Okay, I reached a milestone today--one that will probably not surprise my Facebook friends. Those folks probably have noticed the past few months that I seem to have been memorizing a lot of poems (I post about each one when I've learned it).
Well, there's been a reason for that.
Some months ago, I realized that my total was nearing 200 (I was in the 170s at the time). I thought: I'm a-gonna do this!
And so I set out to do that which, today, I finished. No. 200.
I've written before here about my obsession with memorizing, an obsession that began slowly, accelerated, and has now reached terminal velocity.
The first piece I memorized as a school assignment was back at Adams Elementary School (Enid, OK) in the early 1950s. "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which I had to recite for the parents at some program. As I've written before, that part in the poem about "dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly" always puzzled me, but I charged through it as if I knew what it meant. (Good preparation for my teaching career!)
Other teachers assigned other poems through the years--one, my senior year in high school, was the first stanza or so of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"--"The curfew tolls the knell of parting day ...."
I memorized other things just by repetition--hearing it, saying it--from naughty rhymes on the playground to Scripture in church.
After I began teaching a few years, I began requiring my students to memorize famous poems and passages (about ten to a dozen a year), and it was then that my true memorization mania commenced. I would learn the texts along with my class, but soon I grew bored and while they were learning, say, "The Road Not Taken," I would do another Frost poem. This went on and on and on.
I retired from public school in January 1997, then returned in 2001 to teach at a private school, Western Reserve Academy, where I continued the practice--again, learning new ones while the kids worked on my "old" ones.
I was nearing 100. And I reached it. On November 8, 2010, I gave a speech in the Reserve Chapel about what I'd done. One hundred poems!
But then what?
Aw, just keep learning ones I liked, were famous, were by writers I admired--or all of the above.
Finding "rehearsal" time, as I've written here before, has become an ... issue. I know that I must practice them, every week, more than once, or they will fly away like bored birds. So I've assigned a "time" for each of them. I have sets of them I rehearse (mumbling and mouthing only--I have not yet begun to speak them aloud in public!):
- brushing my teeth in the morning (newer ones, every day)
- in the shower, M-T, Th-Fri
- while I dress (newer ones), every day
- walking over to the coffee shop (M-T, Th-Fri)
- at the coffee shop in the morning (M-T, Th-Fri)
- driving out to the health club (M-T, Th-Fri)
- at the health club (Monday thru Saturday, though I'm sometimes a Bad Boy and take a nap instead)
- walking over to the coffee shop in the afternoon (Mon-Sat: newer ones, ones I'm learning)
- walking home from the coffee shop in the afternoon (ditto)
- in bed (going over ones that caused me to stumble earlier in the day)
So I've reached 200. Now what? Do I rest? Pat myself on the back?
I'm not sure. I know that (soon?) I will probably find some poems I just must learn. And so I'll do it. And off I'll go again on the Highway to 300.
And as for practice time? Joyce--who is usually the sole audience for these lines--may soon realize she's married an inveterate mumbler.
Anyway--here's the entire list ...
Matthew Arnold
“Dover Beach”
W. H. Auden
“Funeral Blues”
“Musée des Beaux
Arts”
“Autumn Song”
“Carry Her Over the
Water”
Bible
“Psalm 23” (KJV)
Elizabeth Bishop
“One Art”
“Breakfast Song”
William Blake
“The Tyger”
Philip Booth
“Nightsong”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
“How Do I Love
Thee?”
Robert Browning
“My Last Duchess”
Lord Byron
“She Walks in
Beauty”
Carroll, Lewis
“Jabberwocky”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“When I Was Young”
“Kubla Khan”
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”
“A Man Said to the
Universe”
“In the Desert I Saw
a Creature”
“I Saw a Man
Pursuing the Horizon”
E. E. Cummings
“I carry your heart
with me”
“maggie and millie
and molly and may”
“love is more
thicker than forget”
“the Cambridge
ladies who live in furnished souls”
“anyone lived in a
pretty how town”
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”
“I heard a fly buzz
when I died”
“A narrow fellow in
the grass”
“The props assist
the house”
“As imperceptibly as
grief”
“This is my letter
to the world”
“Tell all the truth
but tell it slant”
“The bee is not
afraid of me”
“Wild Nights! Wild
Nights!”
