Another Jabberwocky-er checking in, funny that so many people have memorised something which contains so many nonsense words.
Also maggie and millie and molly and may by e. e. cummings. It’s short but it doesn’t all rhyme/scan.
Something really stupid by John Hegley that I can’t remember the title of:
The shadow that my shed sheds
I call a shedow
A snake doesn’t cast much of a shadow
It can shed its skin though
Unlike a shed
I, tpp, remember the beginning of Jabberwocky. Martin Gardner, in “The Annotated Alice”, notes that a lot of people can remember at least the beginning without having made a conscious effort to.
I also remember parts of Coleridge’s poetry (“Xanadu”, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”) without having tried to.
What kills me, though, is that I can remember parodies a lot better than the originals. I remember poems from Bored of the Rings and not the Tolkien orifinals. And I can recall almost the entire poem “The Rating” (a parody of “The Raven”) from Mad magazine from decades ago:
*Once upon a weeknight weary
As I sat with vision bleary
Watching TV on the set I bought from Gimbels’ store
As I sat with vision burning
Suddly I was discerning
Certain shows were not returning
Shows I’d seen just weeks before
“Hey!” I said, “What goes on with all these shows I’ve seen just weeks before?
Are they gone forevermore?”
What poetry can I recite by heart?
By Heart???
Well, Baracuda of course, and most of Crazy on You.
I can’t believe it took 22 Replies for someone to think to post this joke! 
Well, in addition to a few poems already been mentioned in this thread… I do a nice oral rendition of
Langston Hughes’ Mother to Son
T.S. Eliot’s Macavity the Mystery Cat
James Weldon Johnson’s The Creation
Maya Angelou’s Phenomenol Woman
A.E. Houseman’s To An Athlete Dying Young – which I learned for a eulogy for a friend who died in an elevator car accident.
I don’t consider myself a lover of poetry by any means but learning The Creation at 17 was a heck of an achievement.
A bunch of Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, Ogden Nash and Bennet Cerf (all of which I categorize as “light verse” rather than “poetry” because I had a snob for an English teacher), some Dorothy Parker (also light verse, my favorite being Resume’), a good-sized chunk of Hamlet, a smallish chunk of MacBeth, about two minutes’ worth of Julius Caesar, and Teo Torriate, an archaic Japanese poem that was set to music by Queen.
Hey, baby! 
You can count me as one. Give me five or ten minutes and I could probably have the whole thing memorized.
That’s one I memorized virtually without trying, because my Dad always used to recite it at Boy Scout campfires, and I heard it so often it’s stuck in my head.
Supposedly, when I was a little kid (maybe around 4 or 5?) I could recite all of The Night Before Christmas (a.k.a. A Visit from St. Nicholas), but now I don’t remember remembering it, though a fair amount of it is still stuck in my head.
I once tried to commit Coleridge’s Kubla Khan to memory. I don’t think I got it all the way, but that’s another one I have at least the first few lines of permenantly embedded in my head.
In senior year high school German class, our final exam was to memorize and recite Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling, and I still remember the first stanza or so.
The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert Service
The Lorax by Dr Seuss
The Battle of Trenton by Mike Agranoff
“Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.”
Am I the only one who spent 3rd grade memorizing The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere?
I can do Shelley’s “To Night” and Yeats’ “Stolen Child,” but only because I set “To Night” to music and several people have done “Stolen Child.” I doubt I could recite them without running through the music in my head.
I had to learn 14 lines from Hamlet last year for English; I might still remember them…
My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time
And makes as healthful music. It is not madness
That I have uttered. Bring me to the test,
And I the matter will reword, which madness
Would gambol from.
…dammit, that’s all I remember. 
if someone put a gun to my head, my neurons could probably fire up all of ANNABEL LEE
There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale. I first came across it in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles story of the same name (the one with the automated house still running after a nuclear war kills the family) and it stuck with me. Actually, I became quite the Teasdale fan and can recite more of her work than just that, but There Will Come Soft Rains has been with me since 7th grade.
The Owl & The Pussycat by Edward Lear. When I was in 5th grade way back forever ago, the school library had a copy of Lear’s Book of Absolute Nonsense, a collection of his limericks, poems, stories, etc. I used to love that book, check it out all the time and The Owl & The Pussycat was easily memorized. I finally found a copy of it at Barnes & Noble a few months ago.
I used to be able to recite Poe’s The Bells but I’d get stuck now, I think. That was an annoying poem to recite anyway, unless you like saying “the bells” over and over for thirty seconds straight :dubious:
Like most everyone else, I can usually remember * Jabberwocky*.
I can also get through much Terrence, This is Stupid Stuff by Housman, my current favorite poem. I’m best with the last stanza, but, depending on the wind, I can often do big chunks of the rest of it, too.
Ogden Nash’s The Bat and The Lama. Nash was one of America’s greatest poets, criminally overlooked because he wrote light verse.
William Carlos Williams’s This is Just to Say. An utterly brilliant poem, though it’s free verse and not rhymed. I can also stumble through his The Red Wheel Barrow.
I can usually reconstruct Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro.
The first two lines of the prologue of the Canterbury Tales – in Old English.
