Not long ago, a reader of these maunderings wrote and asked if I would list the poems I've memorized. (I had blogged about memorizing poems a number of months ago.) I didn't think I had a typed list (each poem lives on a 3x5 card I carry around in my backpack), but then I found one, which I had to update a little. So ... I think the list below is accurate.
A couple of years ago (still teaching at Western Reserve Academy) I talked one day at an all-school assembly about learning my 100th poem. Now I'm up in the mid-120s. Just added "My Last Duchess" the past few weeks and am looking around for another. I have to review them all, several times a week, usually while I'm walking somewhere, riding the exercise bike, sitting in a waiting room (they used to be great for silent review in faculty meetings!), etc. Otherwise ... Gone with the Wind.
W. H. Auden
“Funeral
Blues”
“Musée des
Beaux Arts”
Elizabeth Bishop
“One Art”
“Breakfast
Song”
Philip Booth
“Nightsong”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“How Do I
Love Thee?”
Robert Browning
“My Last
Duchess”
Lord Byron
“She Walks
in Beauty”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“When I Was
Young”
Billy Collins
“After I
Heard You Were Gone”
Hart Crane
“My
Grandmother’s Love Letters” (“There are no stars tonight”)
Stephen Crane
“The Sage
Lectured”
“A Man Saw
a Ball of Gold in the Sky”
E. E. Cummings
“I carry
your heart with me”
“maggie and
millie and molly and may”
Charles Dickens
Opening and
closing sentences from A Tale of Two Cities
Emily Dickinson
“Because I
could not stop for death”
“A bird
came down the walk”
“Hope is
the thing with feathers”
“If you
were coming in the fall”
“I like to
see it lap the miles”
“I taste a
liquor never brewed”
“Much
madness is divinest sense”
“There is
no frigate like a book”
“They say
that ‘Time assuages’ —”
“The going
from a world we know”
“The brain
is wider than the sky”
John Donne
“Death Be
Not Proud”
“The Flea”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Concord
Hymn”
John Fletcher
“Do Not
Fear”
Robert Frost
“Birches”
“Mending
Wall”
“Nothing
Gold Can Stay”
“Questioning
Faces”
“The Road
Not Taken”
“The Silken
Tent”
“Stopping
by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
“Acquainted
with the Night”
Thomas Hardy
“When Dead”
A. E. Housman
“When I was
one-and-twenty”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Old
Ironsides”
Ted Hughes
“Hawk
Roosting”
Ben Jonson
“On My
First Son”
John Keats
“Much Have
I Travell’d in the Realms of Gold”
“When I
Have Fears That I May Cease to Be”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Excerpt
from I Have a Dream
Vachel Lindsay
“Factory
Windows”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The Arrow
and the Song”
“The Cross
of Snow”
“My Lost
Youth”
“The Tide
Rises, The Tide Falls”
“Haunted
Houses”
John McCrae
“In
Flanders Fields”
Andrew Marvell
“To His Coy
Mistress” (“Had we but world enough”)
William Matthews
“Misgivings”
Edna St. Vincent Millay
“The
Courage That My Mother Had”
“Dirge
Without Music”
“First Fig”
“Only until
This Cigarette Is Ended”
“Second
Fig”
“What Lips
My Lips Have Kissed”
“I Shall
Forget You Presently”
Clement Clarke Moore
“A Visit
from St. Nicholas”
Sharon Olds
“The Clasp”
“High
School Senior” (“For 17 years …”)
“I Go Back
to May 1937” (“I see them standing…”)
Mary Oliver
“The Black
Snake”
“When I was
young and poor”
Thomas Paine
“These are
the times that try men’s souls ...”
Edgar Allan Poe
“Alone”
“Annabel
Lee”
“Eldorado”
“The Raven”
“To Helen”
John Crowe Ransom
“Bells for
John Whiteside’s Daughter”
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Mr.
Flood’s Party”
“Reuben
Bright”
“Richard
Cory”
Kay Ryan
“Spiderweb”
Robert W. Service
“The
Cremation of Sam McGee”
William Shakespeare
“All the
world’s a stage” (from As You Like It)
“But will
you woo …?” (from The Taming of the Shrew)
“Well come,
my Kate” (from Shrew)
“Fie, fie!”
(from Shrew)
“To be or
not to be” (from Hamlet)
“O, what a
rogue and peasant slave” (from Hamlet)
Hamlet
(assorted short speeches)
“Our revels
now are ended” (from The Tempest)
“Sigh No
More” (from Much Ado About Nothing)
Sonnet 2: “When forty winters shall besiege thy
brow”
Sonnet 18:
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Sonnet 29:
“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”
Sonnet 30:
“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”
Sonnet 55:
“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments of princes
Sonnet 56:
“Is it thy will thy image should keep open”
Sonnet
64:“When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d”
Sonnet 73:
“That time of year thou may’st in me behold”
Sonnet 106:
“When in the chronicle of wasted time”
Sonnet 116:
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”
Sonnet 123:
“No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change”
Sonnet 130:
“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”
Sonnet 138:
“When my love swears that she is made of truth”
Sonnet 147:
“My love is as a fever, longing still”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Ozymandias”
Charles Simic
“Eternity’s
Orphans” (“One night you and I were walking”)
Kathryn Starbuck
“A Gift”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“My Shadow”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“The Charge
of the Light Brigade”
Dylan Thomas
“Do Not Go
Gentle into That Good Night”
“The Force
That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower”
“In My
Craft or Sullen Art”
Walt Whitman
“O Captain!
My Captain!”
Richard Wilbur
“Ecclesiastes
11:1”
“The House”
William Wordsworth
“I Wandered
Lonely As a Cloud”
“She Dwelt
among the Untrodden Ways”
“A Slumber
Did My Spirit Seal”
“The World
Is Too Much with Us”
“My Heart
Leaps Up”
William Butler Yeats
“Brown
Penny”
“Oil and
Blood”
“The Second
Coming”
I am incredibly impressed. Some of my personal favorites from this list: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Oliver, Shakespeare, and my only disappointment, Ted Hughes but no Sylvia Plath. :)
ReplyDeleteOn Nov. 10th Daniel recited a Robert Service poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee to my sister and I. We were both entertained and amazed at the performance.
ReplyDelete