“A route of
evanescence”
“I dwell in
possibility”
John Donne
“Death Be Not Proud”
“The Flea”
“No Man Is an
Island”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Concord Hymn”
John Fletcher
“Do Not Fear”
Philip Freneau
“The Indian Burying
Ground”
Robert Frost
“Acquainted with the
Night”
“Birches”
“Fire and Ice”
“Mending Wall”
“Nothing Gold Can
Stay”
“Provide, Provide”
“Questioning Faces”
“The Road Not Taken”
“The Silken Tent”
“Stopping by Woods
on a Snowy Evening”
“Design”
Thomas Hardy
“When Dead”
Jeffry Harrison
“Afterword”
Felicia Hemans
“The Boy Stood on
the Burning Deck”
Robert Herrick
“Gather Ye Rosebuds
While Ye May”
A. E. Housman
“When I was
one-and-twenty”
Oliver Wendell Holmes
“Old Ironsides”
Langston Hughes
“Mother to Son”
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”
Galway Kinnell
“Promissory Note”
Philip Larkin
“Travellers”
Vachel Lindsay
“Factory Windows”
Abraham Lincoln
“The Gettysburg
Address”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“The Arrow and the
Song”
“The Cross of Snow”
“My Lost Youth”
“The Tide Rises, The
Tide Falls”
“Haunted Houses”
Amy Lowell
“Night Clouds”
John McCrae
“In Flanders Fields”
Keir Marticke (WRA student)
“She Who Carried
Hope”
Andrew Marvell
“To His Coy
Mistress” (“Had we but world enough”)
John Masefield
“Sea Fever”
Edgar Lee Masters
“Mabel Osborne”
“Percy Bysshe
Shelley”
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”
“Sonnet XIII: Read
history”
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”
Ransom, John Crowe
“Bells for John
Whiteside’s Daughter”
Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Mr. Flood’s Party”
“Reuben Bright”
“Richard Cory”
“Miniver Cheevy”
Kay Ryan
“Spiderweb”
“Ship in a Bottle”
Brynn Saito
“Stone on Watch at
Dawn”
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)
“She should have
died hereafter” (from Macbeth)
“Soft you; a word or
two before you go” (from Othello)
“Fear No More the
Heat of the Sun” (from Cymbeline)
Sonnet 1: “From
fairest creatures we desire increase”
Sonnet 2: “When forty winters shall besiege thy
brow”
Sonnet 18: “Shall I
compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Sonnet 27: “Weary
with toil, I haste me to my bed”
Sonnet 29: “When, in
disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”
Sonnet 30: “When to
the sessions of sweet silent thought”
Sonnet 31: “The
bosom is endeared with all hearts”
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 97: “How like
a winter hath my absence been”
Sonnet 98: “From you
have I been absent in the spring”
Sonnet 106: “When in
the chronicle of wasted time”
Sonnet 111: “O, for
my sake do you with Fortune chide”
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”
Sonnet 154: “The
little love god, lying once asleep”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“Ozymandias”
“Good-Night”
Shel Silverstein
“The Little Boy and
the Old Man”
Charles Simic
“Eternity’s Orphans”
(“One night you and I were walking”)
Kathryn Starbuck
“A Gift”
Robert Louis Stevenson
“My Shadow”
“Requiem”
“Windy Nights”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“The Charge of the
Light Brigade”
“Crossing the Bar”
“The Eagle”
“The Kraken”
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”
Tomas Tranströmer
“The Half-Finished
Heaven”
Ocean Vuong
“Torso of Air”
Walt Whitman
“O Captain! My
Captain!”
Richard Wilbur
“Ecclesiastes 11:1”
“The House”
“April 5, 1974”
“Year’s End”
“Boy at the Window”
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”
Wright, Charles
“It’s Sweet to Be
Remembered”
William Butler Yeats
“Brown Penny”
“The Lake Isle of
Inisfree”
“Oil and Blood”
“The Second Coming”
“When You Are Old”
“The Lamentation of
the Old Pensioner”
“Down by the Salley
Gardens”
“The Wild Swans at
Coole”
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