One of my New Year's bingo items last year was to learn a poem by heart, and I managed several in the end. It helps if they rhyme in a fixed pattern, because then often the next few lines suggest themselves once you recall one. The first poem I committed to memory was The Owl and the Pussycat, which was one I was reading to my son a lot anyway.
Nothing is more helpful to memorizing poetry than walking around while you do it. Actors know this trick. You are memorizing the words on the auditory side of your brain, in muscle memory. People who try to do it sitting down are using the wrong side of their brain. You can do it, but it's harder, and I don't think it sticks as long.
This should be good news for everyone--you can get poetry and exercise at the same time.
I memorized two long Psalms while on daily walks, mostly because it was relatively undistracted time — somehow the trees and birds were helping, not hindering me.
Thanks for this. I am 81 years old and I began learning and reciting poetry a year or two ago to help with memory. The poems with rhythmic meter and rhyme have definitely been my choices, and will continue to be. Two favourites are Hilaire Belloc’s Tarantella, and one by Housman Oh Who is That Young Sinner. Your suggestion about spacing and intervals is something I have definitely employed.
Very helpful! I'd also add memorizing with someone else. My ten year old and I have memorized 4 in the last few months (well five for him, because I let him read "Red" by Mary Ruefle ONCE and he instantly committed it to memory). We've memorized:
One more thing: sometimes a person might love the sense of a poem, and that's a great reason to memorize it, but a person can love the sound, too. I think a lot of people know Coleridge's lines about Xanadu and Kubla Khan and the pleasure-dome and caverns not because they have any idea of what's going on there (I don't) but because the sounds of those words pulls you in, and then descends like a scale to the sunless sea. It's practically a song. My all-time favorite for sheer exotic word magic sound is a not very well known poem by Archibald Macleish called "You, Andrew Marvell." That poem is a symphony orchestra and an oil masterpiece wrapped into ten short stanzas: Ecbatan, Kermanshah, Baghdad, Crete and Sicily, Lebanon, the gilded sand of Africa, "the wheel rut in the ruined stone" - it's been in me for forty years and it still gives me goosebumps. I am very fortunate and grateful to the poet to have it permanently inside me.
Thank you so much for this Henry! I will definitely remember that lovely Ogden Dash forever now!!! I just about know The Adventures of Isabel by him off by heart too as do my children ! After reading John Carey’s autobiography I have learnt the first 10 or so lines of Lepanto and have been quite surprised at how well they’ve stuck but it does take a bit of time. We had to memorise and recite vast amounts of poetry at school (also verse speaking competitions and something called the Poetry Society of something!) I really wish my children were set more!
This is exactly how Anna Akhmatova's poetry was memorized in Soviet Russia, only in the very poor apartments and in very poor clothes, the rest -reciting among friends was the same, although some friends informed the organs, like on Mandelstam, and he perished in camps of the Gulag. Yes, but Akmatova’ s poetry survived in the same manner, and she, the only one, survived also.
I read an essay once by Randall Jarrell in which he talks about discovering by accident while floating in a pond that he loved Robert Frost’s poem “Provide, Provide!” so much that he had memorized it by accident! I was a teenager then and didn’t know the poem, but when I looked it up it worked its magic and - although I had to really work at it - I eventually memorized it too. It’s a crystally poetic diamond. That’s why I think your step #1 is really the tip that matters. Without it, none of the other steps have any power, and with it, they all work together. I memorized “The Walrus and the Carpenter” when I was a child because it was hilarious, and I can still make myself happy with “shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - and whether pigs have wings.” Provide, Provide if anyone is interested: https://allpoetry.com/Provide,-Provide
I’ve memorized a few poems almost by accident; if there’s a poem you consistently return to there’s a good chance you’ll end up with it at least half memorized, and then finishing the job becomes quite easy.
I’ve found the acronym method incredibly useful. You read through the poem a number of times, then write down (in addition to the poem itself) the first letter of each word, such that the first stanza of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner would read as follows: “I i a A M / A h s o o t / B t l g b a g e / N w s t m.” I skew closer to the plain memorization scheme, and find this a good way to make the task seem not as daunting. It functions as a good middle step and I find it less tedious than memorizing straight line by line.
That's intriguing. I'm looking at those letters and suddenly I see it! "By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stops though me?" But the first two lines are just a mystery. The poem is, in a sense, already inside us, so that memorization might be conceptualized as both "imprinting" (the standard model) but also, in a way, "revealing." If it was just imprinting, then we would read every poem as if for the first time, like an amnesiac. But it's not that way, is it? Like a symphony we love, it's in there somehow already, even if we can't play one note on any instrument. We are deeper wells than we imagine ourselves to be.
