poetic. Par exemple:
You make coffee, and you must remind yourself of your mortality: "I have measured out my life in coffee-spoons."
You look in the mirror: "I am afraid to own a Body".
You're crying because you're crying for no reason: "That I might in this holy discontent / Mourn with some fruit, as I have mourn'd in vain."
You wake up and choose violence: "So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, / Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; / Evil, be thou my good".
Your friends want to go to that one café: "There are a hundred places where I fear / To go, — so with his memory they brim."
You have the misfortune of being madly in love with your fiancé, but he's madly in love with someone else who doesn't even like him, but then she decides to settle for him because he'll protect her son, and so, to get revenge, you impulsively tell a different guy who's madly loved you this whole time (and incidentally needs to kidnap the son) to kill him (the guy you're madly in love with who happens to be your fiancé): "Ah! ne puis-je savoir si j'aime ou si je hais?"
You finally have a figuratively tangible existence-proof of the Rich, Sensitive, and Enigmatic Tapestry that is your interior life.
During Covid, I learned about the bird-watching trend, and therefore bought some binoculars and learned some birds. Before that, a bird was just a feathered biped. But now I literally, actually saw them differently; I literally, actually saw things I could not see before. I noticed patterns in their behavior: the robins were always in the yard in the morning, the blackbirds liked to hang out in the reeds by the high school, the bluejays were pugnacious assholes. Recognizing them enabled seeing each single bird, insignificant and meaningless in itself, in the context of its position in the ecosystem, in the context of its species; each single invasive starling in the flock points back to our hubris. When I traveled, I recognized some old friends and slightly different versions of them, their relatives. I had to learn new birds for new terrains.
A poem is like that, but for emotions, and beauty, and what makes life worth living. They resonate and combine and heighten the experience of living. To memorize them is to stretch their lines across the soundbox of your heart. Your life is a movie etc.
How memorize a poem
Believe!
The first thing is to realize that you can memorize almost all poems, though some are much easier. The earliest poems we have were passed down by mouth. How many songs can you sing along to? It's just like that.
And honestly it doesn't take that long! A metered sonnet takes about half an hour to memorize.
Order matters
Human memory is very good at sequential access, but very bad at random access. (What's the fifteenth letter in the alphabet?) Sometimes you'll think you've forgotten a poem, but really you've just forgotten the first line.
Chunk it
Because order matters, it's optimal to memorize it from start to finish. But this is impractical.
I've found it's best to not break the poem at natural demarcations (e.g. stanza breaks, octet/sestet, quartets). When you break it at those natural fault lines, it can be hard to know what comes after, since some poems don't have strong connections between stanzas. Instead, recite and associate the first line of the next stanza with the last line of the current one.
Meter meter poem eater
There's a reason why all oral poetic cultures share some kind of sonic repetition. It makes it sound better, of course, but it crucially makes it much easier to memorize. In my experience, a poem in standard meter, rhyme, and form, like a Shakespearean sonnet, is at least three times easier to memorize than a free-verse poem that happens to have fourteen lines. (Meter is more important than rhyme. In fact, sometimes, rhyme can cause you to transpose lines or stanzas, since the rhymes still work.)
There are other sonic tricks as well. Pick a song that you know by heart. Try to recite its lyrics without singing it. Almost impossible, right? We have like this innate capacity to memorize melodies. We can use that to our advantage, since there's an entire genre that is putting a poem to classical music. They're called "art songs", or in German "lieder", or in French "mélodies", and they are beautiful. While there's not that many in English, it's helpful if your poem has a setting. You can see if it does on Liedernet. My favorite art song cycle, and one of my favorite pieces of music period, is Benjamin Britten's setting of John Donne's "Holy Sonnets". Sometimes there are settings of poems to non-classical music, such as this incredible "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain" by Andrew Bird and Phoebe Bridgers. Why can't there be more of this.
Do note that you will no longer be able to not sing the poem. And, if it's an art song, it's meant for highly trained singers, so you (well, I) won't be able to hit the notes. This is fine. This is, actually, good. Remember: Under no circumstances recite poems to real persons. Sing them in the shower instead.
The Algorithm (may cause addiction)
Print or copy the poem onto paper. This is important.
Read the poem carefully. You will never understand the whole poem (am I just projecting?), but you must understand its syntax, which, for the old ones, is not trivial. Each sentence of the poem should make sense to you. (Also helpful here is some sense of older English conventions: for example, "thy/thine" and "my/mine" were like "a/an"; it's "thy/my nose" but "thine/mine eyes". Also idk if it's just me but literally until college I thought "thou" rhymed with "you." Cause that's what it means!)
Particularly note the parts of the poem that speak to you. You chose to memorize this poem for a reason. There are lines that stick out to you: underline them and memorize them first. (You likely already have them memorized.) They are the nuclei around which the snowflake of the poem crystallizes, and safe harbors in the windmills of your mind.
Now chunk the poem. (If it's really short this is optional.) Remember, don't just do the stanzas. Do the stanza + one line, and then the next chunk should overlap with the previous one, including that one line.
Memorize each chunk.
Now you have to integrate the chunks. If the poem is very short, or you're cracked, then you might already be done. If not, you have two options. Assume you have four chunks, A, B, C, and D.
If the poem is short or easy, do a nested for loop. First recite A. Then recite A and B until you have A+B memorized. Then recite A and B and C until you have A+B+C memorized. Then recite A and B and C and D until you have A+B+C+D memorized.
If the poem is long or hard, do a merge-y thing. Recite A+B. Recite B+C. Recite C+D. Now recite A+B+C. Now B+C+D. Now the whole thing. Add early stopping to taste.
Done! Go forth, it is with you always.
"Andy," you say, "this seems awful recursive." That's because it is! I guess I should've put a trigger warning. To memorize a piece, you memorize its pieces, then put them together.
Because I don't really know Haskell here it is in Python:
def memorize(poem):
chunks = split(poem)
if is_easy(poem):
for i in range(len(chunks)):
while not is_memorized(chunks[:i]):
recite("".join(chunks[:i]))
else: # skill issue
for subchunk in subchunks(chunks):
memorize("".join(subchunk))
while not is_memorized(poem):
recite(poem)
def subchunks(chunks):
# expressing this recursively is a nightmare so
# [a, b, c] -> [ [a], [b], [c], [a, b], [b, c], [c, d], [a, b, c], [b, c, d] ]
n = len(chunks)
for length in range(1, n):
for start in range(n - length + 1):
yield chunks[start:start+length]In Korean, the word for "memorize" is also the one for "recite." This is apt. You autoregressively recite the line(s), testing yourself by masking the next token, and eventually you'll have it by heart.
Memorize you a poem for great good!