Now Is the Perfect Time to Memorize a Poem | Hacker News Reader

Now Is the Perfect Time to Memorize a Poem

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96 pointsapollinaire66 comments

When I was in college I was a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism (https://www.sca.org/). To provide an evening's entertainment, I adapted a folk tale, Why the Sea is Salt, into iambic pentameter.

http://www.flownet.com/ron/salt.txt

It is meant to be performed vocally, not read. The first time I had to read it from my original manuscript (and it was a manuscript, written by hand with a pencil because this was the mid-80s). After that I decided I wouldn't perform it again until I had it all memorized. It took me over 30 years to get to the point where I was confident I had it memorized well enough to perform it without notes, but last year, over thirty years after its debut, I finally did it.

Then Covid happened. Now I recite it to myself in my head to help me fall asleep. It works remarkably well.

I would watch a Youtube recording of this!

Heh, thanks. To really do it justice requires a bunch of people dressed in medieval garb and that could be a tall order under the circumstances. But let me see what I can do.

Please make this happen, even if you can't fully do it justice yet. I just read it aloud to myself and I love it. I might have to memorize this one myself while I'm stuck at home.

Thanks for the kind words. I recorded an audio-only version this morning:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/salt.mp3

Some day I'll try to get a visual version done.

That'd put you in ... black diamond, I suppose?

Yes! The original line was, "Wheree'er I go where I my glass may raise/there shall I the name Black Diamond praise" :-)

howdy from carolingia!

It's always a good time to exercise your brain in a different way. I started memorizing poetry while in high school just for the fun of it. Some I found motivational, some just silly - Jabberwocky almost broke me. Whitman - that man knew how to live. My favorite of all remains Poe's The Raven. It was the Simpson's shortened take on that poem that first drew my attention, but man, did Poe know how to tell a story, and the meter! Such a rhythm, such a beat that man had.

In learning other languages one of the greatest challenges of all is to understand their poetry. Pushkin, Lermontov in their original are treasures. If only I could understand them all without always keeping my dictionary handy.

It is always wonderful to find a poet's expressions when they have chosen a different way to say what I'm thinking. Mary Oliver's Summer Day is just a celebration of the wonders of life.

Also, this stuff is a great source of passwords. Nobody puts words together the way poets do.

I think to memorize poems is best done with foreign languages. Get the pronunciation right and nobody will believe you just started to the language.

Here’s the snippet on YouTube of “The Raven” from “The Simpsons”

https://youtu.be/bLiXjaPqSyY

I've never been huge on poetry, but decided last year to memorize a poem each month. Totally doable, but I only made it through about four. My own laziness.

You get to know a poem so much better when you memorize it. You need to think about each word. Sometimes your brain wants to substitute another word and you have to think about why the poet chose the one they did instead of the one that might feel natural.

It feels like engaging in a great conversation. These poets all read each other's work, going back in this timeless chain into the distant past. And you can tell when one is responding to the words of another, who they know can never answer back, but there's a connection all the same.

Recognizing Ozymandias being recited in a Ballad of Buster Scruggs short felt like seeing a dear friend make a surprise cameo in a movie.

Plus, if you've got a flair for the dramatic, it's a neat party trick.

What was the criteria for the poems you decided to memorize? How did you pick - just based on stuff you already knew of, or did you actively pursue works new to you?

One of the hardest parts, tbh. Harder than actually memorizing. I went with classical sonnets, looked for greatest all time lists and found things that were new to me, had stood the test of time, and spoke to me in the moment.

Cool, thanks for the insight! I'm now considering attempting this as I've started worrying about memory and how to keep it active and healthy (in my mid 30s but people seem to make a big deal about it).

I memorized The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock during my first job as an engineer out of college. The .Net codebase would take 3-4 minutes to compile. I printed out the poem and taped it up in my cubicle. On each compilation, I would work on memorizing a few lines. I had never done anything like it before but memorized all 140 lines in just a few weeks. 12 years later I still remember about 50% of it. It’s a famous enough poem that it comes up once every few years and I impress some friends or strangers. At this point the entire poem just feels like an old friend. It has been surprisingly rewarding investment of otherwise wasted time while waiting for a build to finish.

The number of times I've turned to my wife and said "Let us go then, you and I..." when it's time to leave the house...

