Nerd on a Walk

By the time I was teaching my final few years at Western Reserve Academy (I retired in June 2011), I'd memorized all of Poe's "The Raven." (I think I've written about why and how I learned in an an earlier post? Too lazy to look right now.) Anyway, by that time I'd been memorizing poems for decades--and I knew a simple lesson: If I didn't review them--often--I'd lose them. And that takes time, reviewing the 130-some poems I have memorized. As I've written here before, I have a set of them I do on M-W-F while I'm on the exercise bike, another set for T-Th-Sa. I also have a couple that I recite just about every day while I drive to the health club ("The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" and "My Last Duchess"). But for "The Raven," in those WRA years, I'd discovered this: If I started reciting it when I left the house to walk to school, by the time I touched the door to Seymour Hall (my classroom building), I was reciting the final words shall be lifted nevermore. Soon I was timing that walk, home to school, so that I always finished the poem just as I grabbed the door's handle. I found a kind of--what?--satisfaction (?) in doing that.

Well, I also have yet another set of poems I do while walking back and forth to Bruegger's Bagels every morning. I do them on Monday-Tuesday-Thursday-Friday. Four days keeps them solidly in mind. Here they are:

• The Walking-to-Bruegger's Set
• Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts"
• Bishop, "Breakfast Song"
• Booth, "Nightsong"
• Collins, "After I Heard You Were Gone"
• Crane, "A Man Saw a Ball of Gold in the Sky"
• Cummings, "maggie and milly and molly and may"
• Dickinson, "A Bird Came down the Walk"
• I time this one so that I start saying it as the sidewalk begins a down slope.
• Dickinson, "The Going from a World We Know"
• Dickinson, "The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky"
• Dickinson, "I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed"
• Donne, "The Flea"
• Frost, "Fire and Ice"
• Frost, "Acquainted with the Night"
• Hardy, "When Dead"
• Houseman, "When I Was One and Twenty"
• Hughes, "Mother to Son"
• Jonson, "On My First Son"
• Masefield, "Sea Fever"
• Matthews, "Misgivings"
• Millay, "Sonnet XI" ("I Shall Forget You Presently, My Love")
• Poe, "To Helen"
• Ransom, "Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter"
• Ryan, "Spiderweb"
• Starbuck, "A Gift"
• By now--I'm waiting at the crosswalk on Rt. 303, with Bruegger's right across the street.
• Shakespeare
• "Our revels now are ended"
• "When in the chronicle of wasted time"
• "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought"

In Bruegger's I have my little breakfast, do my Kirkus reading for the day (100 pp.), then head back home and do the second batch of poems.

• The Walking-Home Set
• Shakespeare
• "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I"
• "I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation / prevent your discovery"
• "'Tis now the very witching time of night"
• "There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow"
• Stevenson, "Requiem"
• Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade"
• Thomas
• "In My Craft or Sullen Art"
• "The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower"
• Whitman, "O Captain! My Captain!"
• Wilbur, "Ecclesiastes 11:1"
• Wordsworth
• "My Heart Leaps Up"
• "The World Is Too Much with Us"
• Yeats
• "Oil and Blood"
• "When You Are Old"
• "The Second Coming"

I'm sure you see an alphabetical pattern here! Well, that helps me remember the sequence. So now you know how I spend part of the morning on M-T-Th-F. So if you see me walking, lips moving, no sounds emerging, relax: I've not "gone over"; I'm just having a conversation with a few special friends who live in my head.

PS--Just looked up my earlier post about "The Raven": Link