The Pleasures of Memorizing Poems

"Erato, Muse of Poetry," by Edward Poynter (1836 - 1919)

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I subscribe to a substack, Poems Ancient and Modern (https://poemsancientandmodern.substack.com/) conducted by the writers Joseph Bottum (South Dakota) and Sally Thomas (North Carolina). Five days a week, they present and briefly discuss a poem in the public domain. The hosts and commenters occasionally mention the pleasures of memorizing poetry.

A recent comment set me to thinking about the poems that I used to know by heart. Here’s the list of the poems I believe I could recite from memory at one time or another. There’s nothing surprising here, perhaps, except the first poem. I memorized it around 1977 to pass the hours while sitting with my sleeping father-in-law in his hospital room. The list, in no particular order:

Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst”; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Concord Hymn”; James Elroy Flecker, “The Old Ships”; John Donne’s holy sonnet, “At the round earth’s imagined corners” and “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”; Shakespeare’s sonnet 73; Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice,” “Dust of Snow”; Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”; W. B. Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” large sections of “The Tower” (I still know the stanza about Mrs. French and her obliging servant with the garden shears), “For Anne Gregory,” “Sailing to Byzantium”; Edgar Allan Poe, “To Helen”; A. E. Housman, “With rue my heart is laden”; John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”; Samuel T. Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”; Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Crossing the Bar”, “Ulysses”; George Herbert, “Love (III)”; W. C. Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”; William Wordsworth, “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”  After publishing this post, I remembered once knowing Charles Wolfe, "The Burial of Sir John Moore After Corunna," a modernized version of "Westron Wind," Sir Thomas Wyatt, "They Flee from Me," William Carlos Williams, "This Is Just to Say," Richard Lovelace, "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars."

I knew (and know) bits and pieces of many other poems. Yesterday I made my wife giggle when out of the blue I recited, in mangled form, the first stanza of Suckling's "Song: Why so pale and wan fond lover."

I probably knew more at various times. I held tightly to the poems in the unhappiest period of my life, when my first marriage failed, but as I became happier I lost my grip on them. 

Posted 5 July 2024 updated 20 July 2024. Please send comments to [email protected]