Poems you know by heart

I know several poems by heart. They are:

La Belle Dame Sans Mercy (John Keats)
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad (Robert Browning)
At Touggourt (Aleister Crowley)
The Cool Web (Robert Graves)
Corinna's Going a-Maying (Robert Herrick)
I wandered lonely as a Cloud (William Wordsworth)
Sonnet 151 (William Shakespeare)

And I know a fragment from The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1 Lines 148 to 158.

Do you know poems by heart?

I've memorised a bunch by Emily Dickinson just through reading her a few times and on the virtue of her poems being sort of mnemonic in rhythm themselves. Aside from that there are a few short ones by Blake, Marlowe's Shepherd, an awful lot of Prufrock and The Wasteland and maybe La Belle Dame Sans Mercy as well (or at least most of it).

It's easier with musical accompaniment though and I've memorised hundreds of song lyrics.

Conscious memorisation of poems is something I've been meaning to dedicate some time to but have never gotten around to actually doing.

Cremation of Sam MaGee (Service)
Casey at the Bat (Some Guy)
The Children's Hour (Longfellow)


These are 'by heart' in that I can recite about 80% of them accurately and try to do so when some line of conversation causes me to recall them.

The first two are remnants of a middle school spent rummaging through the text book rather than listening to the teacher. The last was read to me by my mother as a child and can probably make any parent choke up.

Robert Frost, "Fire and Ice"
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring and Fall"
Edward Lear, "The Owl and the Pussycat"
Gayatri Mantra

I know many song lyrics, some I wish I could forget.

I also know a few nursery rhymes.

Spring and Fall might be my favourite poem YesNo, definitely first in line for memorisation.

It is a good poem. I think I'm going to try to memorize a few poems as you suggested earlier. I don't know which ones.

I know Shelley's Ozymandias: a meaningful poem to me. I might be able to come up with most of Byron's Destruction of Sennacherib, which is not as meaningful but still fun and gorgeous sounding (only Byron could make horse spit beautiful). And whether I like it or not, I'm stuck with the huge chunk of Longfellow's Midnight Ride of Paul Revere they made me memorize in Elementary School. Make it stop! Make it stop! Oh God, somebody make it stop!

I know several hundred by heart, but the most useful in English is probably Ulysses by Tennyson.

I know many of Poe's by heart, particularly "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," "To the River," "Alone," etcetera. I'm working on "Ulalume." I also know many of TS Eliot's poems by heart, as well as Emily Dickinson, plus a few others here and there.

Philip Larkin These be the verse "They f**k you up your mum and dad"

Betjeman Sun and Fun: the song of the Nightclub Proprietoress "I'm dying now and done for/ What on earth was all the fun for?/ For I'm old and ill and terrified and tight".

Very many. We were given a multitude of memory tasks in school: tables, catechism, poetry. Many are poems like Chi mi na Mor-bheannan. Some I have forgotten bits of. One of my party pieces used to be to recite Tam o Shanter in its entirety. But it is long time since I did that.

I have memorized few poems by Robert Frost, E.A. Poe, W.B. Yeats, and parts of Dante. I would love to be able to recite either more Dante or Beowulf from memory.

I have recited Hilaire Belloc's Matilda at a party following it up with Sarch Byng

Of Sarah Byng the tale is told
When she was only twelve years old
She couldn't read or write a line.
Her sister, Jane, though barely nine
Could spout the catechism through
AND part of Matthew Arnold too,
While little Bill, who came between,
Was quite unnaturally keen
On Athalie by Jean Racine.
But not so Sarah, not so Sal.
She was a MOST uncultured gal.

There I've still got it by heart.

Brilliant JB. Now that's poetry.

Isn't it just? Lytton Strachey was at a performance of Iolanthe. He turned to his neighbour and said "That's what I call poetry" when the chorus sang:

To say she is his mother is an utter bit of folly!
Oh, fie! Our Strephon is a rogue!
Perhaps his brain is addled, and it’s very melancholy!
Taradiddle, taradiddle, tol lol lay!

I can also recite by heart large swathes of Gilbert and Sullivan.