Excellent advice, all around. I can only add that I find it important to make sure the sentences are the crucial larger units to get down, because only then do rhetorical patterns make sense and resolve. With sentences, too, one learns the emotional, even the dramatic import of the poem. Good recitation is of course not merely an automaton's repeating of memorized words, but also performance, and performance is ultimately the reciter's interpretation of the poem. Between bland, sing-songy repetition and overwrought emoting there is a sweet spot of recitation that conveys tone, emphasis, and feeling as well as memorable language.
I have an average memory, alas, particularly in comparison to my best friend from childhood, who retains both poetry and prose with an ease one can only envy. I hold onto only that which I practice deliberately and at length.
I describe my approach, to myself at least, as tightening the laces, by which I mean pulling the poem ever more deeply into your mind by increasing attention to the smallest details of word choice and structure — rhyme scheme and rhythm of course, but also assonance, consonance, repetition, parallel structure, and framing. These are especially apposite with Shakespeare, as the sonnets appear all but written to be memorized. (You mention Helen Vendler, who points out much of this in passing in her brilliant book.)
I won't bore you with excessive elaboration, but this one is fine grist for the method:
’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed
When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed
Not by our feeling but by others' seeing.
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad that I think good?
No, I am that I am; and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown,
One of my New Year's bingo items last year was to learn a poem by heart, and I managed several in the end. It helps if they rhyme in a fixed pattern, because then often the next few lines suggest themselves once you recall one. The first poem I committed to memory was The Owl and the Pussycat, which was one I was reading to my son a lot anyway.
Excellent choice!
Nothing is more helpful to memorizing poetry than walking around while you do it. Actors know this trick. You are memorizing the words on the auditory side of your brain, in muscle memory. People who try to do it sitting down are using the wrong side of their brain. You can do it, but it's harder, and I don't think it sticks as long.
This should be good news for everyone--you can get poetry and exercise at the same time.
I did a lot of acting once upon a time so I suppose that’s where I picked up the habit
Hey, I want to say, one of my favorite poems by heart is titled "Three Drunk Poets"...not kidding 😁 I love to run it through my mind when I'm walking.
I memorized two long Psalms while on daily walks, mostly because it was relatively undistracted time — somehow the trees and birds were helping, not hindering me.
Walking on the treadmill is not at all the same…
Thanks for this. I am 81 years old and I began learning and reciting poetry a year or two ago to help with memory. The poems with rhythmic meter and rhyme have definitely been my choices, and will continue to be. Two favourites are Hilaire Belloc’s Tarantella, and one by Housman Oh Who is That Young Sinner. Your suggestion about spacing and intervals is something I have definitely employed.
Turn out Forsyth has a new book due out: Rhyme & Reason: A Short History of Poetry (for People Who Don't Like Poetry).
Great choices two splendid poems
Very helpful! I'd also add memorizing with someone else. My ten year old and I have memorized 4 in the last few months (well five for him, because I let him read "Red" by Mary Ruefle ONCE and he instantly committed it to memory). We've memorized:
The Red Wheel Barrow - WCW
First Fig - Edna St. Vincent Millay
Today - Frank O'Hara
Becoming Moss - Ella Frears
We'll get to a sonnet eventually!
My daughter just turned seven and I never thought of doing this with her. A wonderful idea!
How lovely :)
I started my two kids, when they were about your son's age, with "Red Wheelbarrow" too, along with Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up."
"My Heart Leaps Up" is a great one!
One more thing: sometimes a person might love the sense of a poem, and that's a great reason to memorize it, but a person can love the sound, too. I think a lot of people know Coleridge's lines about Xanadu and Kubla Khan and the pleasure-dome and caverns not because they have any idea of what's going on there (I don't) but because the sounds of those words pulls you in, and then descends like a scale to the sunless sea. It's practically a song. My all-time favorite for sheer exotic word magic sound is a not very well known poem by Archibald Macleish called "You, Andrew Marvell." That poem is a symphony orchestra and an oil masterpiece wrapped into ten short stanzas: Ecbatan, Kermanshah, Baghdad, Crete and Sicily, Lebanon, the gilded sand of Africa, "the wheel rut in the ruined stone" - it's been in me for forty years and it still gives me goosebumps. I am very fortunate and grateful to the poet to have it permanently inside me.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43003/you-andrew-marvell
That's (sorry) marvellous. And the geography might help.