The Merry Brown Thrush, which I learned for my kindergarten graduation and can still recite.
A friend of mine has memorized The Ballad of Eskimo Nell. I envy him.
Invictus - William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
And buckets of Frost and Shakespeare…
But *The Jumblies * by Edward Lear is my favorite.
Rilke’s Panther, in German. Partly because it’s so beautiful and also because it fitted so beautifully (and got recited) in the movie: “Awakenings” with Robert de Niro.
The Panther
His gaze, going past those bars, has got so misted
with tiredness, it can take in nothing more.
He feels as though a thousand bars existed,
and no more world beyond them than before.
Also chunks of Shakespeare. If you’re 17, you’d be surprised how often some smart-ass says “to be or not to be”, which gives you the chance to be an uber-smartass and go:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
:rolleyes:
What I’m *still really * proud of, though, is how much I can recite from Drs P (A Dutch guy who can’t sing to save his life, but is outstanding with rhymes) and the child- poetry by the Dutch writer Annie M.G. Schmidt. Most of her poems are excellent singing-material and they stick to your memory like a yellow Post-it-note to a fridge.
From the “Schaap Veronica” series
De dames Groen keerden terug naar huis en deden aan de lijn
Zij aten rauwe bietensla met tranen en azijn.
(translation: the ladies Green went home and minded their weight;
they ate raw beetrootsalad with tears and vinegar)
One of the most moving things written in English, IMHO.
My submission is thus:
There’s too many kids in this tub
There’s too many elbows to scrub
I just washed a behind
I’m sure wasn’t mine
There’s too many kids in this tub
I addition to Rilke’s “Der Panther” I can recite Goethe’s “Prometheus”.
I used to know several others, including the “Zauberlehrling” mentioned by Thudlow Boink, but I have neglected my training in recent years.
tap tap Is this thing on?
ahem
*Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe
Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite and claws that catch
Beware the jubjub bird and shun
The frumious bandersnatch
He took his vorpal sword in hand
Long time the manxome foe he sought
So rested he by the tumtum tree
And stood awhile in thought
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock with eyes of flame
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood
And burbled as it came
One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back
‘And has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms my beamish boy!
Oh frabjous day! Calloo callay!’
He chortled in his joy
Twas brillig and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe*
curtsey
Loads of Robert Service, it’s practically a requirement for Sourdough status.
This is the Law of the Yukon, and ever she makes it plain,
“Send me not your foolish and feeble, but send me your strong and your sane.
Strong for the red rage of battle, sane, for I harry them sore,
Send me men girt for the combat, send me men who are grit to the core.
Swift as a panther in triumph, fierce as a bear in defeat.
Sired of a bulldog parent, steeled in the furnace heat.
Send me the best of your breeding, send me your chosen ones,
Them I will take to by bosom, them I will call my sons.
Them I will gild with my treasures, them I will glut with my meat;
But the others, the misfits, the failures – I trample them under my feet.
Dissolute, dammned, and despairful, crippled and palsied and – slain.
Ye who would send me the spawn of your gutters, go! Take back your spawn again!”
It sounds really really good declaimed on a mountaintop, honest. I’ll spare you the whole thing, as it loses impact away from the proper setting.
There’s a cry out from the loneliness –
Oh listen, Honey, listen!
Do you hear it, do you fear it, you’re a-holding of me so?
You’re a-sobbing in your sleep, dear
your lashes, how they glisten
Do you hear the Little Voices all a-begging me to go?
When the squirrels start talking back, and they make sense, it’s time to head back in from the bush. OTOH, the voices referred to above are the reason I spent part of Saturday helping excavate a 4x4 from a moose swamp.
*There was a woman, and she was wise, woefully wise was she,
And she was old, so old, but her years all told were scarce a score and three,
And she knew by heart, from finish to start, the Book of Iniquity.
There is no hope for such as I, on earth or yet in heaven
Unloved I live, unloved I die, unpitied, unforgiven,
A loathed jade, I ply my trade, unhallowed and unshriven.*
I just like that one.
A little Spike Milligan
A thousand hairy cannibals sitting down to lunch
Gobble gobble glup glup munch munch munch.
Like Zoe, I remember “When You Are Old” by Yeats:
*When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep * (etc., etc.)
(I memorized it unintentionally, through repeated readings. I was struck by its perfection.)
My high school English teacher (bless her heart) made us select and memorize a couple of poems, so I went with “To Lucasta, Going to the Wars” by Richard Lovelace:
…Yet this inconstancy is such
As thou too shalt adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not Honour more.
and “since feeling is first” by E.E. Cumming:
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world… (etc., etc.)
I can also remember most of (maybe all of) “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, just through repeated readings.
Lastly, I can remember “Swamp Witch”, by that great American poet Jim Stafford:
Black water Hattie lived back in the swamp
Where the strange green reptiles crawl
Snakes hang thick from the cypress trees
Like sausage on a smokehouse wall
Where the swamp is alive with a thousand eyes
And all of 'em watching you
Stay off the track to Hattie’s Shack in the back of the Black Bayou… (etc., etc.)
(That one comes in handy on Halloween.)
Those are the only complete poems that come to mind, though I can remember verses and snippets from many others.