Found an excellent article by Michael Knox Beran entitled In Defense of Memorization. And after reading it I took 15 minutes to memorize Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
I’m finding that “She Walks in Beauty” is not sticking very well in my mind. Perhaps it’s because the poem didn’t really mean anything to me (emotionally) when I started memorizing it — I just chose a poem and got to work. With “Stopping by Woods,” however, there’s a particular setting of the poem to music that I heard as a child and still lingers somewhere back there in my memory, so it was really easy to memorize and it’s sticking quite well. Does this mean I should only memorize poetry I love? I suppose so, and in the case of poetry which I’m not familiar with, I can read it over and over again first to get acquainted and then decide if it’s worth my time to memorize it.
[tags]memorization, poetry, Robert Frost[/tags]