Writers tell of poems they have memorized, would like to memorize, etc.
A week ago, I had a column titled “Poems by Heart.” The column drew responses from many readers, which I will publish in due course. (Thank you, by the way — thank you for those responses.) My column began as follows:
I have never been much of a poem-memorizer. You? But I have always liked the idea of memorizing poems. (“I like the idea of being fit and slim. Not that I’ll ever do anything about it.”) Lately, I have taken the trouble to memorize a few poems. “Trouble” is the wrong word, really. It’s a pleasure — or at least a worthy exercise.
We could “count the ways” (speaking of poetry).
In recent days, I have solicited friends and colleagues in the writing business, asking them three questions: “Do you have a poem or two memorized?” “Are there poems you would like to memorize?” “Are there poems that you would recommend that the rest of us memorize?” They could answer one question, two questions, or all of them (or none of them). I will supply their responses, going in alphabetical order (by the last name of the respondent).
I hope and trust you will enjoy this as much as I have.
Richard Brookhiser, senior editor, National Review; historian and biographer:
Poems committed to memory:
“Politics” — Yeats
“This Be the Verse” — Larkin
“The Darkling Thrush” — Hardy
“The Convergence of the Twain” — Hardy
“Come In” — Frost
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” — Frost
“Wordsworth” — James Kenneth StephenWorking at:
“On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” — Keats
“Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” — Wordsworth
Eliot A. Cohen, professor of strategic and international studies, author of The Hollow Crown: Shakespeare on How Leaders Rise, Rule, and Fall:
I have memorized many poems, most from my early teens. One of my old favorites is “Are Ye Truly Free?”(James Russell Lowell). Some of it is no doubt out of tune with the fashions and beliefs of our time (even I cringe a bit), but the last two lines are a creed to live by, particularly for ink-stained wretches like us.
Those last two lines are “They are slaves, who dare not be / In the right with two or three.”
(I am put in mind of the adage “One on the side of God is a majority.”)
Laura Collins-Hughes, critic (of theater in particular):
“This Be the Verse” is the poem that plays in my head a lot. I didn’t mean to memorize it, but I thought of it so often that I read it enough to engrave it on my mind. I find it helps with compassion and understanding. Not the last two lines, which are awfully grim and growly (hello, Larkin), but up until then it seems to me a good reminder of something intrinsic to being human.
The last stanza:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Robert Erickson, associate editor, The New Criterion:
I think Gerard Manley Hopkins is a very good poet to memorize. I can never get his “sprung rhythm” right until the poem is off the page. I especially like “Spring and Fall.”
Jessica Hornik Evans, managing editor, National Review, and poet:
It’s never a good look to blame others for one’s own failings, but I have no knack for memorizing, and I only wish I had been trained — forced! — to do it when I was young. In graduate school, I took a class with the great Russian poet in exile Joseph Brodsky. Naturally, because he was Russian, he expected us to memorize poems (even then I had the feeling that it was — to quote a bit of Philip Larkin — “just too late for me”).
That said, the poems that float in pieces through my mind, again and again so that they seem a part of me, are Larkin’s “The Trees” (“Begin afresh, afresh, afresh”), Dickinson’s “I dwell in Possibility” (“And for an everlasting Roof / The Gambrels of the Sky”), Keats’s “This living hand” (“So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights”), and William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” (all 16 words of it, which in fact I do have memorized, though that’s like saying I managed to drink a glass of water when I was thirsty).
The poem I really should commit to memory is Seamus Heaney’s “Postscript” (“the earthed lightning of a flock of swans”; ”You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass”). It’s an astonishingly beautiful poem, and I’ll keep reading and rereading it — who knows, it might even stick.
David Frum, staff writer, The Atlantic:
I don’t have this one perfectly memorized, but I hear it in my head again and again.
David refers to “The Voice,” by Thomas Hardy.
Mark Helprin, novelist, short-story writer, journalist:
When I was a kid, I had an extraordinary memory — I don’t have it anymore — and once won a bet with my French teacher (an Oxford don whose father had been the governor-general of an English colony in Africa, perhaps Tanganyika?) that I could learn four pages of words in a French dictionary in one minute. However, I always refused to memorize poetry or prose deliberately and programmatically, although in working intensely on a text it would often and despite my best efforts worm its way into retention. I can’t explain this except to remember and summon anew from memory an almost violent resistance to internalizing and reciting someone else’s words. Not that I didn’t stand and still do stand in awe of whole libraries worthy of memorization. Rather (Dan), I refuse the impress, which, as I approach 80, I am now able to liken to a colonoscopy.
My father-in-law, a Harvard professor, of pure Irish extraction, had a prodigious memory and was heir to the Celtic oral tradition. He could recite poetry all day long, and interpreted my silence when bidden to participate as a lack of appreciation for literature. He would ask me the same questions you have, and I would say, “You’re Irish. You have the oral tradition. Jews have a written tradition.” He never believed that I really appreciated the beauty of spoken language until he asked his three daughters and their husbands each to recite a poem and record it for him. This I could do, as it did not require memorization. I chose John Betjeman’s “Business Girls,” a beautiful, lyrical, and evocative poem, entirely unpretentious and profoundly compassionate. He was shocked by the quality of my reading, the love in it, and I was grateful that he then understood that my silence had never been a lack of appreciation.
So there, in a bank shot, you have a poem recommended and a story to go with it.
