Know it by heart

[sienamystic]

I was lying in bed last night, and instead of an earworm, I had a bit of poetry running through my brain - Longfellow's Psalm of Life which I memorized for an English class in the fifth grade. I memorized four stanzas (not knowing that the version I had was an abbreviated one) and I still can say them off today. Ditto Jabberwocky memorized for the same reason, and two Yeats poems, Sailing to Byzantium and The Second Coming.

Different classes had me memorize bits of Shakespeare, like Portia's speech on Mercy from The Merchant of Venice ("The quality of mercy is not strained/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ Upon the place beneath..."), Hamlet's "To be or not to be" (but only until "..the bourne from which no traveler returns") and MacBeth's "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" (because we were about to read The Sound and the Fury). And of course, for Chaucer, I memorized the Prologue up until "...that hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke." Oh, and I can't forget everybody's favorite from Dr. Faustus, "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?" Everybody loves Marlowe, and I admit to laughing until I nearly wet myself at the scene in Shakespeare in Love when every single auditioning actor went right for it.

Having the poetry stuck in my head made me realize that I wanted to learn more poems by heart. I like villanelles, so I was thinking of getting down One Art by Elizabeth Bishop and The Waking by Theodore Rotheke - both poems I like very, very much. And I know there are more Shakespeare and Marlowe bits I would like to have. I like saying poetry aloud to myself - it feels good. None of the pieces I know is particularly long, and I'm not an actor so I think my ability to learn really long pieces would be limited, but learning one of the long pieces would be fun. Although I don't have a lot of alone time in the car anymore, which is the best place for doing this sort of thing. Maybe the shower?

Do you have poetry you know by heart? Did you have to memorize it for school, or did you do it on your own? Do you say it out loud to yourself in the bathtub or in the car, or maybe you frighten people on the bus by declaiming it loudly?

Comments

[coneycat.livejournal.com]

I am one of those scary people who can recite The Cremation of Sam McGee by heart. My dad egged me on. We duet.

In my undergrad Shakespeare class I was so impressed by the opening soliloquoy from Richard III that I committed it to memory and can still rattle it off.

I think I know mostly bits and pieces of other things--a fair bit of Kipling--I like rhyming poetry even though, as Jack Aubrey would say, it ain't genteel. I like the rhythm as much as anything.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Having a good bouncy rhythm makes it a lot easier to memorize and then a lot more fun to declaim in the shower. Kipling does tend to stick in your brain, but I can't claim to know big chunks of him - just little bits here and there.

I hadn't heard of the Cremation poem before so I looked it up! What a hoot!

[lasa.livejournal.com]

Sadly, unlike you, we were not required to memorize much at all in school. All I can remember having to learn was "Casey at the Bat" and "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening".

My loss. I have very little to scare bus riders with.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Stopping by Woods is very pretty, but I think Casey at the Bat has more bus-frightening-potential! You can get all loud and bombastic with it.

[swooop.livejournal.com]

My party piece, so to speak, is that I can recite the entirety of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". I used it as a performance piece for speech tournaments in college, and it's permanently lodged in my brain 25 years later.

I can also recite from memory quite a few of Donne's Holy Sonnets, mainly, I think, because I read them so often.

In school, we were mostly asked to memorize Shakespeare (I used to be able to manage most of Richard III's opening soliloquy, too) or certain prose passages. Until a few years ago, when it finally deserted me, my other party piece was the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. In the original English, no less.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Good lord, all of Prufrock? Wow.

I should know more Donne, but I don't think I even have one poem of his down entirely. May work on that, just for fun.

My Prologue was also in the original, which makes it much more fun.

[spuffyduds.livejournal.com]

I have Jabberwocky too! And on a good day I can do all of Roethke's "I Knew a Woman." These were both just for fun.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Oooh, "I Knew A Woman" is so frickin' seductive.

[(Anonymous)]

I never was one for memorizing poetry except for the monologues we had to do in high school (and let me tell you, I had fun with those), but one fragment of Edwin Arlington Robinson's Tristam always has stuck with me...it is an extremely original and seductive version of the tale that I always loved for its doomed love anyway. I am thinking of buying his book of Arthurian poetry. Sounds delicious to me. Yum.
Jess

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Can you quote some of the stuff you really like? I've never heard of him.

[(Anonymous)]

this is my favorite passage:

"And for a time nothing was to be heard except for the pounding of two hearts in prison, the torture of a doom-begotten music above them, and the wash of a cold foam below them on those cold eternal rocks where Tristam and Isolt had yesterday come to be wrecked together. When her eyes opened again, he saw there, watching him, an aching light of memory; and his heart beat harder for remembering the same light that he had seen before in the same eyes."

yum.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Yowza. That's gorgeous.

Fun!

[(Anonymous)]

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
a stately pleasure dome decree
where Alph the sacred river ran
through caverns measureless to man

:)

Cher

Re: Fun!

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that's a good one. I used to know most of the first part, but I don't think I still have it anymore.