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. // They may not mean to, but they do. // ...

http://www.famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/philip_larkin/poems...

love that one

The mind works in mysterious ways. When in high school, I memorized Ibsen's 'Terje Vigen'[0], a dramatic poem on the hardships felt in southern Norway during the British blockade during the Napoleonic wars - and of revenge, redemption and all that. (Cough).

Anyway, it has probably been 20 years since I last recited it, but I just found to my amazement that I still held it down pat, once I had mumbled the first couple of phrases to myself, the rest just came pouring out.

"Det bodde en underlig gråsprengt en/på den ytterste, nøgne ø..."

[0] http://www.sitater.com/home/ibsen/vigen/idx_eng.htm

  The Summer Day
  by Mary Oliver

  Who made the world?
  Who made the swan, and the black bear?
  Who made the grasshopper?
  This grasshopper, I mean-
  the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
  the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
  who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
  who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
  Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
  Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
  I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
  I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
  into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
  how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
  which is what I have been doing all day.
  Tell me, what else should I have done?
  Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
  Tell me, what is it you plan to do
  With your one wild and precious life?

I cannot memorize these poems, but I like to go back and read them from time to time. I cannot put into words the emotions they create other than powerful, but that doesn't do them justice.

They are the poems by Xu Lizhi.

The full list of poems he wrote is in the link but I will paste one.

《一颗螺丝掉在地上》 "A Screw Fell to the Ground"

一颗螺丝掉在地上 A screw fell to the ground

在这个加班的夜晚 In this dark night of overtime

垂直降落，轻轻一响 Plunging vertically, lightly clinking

不会引起任何人的注意 It won’t attract anyone’s attention

就像在此之前 Just like last time

某个相同的夜晚 On a night like this

有个人掉在地上 When someone plunged to the ground

https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry

Powerful. Thank you for linking this.

This poem was the catalyst stopping me from purchasing the newest tech every year. New phone, new laptop, new devices....the magic of modern capitalism is that it hides the human cost of manufacturing. That said, perhaps having a job creates a better lifestyle in many parts of the world, but consumerism doesn't need to go at such an accelerated pace (IMHO).

Not just human cost, but also environmental, animal, and habitat. It's why I stopped purchasing things altogether, as much as I can. My costs are now limited largely to web hosting and water.

If you're super short on time:

"Ode to a Goldfish", Ogden Nash.

Oh, wet pet

[my interpretation: to be declaimed grandly as a great epic, before tailing off as if you've forgotten]

One year for Lent I gave up listening to music/radio in the car during my commute to classes (at least half an hour each way) and one of the things I did after an uncomfortable week of silence was to memorize and recite poems to myself. I still do this, adding a new poem every year or so. Now my favorite poems are always with me.

One of the last ones I memorized was Frederick Seidel's "Ode to Spring":

https://poets.org/poem/ode-spring

Haven't had to do this since my time at a now vanished English prep school. Thirty years on there remain only tiny fragments of Ozymandias and Charge of the Light Brigade and the first two lines of Casabianca:

    The boy stood on the burning deck,
    Whence all but he had fled

(We have search engines now, but my two inch thick Oxford Book Of English Poetry indexes by first lines. So try to hang on to the first lines in memory...)

Casabianca was widely taught to school children for a century, but nowadays sounds a bit cheesy. There are many parodies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casabianca_(poem)#Parody)

Elizabeth Bishop wrote an terrific modern adaptation, though: https://poetrysociety.org/poetry-in-motion/casabianca

25 years ago, after a rafting trip in the Yukon and Alaska, I decided to memorize Service's The Cremation of Sam McGee. After working on it for about a month, I had it cold. Never attempted to recite it since. After seeing this article, I thought I would give it a shot. I stumbled over a couple of lines in the middle, but, overall, I remembered it pretty well. Now if I could only remember where I put my keys 60 minutes ago.

Where ever I am, there's always Pooh. There's always Pooh and me. Whatever I do, he wants to do. "Where are you going today?" says Pooh. "Well, that's very odd cos I was too." "Let's go together" says Pooh, says he. "Let's go together" says Pooh.

---

Memorized as a bored ten year old, 'playing' Encarta 95. The first entry - A.A. Milne.

Idk about the States, but memorizing and reciting poetry is standard in Polish elementary and high schools. For example, as an assignment everybody is given about two weeks to memorize a poem such as this: https://literat.ug.edu.pl/amwiersz/0004.htm

My kids are almost four and almost two. After a cumulative almost 4,000 readings through a small library of their favorites I can now recite classics like Goodnight Moon from memory. Not exactly great literature but they are usually structured as poems, of a sort.