Also, start early. Learn as many poems as you can by early adolescence, they never fade. Then, they are formative of both knowledge and character.
Thank you so much for this Henry! I will definitely remember that lovely Ogden Dash forever now!!! I just about know The Adventures of Isabel by him off by heart too as do my children ! After reading John Carey’s autobiography I have learnt the first 10 or so lines of Lepanto and have been quite surprised at how well they’ve stuck but it does take a bit of time. We had to memorise and recite vast amounts of poetry at school (also verse speaking competitions and something called the Poetry Society of something!) I really wish my children were set more!
I learned Ozymandias from the Ted Hughes recording and now doing the voice is half the fun
This is exactly how Anna Akhmatova's poetry was memorized in Soviet Russia, only in the very poor apartments and in very poor clothes, the rest -reciting among friends was the same, although some friends informed the organs, like on Mandelstam, and he perished in camps of the Gulag. Yes, but Akmatova’ s poetry survived in the same manner, and she, the only one, survived also.
Oh how fascinating I didn’t know that thank you
I read an essay once by Randall Jarrell in which he talks about discovering by accident while floating in a pond that he loved Robert Frost’s poem “Provide, Provide!” so much that he had memorized it by accident! I was a teenager then and didn’t know the poem, but when I looked it up it worked its magic and - although I had to really work at it - I eventually memorized it too. It’s a crystally poetic diamond. That’s why I think your step #1 is really the tip that matters. Without it, none of the other steps have any power, and with it, they all work together. I memorized “The Walrus and the Carpenter” when I was a child because it was hilarious, and I can still make myself happy with “shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings - and why the sea is boiling hot - and whether pigs have wings.” Provide, Provide if anyone is interested: https://allpoetry.com/Provide,-Provide
With Frost, I find that the rhythm of everyday speech which carries the homespun sense in his poetry is what makes it memorable, and memorisable.
I’ve memorized a few poems almost by accident; if there’s a poem you consistently return to there’s a good chance you’ll end up with it at least half memorized, and then finishing the job becomes quite easy.
I memorised all Shakespeare's sonnets!
!!
I’ve found the acronym method incredibly useful. You read through the poem a number of times, then write down (in addition to the poem itself) the first letter of each word, such that the first stanza of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner would read as follows: “I i a A M / A h s o o t / B t l g b a g e / N w s t m.” I skew closer to the plain memorization scheme, and find this a good way to make the task seem not as daunting. It functions as a good middle step and I find it less tedious than memorizing straight line by line.
That's intriguing. I'm looking at those letters and suddenly I see it! "By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stops though me?" But the first two lines are just a mystery. The poem is, in a sense, already inside us, so that memorization might be conceptualized as both "imprinting" (the standard model) but also, in a way, "revealing." If it was just imprinting, then we would read every poem as if for the first time, like an amnesiac. But it's not that way, is it? Like a symphony we love, it's in there somehow already, even if we can't play one note on any instrument. We are deeper wells than we imagine ourselves to be.
Excellent advice, all around. I can only add that I find it important to make sure the sentences are the crucial larger units to get down, because only then do rhetorical patterns make sense and resolve. With sentences, too, one learns the emotional, even the dramatic import of the poem. Good recitation is of course not merely an automaton's repeating of memorized words, but also performance, and performance is ultimately the reciter's interpretation of the poem. Between bland, sing-songy repetition and overwrought emoting there is a sweet spot of recitation that conveys tone, emphasis, and feeling as well as memorable language.
Excellent advice. Well done.
I have an average memory, alas, particularly in comparison to my best friend from childhood, who retains both poetry and prose with an ease one can only envy. I hold onto only that which I practice deliberately and at length.
I describe my approach, to myself at least, as tightening the laces, by which I mean pulling the poem ever more deeply into your mind by increasing attention to the smallest details of word choice and structure — rhyme scheme and rhythm of course, but also assonance, consonance, repetition, parallel structure, and framing. These are especially apposite with Shakespeare, as the sonnets appear all but written to be memorized. (You mention Helen Vendler, who points out much of this in passing in her brilliant book.)
I won't bore you with excessive elaboration, but this one is fine grist for the method:
’Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed
When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed
Not by our feeling but by others' seeing.
For why should others’ false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad that I think good?
No, I am that I am; and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown,
Unless this general evil they maintain:
All men are bad and in their badness reign.