Memorize a Poem in Minutes
Knowing a poem by heart is a soul flourishing exercise. Here are some beautiful, short poems to memorize and a little advice.
Hey there, readers! Sorry for the clickbaity title and the homemade baby meme. Our culture seems overly concerned with productivity and self-improvement, and I may have tried to capitalize on that. But since I have you here, I may as well tell you a true story.
One morning not that long ago I hopped onto the treadmill at the gym for a quick run and realized that I didn’t have my earbuds. Knowing how bored I’d be if I had to jog on a machine for half an hour without music, I decided to memorize “The Coming of Light” by Mark Strand. After only 15 minutes I could recite it, and I repeated it for the rest of my run. (Please take some time to view it here. I’m not posting the poem because it is not public domain nor do I have permissions to reprint.)
“The Coming of Light” is a poem about a particular type of love — one that is found in life’s twilight. At a mere 7 lines of free verse, the poem is a study in economy and anaphora.
Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
I chose this poem for three reasons:
It is beautiful. I am attracted to well crafted things, no matter how small. Sometimes I love something because of its smallness. And the more musical a poem is, the more likely I will want to revisit it over and over. The repetition of this poem sounds like a refrain of a song.
It means something to me on a very personal level. I am at an age where I probably have more time behind me than ahead of me, and this poem speaks to all the loves I am discovering now — including poetry.1
It is short. If I am anything, I am practical. I knew how much time I had on the treadmill, and I love being able to have a realistic goal.
I Thought I Had a Bad Memory
I was lousy at tests that required memorizing facts. I would constantly forget why I walked into a room. I’d misplace everything. I couldn’t even remember my social security number correctly which caused an enrollment crisis when I was a junior in college. My memory was bad at everything except the things I wanted to forget. For years bad memories haunted me and severely affected my mental health.
The turning point came in 2022 when I went to the Catholic Imagination Conference in Dallas to hear my friend
speak. She was on a panel with Ron Hansen and Phil Klay, and I heard Phil Klay say that he memorized T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” while humping his gear on training exercises when he was in the military. And he said,When you memorize a poem, it becomes a part of you.
It was then that I realized that if I had bad memories that meant that my memory, as a function of my mind, was working. It was just hijacked, and I needed to take control of what was in my mind. I resolved to flood my memory with poetry. I wanted a Biblical deluge to cleanse the brokenness I knew. I was going to remake the world in a new language — one full of love, light, and poetry.
Aristotle, St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas emphasized the difference between memory and recollection; one is passive and the other is active. Memorizing is a choice. These are the some of the actions that helped me recollect as much poetry as I could:
Read slowly and out loud. Speed reading is no help to anyone here. Poetry moves at the speed of one’s voice, and an essential quality to the greatest poems is that they are meant to be read aloud. When choosing a poem, try many of them out. I tend to choose poems that suit my voice and sound good when I perform them for others.
Read, rest, repeat. Establishing a distributed learning practice is one of the most helpful things you can do if you want to know anything for a long time. When I learned the poem by Mark Strand I had actually forgotten a line by bedtime so I revisited it before I went to sleep. By the next morning I was able to recall the poem more accurately. Repeated exposure will help root verses in the long term memory.
Copywork. I have an IBM Selectric typewriter, and sometimes I like to type out what I want to memorize instead of simply cutting, pasting, and printing on my computer. Many homeschoolers will tell you about the benefits of copywork, but this isn’t just a practice for students. Making a physical copy helps you see the words on the page. Handwriting the poem over and over can also be a form of meditation. You may even try your hand at calligraphy to create a copy you would want to display out in the open.
Make the poem accessible (or even unavoidable). I have Shakespeare monologue I am trying to re-memorize taped on the window above my kitchen sink. Having a family of seven means we have quite a few dishes there, so if any of us are standing there we may as well learn some Shakespeare! I have a Robinson Jeffers poem on an index card I use as a bookmark. I’ve learned to lower the threshold between me and the poem. You may want to consider listening to a recording (of yourself or someone else) while you are driving or walking.