My wife and I quote their favorites at each other at opportune moments. They are, of course, completely oblivious.

Every time I set out to memorize something, be it a poem, prose, song, etc., other parts of my cognitive life tend to improve. And not just the linguistic parts -- I am able to focus while programming much more easily, for example, which for me is a non-linguistic task.

Maybe it has something to do with working to increase the overall page size of my brain or something.

Good advice. I’ve memorized a lot of poems by reading them out loud three times a day. A sonnet or a few stanzas took me a few weeks. Some were pages long and took months. This method is slower than some others, but it’s foolproof, and since I only chose poems I loved, I didn’t mind spending the time with them.

The method also works for prose.

Years ago I discovered that there are many poems you don't have to wilfully memorize, but which you "learn" like you learn melodies, very quickly and totally unconscious. For me, this includes for example Poe's "Raven" [0]. I once had a teacher who had memorized large parts of Goethe's "Faust" by accident, just by reading it every year she taught it in class.

[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48860/the-raven

    But go not "back to the sediment"
    In the slime of the moaning sea,
    For a better world belongs to you,
    And a better friend to me.

-- Voltairine de Cleyre, "And Thou Too"

Great is the matter of life and death

Moments go by swiftly and are lost

To squander time is a great shame

Do not waste your life

I cannot even begin to put into my own words how essential poetry turns out to be for this experiment in being human.

I have a handful of poems that are nearly always kicking around in my head and come up in snips and tatters in idle moments. Sometimes it's an actual liturgy -- often, when I'm walking, i get snippets of thomas cranmer's english on endless loops through my mind -- but more often than not it's a figurative one, though no less grounding for that.

Poems take a language and bend it past its breaking point, without breaking it.

What are the poems?

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

I've got chunks of ancient epics, medieval poems, some reniassance works, not much that's restoration or romantic or victorian, and a healthy dose of 20th century stuff. Mostly all in english -- it's my only real natural language.

I just tried to make a comprehensive list, but I don't think it's productive. Things surface as they're needed, I think.

Are they just mantras or do they carry some explicable deeper meaning for you? I'm still unaware of what makes poetry so fascinating to people.

huh, the last sentence of my post got dropped; put it back now.

No, they're not mantras.

The easy answer is that rhythmicity of language is just fundamentally compelling to our minds at a very basic level, and poems are a way that we can bend and twist and revel in and celebrate with language that gets that.

There's often a "oh, you clever ... " satisfaction as a reader when the poet picks _just_ the perfect word to rhyme off and you're left almost gasping with ... something indescribable ... at how _right_ it was. It's a thing of beauty.

In translation, Hafiz: "... the Beloved / has just made such a fantastic move// that the saint is now continually/ tripping over Joy// and bursting out in laughter/ and saying "I Surrender!""

Watching someone, often someone long dead from a time and a place I can't even imagine, working within an often highly constrained form to produce something that still packs a punch -- something that can still reach out and wrench something loose inside your head, something that can communicate things that are probably ineffable -- when it happens to you, you'll know.

There's a picture of Auden in the OP and he wrote this poem, which I memorized as a teen after learning of it from my mom.

    That night when joy began
    Our narrowest veins to flush
    We waited for the flash
    Of morning's leveled gun.

    But morning let us pass
    And day by day relief
    Outgrows his nervous laugh
    Grown credulous of peace.

    As mile by mile is seen
    No trespasser's reproach
    And love's best glasses reach
    No fields but are his own.

Fascinating rhyme scheme in this one. The vowels in each stanza rhyme ABAB, the consonants ABBA. Never seen anything like it.

I'll never forget this Dutch poem, called "Het heelal" (the universe):

    Hoe verder men keek
    hoe groter het leek

(the further they looked, the bigger it seemed)

For years, I used the walk to school (30 mins each way) to memorize many poems, especially Poe. The Bells, For Annie, The Raven - word for word. Walking was time to turn over the poetry in my mind and reflect on its meaning.

25 years later, and I can recite every poem from my youth, flawlessly. But they don't comfort me at night. I have the poems with me forever, but they are not useful day-to-day.

I don't recommend memorizing old poetry.

Maybe you absorbed their value at the time?

