I told you when I started that I am bad at schedules and consistency, and so there has been a gap in my poetry memorization. Nor have I retained everything I learned earlier this year. Sad, sad, very sad! Still, I have a lot more of it than I used to. And now I have this splendid poem by Wordsworth by heart, one of the ‘Lucy’ poems, which almost clung to me like a magnet, as the best poems so often do. You can find it on Poetry Foundation. My other recitations are here.
(Excuse the background noise of the air vent.)
And here is the passage from ‘The Uncommon Reader’ by George Steiner that made me realize I had stopped memorizing for a year or so and really ought to start again more seriously.
Le Philosophe lisant, like the cultured men around him in a tradition which runs from classical antiquity to, roughly, the First World War, will know texts by heart (an idiom worth thinking about closely). They will know by heart considerable segments of Scripture, of the liturgy, of epic and lyric verse. Macaulay’s formidable accomplishments in this respect — even as a schoolboy he had committed to memory a fair measure of Latin and English poetry — were only a heightened instance of a general practice. The ability to cite Scripture, to recite from memory large stretches of Homer, Virgil, Horace or Ovid, to cap on the instant a quotation from Shakespeare, Milton or Pope, generated the shared texture of echoes, of intellectual and emotive recognition and reciprocity, on which the language of British politics, law and letters was founded. Knowledge by heart of the Latin sources, of La Fontaine, of Racine, of the trumpet-calls in Victor Hugo, has given to the entire fabric of French public life its rhetorical stress. The classic reader, Chardin’s lisant, locates the text he is reading inside a resonant manifold. Echo answers echo, analogy is precise and contiguous, correction and emendation carry the justification of accurately remembered precedent. The reader replies to the text out of the articulate density of his own store of reference and remembrance. It is an ancient, formidable suggestion that the Muses of memory and of invention are one.
I hope you will join me in memorizing more poetry. It might be the best contribution we can all make to literary culture! Soon I will record the Herrick poem I memorized last year too...
thank you for recognizing the importance of memory and its inclusion of words we love: the skill of memorization is being removed from our daily lives bit by bit as we allow the iCloud to drift in and store what we love and cared for. Considering a lost phone and its only link to find and contact our loved ones is a prompt for basic memorization, but how many of us even know 9 numbers in a row? and memory is banked and accessible from the internet et al. so why cloud my brain with stuff that I can get to anytime anyplace anyhow? taxing my brain and distracting me from my busy world of doing ...
As a musician, it has always been the case that I would memorize songs and not poems, but even then I find I am memorizing melodies, forms, chord changes (meaning, for non-musicians, the harmonic sequences of the music), and not lyrics, which I would sometimes only vaguely know, if it all. This is meant to allow non-singing musicians to get through the gig, but it is ultimately a hollow approach, as it does not fully respect the songs or songwriters. And, as I have been many times reminded by admired musicians, this approach does not allow a musician to fully realize the song, because it leaves out critical intellectual/emotional components — even if the performance doesn't include the sung vocal, it should still respect and be informed by the full meaning. I'm lately trying to re-learn songs I once knew, and will work harder at memorizing the lyrics, too. It seems the right thing to do.