How to memorise poetry

or, at least, how I memorise poetry

Since I started posting videos of myself reciting poems, I have been asked for advice about how to memorize. You can find my videos here, or here on YouTube.

Ted Hughes had a method of image making that may suit some of you, but that is not quite how things work for me. I believe Helen Vendler memorised all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which I cannot imagine being willing to do. (I think I only know one of them… must correct that.) There’s also a lot of memory advice available in books like Moonwalking with Einstein, which I don’t follow, apart from occasionally, interesting though I found that book.

Below are six things that I find useful. It comes down to repetition and careful noticing. In general, I would distinguish between learning by feel and learning by form (i.e. point 5 below). You will know best what works for you.

If you read this and think it all sounds like too much, try starting with something short and sharp. Probably you can remember this Ogden Nash poem for the rest of your life after seeing it once:

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker

Now try this triplet by Herrick. It takes a little more work, but not much.

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Now try this Sappho fragment (trans. Dan Beachy-Quick)

I don’t know where I go
my mind is two minds

Or try this Issa (trans. Robert Hass) (I love this one)

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

Or just pick your favourite lines from Prufrock—”I am old, I am old,/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Or a nursery rhyme! Whatever you like.

Starting like this is useful because developing your ability of recall is the most important part of improving your memory. Imagine if you memorised a line or short poem a day like this. You would soon become a famous rhapsode. (Someone wrote an article about doing exactly that in the Spectator once, performing poems on the street for money. It was a great read, but I cannot recommend it to you as a career choice.)

One word of warning: formal poems are easier to memorise and if you start with someone like Hera Lindsay Bird you might struggle. Rhyme and meter make memorisation easier. You already know this because you probably know a lot of song lyrics off by heart.

If you want to find poems on your phone, (turn that screen-time into memory time!), try Poetry Foundation or Poetry Archive. You can also listen to poets on Poetry Archive.

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1. Pick a poem you actually want to learn. This is the most important decision. Sometimes a poem simply has to be memorised. (Just try not memorising this one…) You are learning these poems by heart so you should follow your feelings. Obsession is the first principle of memorisation. If there are poems which stay with you, learn them.

2. Immerse yourself. If you can listen to the poet reading the poem themselves, you should do so. This is how I memorised ‘Filling Station’ and ‘The Mulberry Tree’. I am currently finding it quite easy to memorise ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ which is no doubt because I have heard a recording of Larkin reciting it dozens of times. If a recording is not available, as is the case for most poets, then you will have to say it yourself many times. The more you love the poem, the quicker the immersion works. I know about half a dozen Robert Frost poems and they lodged themselves with me without much worry for exactly that reason.

3. Spaced recall. Spaced recall is the better part of memorization. Say the first line. Say it without the paper in front of you. Say the second line. Say them both without the paper in front of you. Move on once you can say them both together without the paper. Come back later. Repeat. Come back the next day. Repeat. And so on… You do not have to stick to lines. You might do sentences, half lines, images, whatever makes sense. But you should work at intervals. Sometimes to really own the poem, you need to repeat it at longer and longer intervals, until it is really stuck. If you want it to be easy, see 1 (i.e. pick a different poem). Writing the poem out can be helpful but it is by no means necessary in my view. Keeping a commonplace book might help also. But ultimately, you possess the poem by speech alone.

4. Walk around. Poetry is like music. It makes us want to move. So memorize and recall poems as you walk or wash the dishes or plant tulip bulbs or fold socks or whatever. You can do it sitting in a chair or lying in bed, but it needs some movement somewhere in the process. I used to memorise on the train to work. Now I get off the bus early and do it as I walk. Count the beats on your fingers. Tap your foot. Anything.

5. Notice formal features. When I learned ‘My true love hath my heart’ (two lines of which have escaped me and I am now recommitting them—not enough spaced intervals!), I paid a lot of attention to the formal features. It is dense with rhetoric. There’s antimetabole (inverted words), chiasmus (inverted grammar), polyptoton (same word, different grammar), and more. (I can’t name them all. I checked and Claude can list them, but Claude mixed up a chiasmus with an antimetabole, so be careful!) It gets boring doing this sort of naming-of-the-forms stuff. And the point is not to learn rhetorical names but to notice the patterns themselves, which some knowledge of the trope names can help with. (The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth is good for learning them.) You need to see when the words are repeated, transposed, repeated but grammatically changed, structures are inverted or paralleled, and so on. There is so much repetition, of obvious and subtle forms, in this poem. It is a parallel structure overall, within lines, and between lines. The more you see that, the more you will remember it. Here are some examples from the second quatrain.

   His heart in me keeps me and him in one;

   My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:

   He loves my heart, for once it was his own;

   I cherish his because in me it bides.

   In the first line, we have: His, me, me, him. The next two lines go: My, him, he my. Look at the first words of the lines: his, my, he, I. And the rhymes are very telling: one/own, and guides/bides. These are memorable because they evoke some ambiguity: how possessive is this romance? In the second line, see how “my” is contained by “he” and “his”, and then in the fourth line “his” is contained in “I” and “me”. The whole structure of the poem is repeated again and again within the lines. This is reinforced by the fact that the first and last lines are the same. There’s also alliteration (because, bides) and hendiadys (“thoughts and senses”).¹

6. Learn by rhythm. When I recite to camera, I find it quite inhibiting. But as I walk around reciting to myself, I am free to be as expressive as I like. A poem like Herrick’s ‘Daffodils’ or Wilbur’s ‘Love Calls Us to the Things of This World’ relies on lots of rhythm. You must get the feel for this, quite apart from the meaning. It is of course completely bound up with the sense—that is part of what poetry is—but you need to catch it like a kind of tune, so that you can be carried along with it. Look at the second stanza from ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. I have bolded what I take to be the stressed syllables.

   All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept

   For miles inland,

   A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.

   Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and

   Canals with floatings of industrial froth;

   A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped

   And rose: and now and then a smell of grass

   Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth

   Until the next town, new and nondescript,

   Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

   To begin with this is a slow rhythm: you simply cannot rush the first two lines. They have a Tennysonian slowness. (Try reciting ‘Ulysses’ quickly.) It speeds up a little with the farms and the hothouse and the hedges. The strict iambic turn starting with “and now and then” changes the rhythm completely. I thought I had discovered this as I memorized, but you can hear the shift pretty clearly in Larkin’s recording, so perhaps I remembered it. (It is some time since I heard it.) Anyway, the memory works on those rhythms as much as on the words.

A Reading from Homer (1885) Lawrence Alma-Tadema

1. (If you wish to read more parallel poetry, try the Psalms, or Whitman. In general, if you wish to see these patterns, read the Bible. KJV, please.)