Last December, at a Christmas party, someone handed out little booklets of lyrics & we gathered around the table and sang carols. I was quite surprised how many of the songs I knew by heart, sometimes more than even one verse. I’ve thought about this off and on since, asking myself if there’s anything else I’ve memorized (nothing has presented itself yet, save the multiplication tables I learned in grade school).
My favorite book of poetry is Poem a Day, with an introduction that starts
Once upon a time men and women of sense and sensibility knew by heart dozens of poems—Shakespeare’s sonnets, stirring patriotic verse, odes to churchyards and elegies for the departed, the music of Swinburne or Poe or Yeats. Poems are meant to be voiced and A Poem a Day includes 366 poems old and new—one for each day of the year—worth learning by heart. Only two criteria were demanded of each poem for inclusion in this collection—it had to be short enough to learn in a day, and good enough to stand among the great poetry of the English language.
And while I’ve read through the poems numerous times, I’m afraid I’ve never been tempted to memorize any.
Then last week I read Brad Leithauser’s piece on the New Yorker’s blog, Why We Should Memorize. He says Memorized poems are a sort of larder, laid up against the hungers of an extended period of solitude, and a lot more. Read it here.