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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.
Too many to name or to remember, but most of them are short. Of the longer ones I've memorized, I can think of:
-The opening paragraph of The Canterbury Tales' General Prologue
-Keats' To Autumn
-Frost's Design
-Yeats' Meru, A Dialogue of Self and Soul, Sailing to Byzantium, Byzantium
-Wallace Stevens' Plain Sense of Things and Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
-Byron's She Walks in Beauty
-James Merrill's Christmas Tree
-Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV, Forbidden Mourning, Air and Angels
-Herbert's Prayer (I)
Surely others I'm forgetting
Hello, Morpheus. Good to see you back here.
I've memorized a great many long poems, including: "Prufrock", "The Highwayman", "The Ballad of East and West", "To His Coy Mistress", and "Jim Bludso", as well as many shorter poems. I probably couldn't rattle off all the long ones on command, but in about 3 or 4 minutes of study I could.
Thanks, Ecurb.
I took "memorize" to mean "I could rattle them off on command." I don't know if I'd want to try to memorize a poem as long as Prufrock!
I've been able to rattle all of those long poems off on command at one time or another in my life -- but for some of them I'd need a quick refresher (I can still do Prufrock, especially if I go over it in my head one time before reciting). Of course I learned "To His Coy Mistress" in the hope that it would prove "useful" to me. It didn't (but I can still recite it on command).
I learned long poems by heart when I worked as a busboy in Yosemite National Park, years ago. Every trip back to the bus closet, I'd memorize the next two lines.
Yeah, that makes sense. I'm sure as the years go by you lose the ability to rattle off poems you memorized a decade or two ago if you haven't recited it in years.
Ha! That's a good methodical way of memorizing poems! I've had to make monthly trips to the doctor for over a decade, and started taking poetry books with me and memorizing poems while I was there. Gives me something to do those times where they're behind schedule and I'm in the waiting room for 1.5 hours.
YesNo
I can recall Wordworth's "I wandered lonely as a cloud" and a few others. I can still quote bits of Hamlet and Julius Caesar (even though it is nearly 50 years since I read them.)
Can I for a moment be more light-hearted? I remember an anonymous poem written back in the late 1960s/early 1970s that copied the style of the classic Twinkle twinkle little star poem.
Twinkle twinkle little star
Now we know exactly what you are
Nuclear furnace in the sky
You'll turn to ashes by and by.
Tick tick pulsating star
Nucelo-magnetic resonating ball
Making monkeys of us all.
Twinkle twinkle quasi-star
Now we wonder what you are
With such indecent energy
Didn't God say you couldn't be?
Hard to believe, but Elliot's Wasteland. Struck such a cord with me in college that I memorized it for a class and have kept it in the mental vault ever since.
I'm working on memorizing a lot of Swinburne, largely because he's very easy to memorize. I'm working on some Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane as well. I can get by on some Hopkins and Tennyson.
In fact, I think it's fair to say I can recite a lot of The Bridge and Voyages by Crane.
Le Bateau ivre (Rimbaud, 100 verses)
Le Dormeur du Val (Rimbaud)
Ma Bohème (Rimbaud)
Les chercheuses de Poux (Rimbaud)
À la Musique (Rimbaud)
Les Conquérants de l’Or (Hérédia)
Les Conquérants (Hérédia, 800 verses)
Au Lecteur (Baudelaire)
Bénédiction (Baudelaire)
L’Albatros (Baudelaire)
Élévation (Baudelaire)
Correspondances (Baudelaire)
J’aime le souvenir de ces époques nues … (Baudelaire)
Le Flacon (Baudelaire)
L’Invitation au Voyage (Baudelaire)
À une Passante (Baudelaire)
Le Voyage (Baudelaire, 125 verses)
El Desdidacho (Nerval)
Dans les Bois (Nerval)
Fantaisie (Nerval)
Mon rêve familier (Verlaine)
L’Isolement (Lamartine)
Le Lac (Lamartine)
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Amor, cuantos Caminos (Pablo Neruda)
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Ulysses (Tennyson)
I sometimes hold it half a sin … (Tennyson)
A few stanzas of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
To be or not to be (Shakespeare)
Fear no more (Shakespeare)
Dulce et Decorum (Owen)
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Я вас любил – I loved you (Pushkin)
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In Latin – first five verses of the Aenid (Virgil)
I love memorizing poetic texts.
Poem (303) by Emily Dickinson stuck with me for three years, I eventually wrote this song based on quotes from it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1v7...&feature=share