Marvelous. (By the way, “Business Girls” is here.)
Roger Kimball, editor and publisher, The New Criterion:
I memorize poems all the time. A recent one is “Dirge without Music,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Tremendous. The last stanza:
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
James Panero, executive editor, The New Criterion:
There’s a new dog in my apartment building named Ozymandias. I should memorize Shelley’s pharaonic sonnet for the pooch.
Definitely!
Ramesh Ponnuru, editor, National Review:
I know (or knew and could get back up to speed pretty easily) a few Frosts: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Fire and Ice.”
I used to have “Prufrock” and probably still have Sonnet 29. Would like to have “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.”
That last is a Yeats.
Andrew Stuttaford, editor, National Review’s “Capital Matters”:
I have never memorized poems, much to my regret. Could I? I’m not sure. I’ve never been able to remember songs, or even national anthems. Facts, dates in history, all that, yes, but not poems (or names).
My maternal grandfather, who left school in 1917, could remember hundreds of lines of poems from his school days well into the 1970s.
Great.
Andrew has a list of poems that he basically knows but has not quite memorized. There is “Achilles Sets Out,” by Christopher Logue. And the “tomorrow” speech from Macbeth. (“Is it cheating to include Shakespeare speeches?” Andrew asks. No.) And, in Latin, Catullus 5.
Then there are poems that he would like to memorize and recommends that others do as well: “MCMXIV” (Larkin), “Ozymandias” (Shelley), and “Instead of a Preface,” from Requiem (Akhmatova).
For young children, Andrew says, “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” (Edward Lear). And, natch, “Jabberwocky” (Lewis Carroll). Andrew sends me a clip of the actor John Hurt reciting it: here.
George F. Will, columnist, book-author:
Jay:
“The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day . . .”
George
Those are, of course, the opening words of “Casey at the Bat,” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer. Did we expect anything else from the baseball-minded Mr. Will?
Kevin D. Williamson, national correspondent, The Dispatch. Kevin begins by quoting Henri Nouwen, a Dutch priest, professor, etc., who lived from 1932 to 1996. Here is that quotation:
Many times I have thought: If I am ever sent to prison, if I am ever subjected to hunger, pain, torture, or humiliation, I hope and pray that they let me keep the Psalms. The Psalms will keep my spirit alive, the Psalms will allow me to comfort others, the Psalms will prove the most powerful, yes, the most revolutionary weapon against the oppressor and torturer. How happy are those who no longer need books but carry the Psalms in their heart wherever they are and wherever they go. Maybe I should start learning the Psalms by heart so that nobody can take them away from me.
Kevin then says, “I’d like to memorize the Psalms.”
In 2005, I interviewed (for the first time) Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in the Soviet Gulag. Here is an excerpt from the resulting piece:
At the close of our conversation, I ask him about his Psalm book. Does he still have it? A pocket book of Psalms was given to him by his wife, Avital, a few days before he was arrested. He went through hell to hang on to this book. The authorities often deprived him of it. Once, he went on a “work strike,” entailing several months of the punishment cell — until he got that book back. In another period, “I took my Psalm book and for days on end . . . recited all one hundred and fifty of King David’s psalms, syllable by syllable.” . . .
Toward the very end of his ordeal, at the airport in Moscow — Sharansky had no idea what was happening to him — he refused to board the plane before they gave him back his Psalm book. In front of photographers, he dropped to the snow, yelling for it. They gave it back to him. Once aboard — when they told him he was being released — he recited the Psalm he had always designated for his liberation day, Psalm 30: “I will extol thee, O Lord; for thou hast lifted me up, and hast not made my foes to rejoice over me.”
Anyway, back in New York, sitting in a hotel dining room — I ask whether he still has the book. He grins a little, reaches inside his jacket, and produces it. There it is, this tiny book, big as life. Apparently, he has it on him always, the way one carries wallet and keys. Has he ever been in danger of losing it (I mean, lately)? “Sometimes I forget where I’ve put it, and it becomes more of a problem with age.”
I have seen Sharansky several times since that first interview, 20 years ago. He has never been without his Psalm book.
Back to Kevin Williamson:
I have more Shakespeare monologues memorized than standalone works — I suppose that’s poetry rather than poems, which is a weird thing to write.
The things I was required to memorize in high school I mostly still know (Lord’s Prayer in Old English, Canterbury Tales prologue in Middle English, “To be, or not to be”). I don’t have a ton committed to memory, and it’s what you’d expect me to know [Kevin is a great admirer of Eliot]: “Death by Water” from “The Waste-Land,” “Prufrock,” a few things like that, in part because I (badly) set them to music when I was more serious about that. I thought I had the first sonnet from La Vita Nuova (in English) but can’t seem to summon it, so, that’s gone. Catullus 85 (“Odi et amo”). “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Rhyme and meter make a big difference. I find that the books written in verse I read to my boys stick in memory after a couple of readings, without much effort. So, I can definitely recite Diggersaurs: Mission to Mars without any trouble. Which ain’t quite the Psalms. Regular structure is a kind of magic. Ezra Pound: “Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”
I’d like to memorize the whole of “The Waste-Land” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which I can’t recite without slipping into the adaptation that Iron Maiden put into a song in 1984. “Choruses from ‘The Rock’” would be a lot to memorize, but worth it, I think. “Murder in the Cathedral,” too.
Thank you to one and all for these memories, points, and riches.
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