When I was in middle school (mid 80s) I had to memorize a poem. But I've forgotten the name of it. And I've forgotten the poem ;-) What I do remember is that it was about animals and was off the wall crazy (like poem about Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts). Does anyone know if there is a website where you can enter parameters and it will suggest possible matching poems? I'd really like to find it again.

Great green globs of gooey greasy gopher guts/ Marinated monkey meat/ Stinky little piggies feet/

French-fried eyeballs swimming in a pool of blood

That's what I like to eat

---

Ah, middle school. Good times.

Our version ended with the phrase "with a spoon".

Sorry, I meant one that was crazy like the gopher guts song/poem. Not that it is the gopher guts poem.

The poem I trying to remember had nothing to do with gopher guts ;-) It was also very long, unlike the gopher guts song.

> re: Canterbury Tales - "I was in high school, it was taught to us by rote, the better for us to get a feel for the cotton-mouth cadence of Chaucer’s Middle English ..."

Thats exactly how I was thought in HS. It was a reading assignment before coming to class. I found it difficult to read. And then the teacher read it out loud. I was like ... "ohhhh".

If I should die think only this of me That there is some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

    Canan ki degustasyona gelmez
    Balık pazarına hiç gelmez

Orhan Veli and his wit is pretty cool. I kind of feel sad for people who know a single language, there's something just right about reading literature in the language it's been written. So much nuance is lost in translation.

Most people who know only one language nevertheless read all their literature in the same language it was written in.

This is actually kind of fun, recently I memorized "Gather ye rosebuds" and Poe's "Dream within a Dream". Try the memory palace technique with someplace you recently visited.

  ...
  Weave a circle round him thrice
  And close your eyes with holy dread
  For he on honey-dew hath fed
  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

When I was ten I memorized “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll for performance. Still remember that frabjous poem!

My girlfriend and I sometimes start reciting Vogon poetry to one another <_<.

Oh freddled gruntbuggly...

I think that most people try to memorize things the hard way: by starting at the beginning.

When I need to memorize something, I start with the end, and work my way towards the beginning. For example, if I need to memorize a poem, I start with the last line or 2 lines. Then, I put a line (or complete thought) in front of it and memorize that as it flows into the already memorized part. Rinse and repeat.

Caveat: It sounds like an n^2 algorithm. Yes and no. Larger works can be broken up into chunks so that once the last "chunk" is learned, then only focus on the penultimate chunk, with only occasionally reviewing the flow from chunk to chunk.

I have not found any mentions of this technique specifically in the context of memorization, but rather first heard about it in the context of dog training. E.g., teach a dog the last action of a trick. Once the dog can perform the part of the trick, add one step in front of the learned part, and keep repeating that until the sequence is solid. Then add another step to the beginning of the sequence, etc. Evidently, in this way, animals can learn complex and long sequences of behaviors.

Backward Chaining [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaining] is the closest description that I could find matching this technique, but even that isn't totally correct, as the description deals with performing the entire chain rather than ignoring the chain as a whole and only focusing on the end.

I have personally applied this technique to memorization of poetry, scripture passages, and learning piano pieces. It's amazing!

In fact, I teach all of my piano students this method to learn a piece of music. They never "start at the beginning and stumble through the entire piece" unless they are intentionally practicing sight reading. Rather, we focus on the last phrase, and they learn (memorize) it up to tempo. Then they add the previous musical phrase, tying into the part that they just learned. Usually, we go for a ratio of loosely 10:1 (i.e., 10 repetitions of the new section, then 1 of the new section tied to the old section, maintaining a constant tempo). It works very well!

The end result: 1. It is usually easy to remember how something begins. 2. With this method, the performance gets stronger, as the more difficult passages (often towards the end) have more focused attention. 3. The "newest" part is always at the beginning of wherever you are in the learning process, so your brain is always fresh at the place where it needs to work the hardest.

My students love this approach, because, from their own testimony, it makes learning a complicated piece of music a very straightforward and repeatable skill.

I'm a lasagna

Hog go hang a salami

This sentence no verb

a dormmate used to play life goes on on repeat in college. i couldn't help but learn the words even as i quickly got tired of it. that 2pac was a lyrical genius.

If you want a fun take on Shakespeare's poetry, Zach Weinersmith's (author of SMBC comic) Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness is free for the duration of pandemic [0]. As are many of his other books [1].

[0] - https://www.smbc-comics.com/covid/files/Mini-Sonnets-web-v2....

[1] - https://www.smbc-comics.com/covid/

That Whitsun, I was late getting away...

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