Movement may help. One of the things I learned as an adult is that I am a kinesthetic learner which means I learn best when I am moving around. I have memorized many sonnets while running. I learned longer W.H. Auden poems while on a rowing machine. I tend to remember lyric poems best when I am walking. I ditch my phone and use index cards with poor man’s lamination (i.e. packaging tape on both sides) so I can take my poems on walks in drizzly weather.
Once you master short poems it is much easier to try to try longer ones with some newfound confidence. Find out what techniques work for you, and if you want to do extremely long poems then break them down into parts.
Before I go on I must warn you about certain short poems. Just because something is short does not mean it is easy to memorize. In the beginning of Ben Lerner’s monograph The Hatred of Poetry (which I recommend!) he remembers trying recite Marianne Moore’s very short 1967 version of “Poetry” (which is mostly the first three lines of her 1919 version) for a class assignment. He failed while his classmates who chose longer poems succeeded because Moore’s poem has several things working against it:
it is about disliking something,
it is phrased awkwardly, and
there are no images to hold it together in a young boy’s memory.
The poems I have chosen for you will be much easier than “Poetry” because they have strong imagery, rhythm and/or rhyme.
I would love to hear if you have any poems you find short and easy to remember. I am sure they would be helpful to other readers.
When I went to the Dallas Catholic Imagination Conference I met
who had written this elegant 6-line poem, “Unsaid” which, like Moore’s ”Poetry”, was a much longer poem that was greatly edited over time.“Unsaid” by Dana Gioia
So much of what we live goes on inside–
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.(From Interrogations at Noon published by Graywolf Press, 2001. Used with permission of the poet.)
I find this easier to remember than Mark Strand’s because it is in iambic pentameter with no metrical substitutions2, and it has a rhyme scheme, albeit a bit irregular one: AXBBAX. Notice how lines 2 and 6 do not seem to rhyme; however, it is only the second line, with “aches”, that has no rhyme at all. The last line rhymes with “unsaid” which appears in the middle of the poem and is also the title.
This makes “aches” more conspicuous as the sole unrhymed end word. The enjambment creates a hinge that opens a trapdoor into deeper poignancy: “tongue-tied aches/ Of unacknowledged love”. With a long A and the crack of the hard C, “aches” evokes an unsaid rhyme: “breaks” — for isn’t that what happens to a heart when love goes unacknowledged? What are the things we wish we could have said but are now too late? Do we keep too much to ourselves in order to not feel pain, only to make it worse and irreparable later on? This poem is about the burden of regret, but not only that, this is a counsel without condescension. As indicated by the first person plural “we”, the counselor is sitting with the reader. Only the last sentence, asks the you to consider something. Perhaps we should change our lives.
I’m curious about your thoughts on Mark Strand’s poem in relation to Dana Gioia’s poem and how they might speak to each other in exploring the tension between love and grief.
A Natural Occurrence of Short Poems
During the month of April the brief greenish-gold of the trees flourishes near my home.
“Nothing Gold can Stay” by Robert Frost
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.(Public domain)
Recently one of my kids recited this Frost poem for me. She learned it at school! (Yay, teachers!)
Fire and Ice by Robert Frost
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.(Public domain)
When my kids were a tad younger, I could recite this poem upon seeing a bird perched above us. Snow weather or sun weather, it didn’t matter.
“Snow Weather” by Sally Thomas
A falcon on a wire
Against the laden sky
Scanned his brown empire
With a black-ice eye.Nothing beneath him stirred
In that sunless instant,
But my heart, for a keen eyed bird
Blind to me, or indifferent.(From Motherland published by Able Muse Press, 2021. Used with permission of the poet.)
It reminds me of this one by Tennyson — also good for reciting to children if the bird of prey decides to act.
“The Eagle” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.(Public domain)
And while we are looking up…
“My Heart Leaps Up” by William Wordsworth
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.(Public domain)
While we are on Wordsworth, here is a short song in ballad meter. It has a lullaby quality to it with its ABAB CDCD scheme and alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter.
“A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” by William Wordsworth
A slumber did my spirit seal
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.(Public domain)
Dickinson and the Short Lyric
Being the humble folk we are, my youngest and I memorized this one together last year:
“I’m Nobody” by Emily Dickinson
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you - Nobody - too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Dont tell! they'd banish us - you know!How dreary - to be - Somebody!
