September Memorize Poetry Month

A challenge from Deborah Ager of 32 Poems:

Since there�s April Poetry Month, I hereby declare September to be �Memorize Poetry� month. You don�t even have to memorize all the poems in the world � only four.

One poem per week�how difficult can that be? Here are rules:

1. One poem can be shorter than 10 lines. Ideally, the others should be longer than 10 lines.

Only one rule and four poems in month�easy, aye?

Well, once upon a time it would have been easy for me. I’m not so sure now. New pathways are harder to wear into an old brain. Still, I do think that memorizing poems is a great way to internalize prosody, so I’m willing to give it a try.

My problem is that I tend to have to re-memorize the same poems. For example, once upon a time I memorized Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 that begins

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold;
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

You have to watch that second line, by the way. I love it.

Anyway it’s all gone now, especially the troublesome third quatrain that goes something like:

In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by

Much is made of the change in pronoun here from “his” to “it” but I have just have trouble with the sense of it, I think because the sentence is so interrupted and claused.

The very best at quoting memorized poems is James Baker Hall and you have missed a treat if you’ve never sat in one of his classes when he has closed his eyes, brought that clawed right hand up as both a grabber of lines and a metronome, and in his sonorous baritone given out:

THE EXPENSE of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjur�d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy�d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallow�d bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof,�and prov�d, a very woe;
Before, a joy propos�d; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

“Rhetoric,” he would then exclaim, “all rhetoric. And yet it’s rhetoric that we’ve remembered for 400 years.”

My Mom used to give me “Hiawatha” and “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” when I was tagging after her, bored, while she tried to do her household chores. She memorized them in the one-room school house where she had 8 grades of education. Those recitations marked me, I think, as did her renditions of Hank Williams songs.

Hear the lonesome whippoorwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I’m so lonesome I could cry

What poems would you memorize? Have you memorized? Have you forgotten?

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