How public - like a Frog -
To tell your name - the livelong June -
To an admiring Bog!(Public domain)
And it should surprise nobody that our house is littered with books.
“There is No Frigate like a Book (1286)” by Emily Dickinson
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –(Public domain)
Power of the Image
Oh, the Imagists. I have to admit, they aren’t my favorite but one of my daughters likes this one. I think it speaks to her affection for chickens.
The Red Wheelbarrow By William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens(Public domain)
I’ve heard so many references to this Ezra Pound poem that I probably should just commit it to memory. It’s just a couplet anyway.
In a Station at the Metro by Ezra Pound
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.(Public domain)
Speaking of Couplets
I have an epigram by Ben Jonson for my author friends:
“Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my Book in hand,
To read it well: that is, to understand.”(Public domain)
And one about the fickleness of fashion from Robert Herrick:
“Thus times do shift, each thing his turn does hold;
New things succeed, as former things grow old.”(Public domain)
And here’s John Dryden being funny but also somewhat dreadful:
Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she's at rest – and so am I.(Public domain)
And Other Short Forms
We have an extraordinary number of sea animal stuffed animals in the house. This playful triolet by C.K. Chesterton is perfect for us. Since this form has two lines that repeat in a pattern, there are actually fewer lines to memorize.
Triolet by G. K. Chesterton
I wish I were a jelly fish
That cannot fall downstairs;
Of all the things I wish to wish
I wish I were a jellyfish
That hasn't any cares
And doesn't even have to wish
'I wish I were a jellyfish
That cannot fall downstairs.'(Public domain)
If you ever wanted to impress your friends with your poetic memory and wicked math skilz then this limerick by British mathematician Leigh Mercer is for you:
A dozen, a gross, and a score
Plus three times the square root of four
Divided by seven
Plus five times eleven
Is nine squared and not a bit more.
For those who are ready for longer poems
My friend
organized a community-created anthology of poems worthy of committing to memory.
And Tara challenged people to recite some poems on video, and as a person who loves a good challenge I produced this video on the fly, reciting some Teasdale on a rainy day.
If you feel like watching someone driving instead of walking, check out my friend
reciting “Do Not Be Ashamed” by Wendell Berry. He has more driving recitations on his X feed.Putting politics aside, this performance (and set up) of The Iliad is quite entertaining.
You can do it!
You can memorize a poem!
I hope this helps some of you who have been intimidated by memorization. It’s really wonderful once you get the hang of it. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate National Poetry Month.
Be well, my friends.
I’d love to hear from you!
What poem do you want to try memorizing?
Do you have any poems I didn’t mention that are short and easy to remember?
Do you have any tips or advice for people who want to perform poetry in public?
Was this helpful?
Why am I coming to poetry so late? This is why:
How to Kill a Poet
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Although one could argue that “Think” in the last line is stressed, thereby reciting the last line as a first foot trochaic substitution. I could say it aloud either way.
Oops-this is the correct poem. A poets lamentation on his dying cat.
When’er I felt my towering fancy fail
I stroked her ears, her head, her tail
And as I stroked improved her dying son from the sweet notes of her melodious tongue
Her purrs and mews so evenly kept time
She purred in meter and mewed in rhyme
When I was young I memorized Tennyson's Crossing the Bar, which is short and very easy to learn. W.B. Yeats' Lake Isle of Innisfree is a pretty easy one too.
I also do the copying out by hand and taping the poem to the kitchen cabinet. What I do is read a line out loud, then close my eyes and try to repeat it without looking. I keep doing that until I can say the line without making a mistake. Then I do that for the next one and say the first and second line together. It really helps to get the kids involved. They remember faster than I do and start correcting me.
I once saw a video of an actor talking about tips and tricks for memorizing her lines. She said she'd write down the first letter of every word in a line and then use them as a memory aid. First she'd look at the line, then she'd look at the page with just the list of letters and usually it wasn't too hard to remember each word as she looked at the initial letters. Eventually she'd get to where she could do it without the list of letters.