What poetry can you recite by heart?

Cafe Society
41

The longest poem I know is Poe’s “The Raven”. I also used to know “Annabelle Lee”, but it’s slipped from my mind.

Second longest is Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee”. Also by Service, “My Madonna”. I’m inadvertently memorizing parts of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”, but that one’s complicated by having the exact same meter as “Annabelle Lee” (“The moon never beams withoug bringing me dreams of the dangerous Dan McGrew…” You see the problem).

By Frost, I know “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (made very easy by the rhyme scheme; try it), “The Road Less Travelled”, and “Fire and Ice” (but all cosmologists are required to learn that one ;)).

Like so many others, I know “Jaberwocky”, the whole thing, and can even tell you what most of the words mean. I’m quite content to be Zjestika’s and/or saramamalana’s high school boyfriend.

From Shakespeare, I know Marc Antony’s eulogy of Caesar, and Prospero’s renuciation of his powers. I keep on meaning to also learn some of Hamlet’s soliloquies and the Weird Sisters’ incantation, too, but just haven’t yet.

I can recite the Prologue of Canterbury Tales in Middle (not Old) English, up through “Then longen folks to goen on pilgrimages”. I used to know more, but I can only pull up bits and pieces after that.

From Tolkien, I can give you the “Spell of the Ring”, “Strider”, “The Road Goes Ever On”, and most of “Far Over Misty Mountains Cold”. I used to also have “Oliphaunt” memorized, but I’ve since lost the large-scale structure of it.

Emily Dickenson’s “Since I Could not Stop for Death”. I went through a phase where I was facinated by poems about death, and learned this at about the same time as I learned Poe.

Langston Hughe’s “We real cool”. I might also be able to stumble through “A Dream Deferred”, but don’t count on it.

By Ogden Nash, “Fleas” (the world’s shortest poem), “The Dog”, and “The Cow”, as well as “Purple Cow”.

Myriad Shel Silverstein poems, including but not limited to “The Walrus got Braces”, “Hug-o-War”, “Rats”, “Boa Constrictor”, “Ridiculous Rose”, and “The Fourth”. I’d love to learn “Sick”, too, but again, the lack of large-scale structure makes it very difficult.

Further in the “love to learn” department, I really ought to get a handle on some T. S. Eliott (“Wasteland”, say), and perhaps someday when I’m retired I’ll give Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” a go.

42

There are exactly two poems I know by heart:

The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.
They lay. They rotted.
They turned around occassionally.
Bits of flesh dropped off them from time to time.
And sank into the pool’s mire.
They also smelt a great deal.
Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings
Greenbridge, Essex
*Oh freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotches on a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindelwurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don’t! *
Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz

43

A bunch of Shakespeare… the 18th Sonnet and Prospero’s terrific “we are such stuff as dreams are made on” speech, to name two. I don’t think I have a list.

I’m a little out of practice, but if I looked it over a few times I bet I could do Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock again.

44

Does “Boy Named Sue” by Shel Silverstein count?

45

Chronos. ‘We Real Cool’ is Gwendolyn Brooks, not Hughes. Catchy little poem-- and short, like many of Hughes’.

46

Now hollow fires burn out to black,
And lights are guttering low.
Square your shoulders, lift your pack,
And leave your friends, and go.

Oh never fear, man, nought’s to dread,
Look not left nor right:
In all the endless road you tread
There’s nothing but the night.
—A.E. Houseman, “A Shropshire Lad”

47

Lots and lots.

Jabborwocky, sure–any chimp can memorize that. I’ve still got The Walrus and the Carpenter firmly in my head, and I can dredge up You are Old, Father William given fifteen minutes, and I once briefly knew the first chapter of The Hunting of the Snark.

I didn’t realize that other people knew The Cremation of Sam McGee–I thought I was the only one dorky enough to learn it. It was in my little book I got on Outward Bound, fifteen years ago, and it’s stuck with me. I once knew Henry de la Glaciere, also by Robert Service, but I’ve forgotten all of it but the first stanza:

Said Henri de la Glaciere, unto his proud papa,
I want to take a wife, mon Pere. The Marquis laughed. “Aha!
And whose, my son?” he slyly said. But Henri, with a frown,
cried, “Fi, Papa! I mean, to wed! I want to settle down!”

Plenty of Shel Silverstein, who’s one of my idols: “The Razortail Wren,” “Oh, What a Day,” “Too many kids,” “My Beard Grows Down to my Toes,” “Sweet Marie,” “Lester Came to School,” and so forth.

Lots of e.e. cummings, including a trio of misanthropic sonnets: “pity this busy monster manunkind,” “there are possibly two and a half (or impossibly 3) individuals ever several fat thousand years,” and “when serpents bargain for the right to squirm.” I used to have a good two dozen of his poems to occupy me, but I’ve forgotten plenty of them.

Finally, I wrote lots of overwrought verse as a teenager, including a dozen or so sonnets. I’ve forgotten most of the poems, but sonnets provide an easy hook, and I remember most of those.

I love memorizing poetry: on long car drives, reciting the poems, playing around with word emphasis and emotion and rhythm, gives me something to do far more engaging than listening to crappy radio stations.

Daniel

48

Once you sing Shakespeare, you never forget it.

Sonnet 29 or, For Thy Sweet Love:
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope
With what I most enjoy contented least
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising
Haply I think on thee, and then my state
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings

Pretty song.

I also know another bit of a sonnet, and have Sense and Sensibility to blame for it.
“…Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove. Oh no, it is
an everfixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken…”

I’m really good at remembering the gist of a quote, but unless it’s put to song, or I just hear it many times, verbatim-ness doesn’t happen.

I love the rhythm of this - like
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea” (Thanks Douglas Adams!)

49

Oh, I also know a fair amount of “The Jumblies” by Edward Lear. The last stanza is my favorite:

And in twenty years they all came back,
In twenty years or more,
And every one said, “How tall they’ve grown!
For they’ve been to the lakes, and the Torrible Zone,
And the hills of the Chankly Bore!”
And they drank their health, and gave them a feast
Of dumplings made of beautiful yeast
And every one said, “If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a sieve,
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!”
Far and few, far and few
Are the lands where the Jumblies live
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue
And they went to sea in a sieve

50

I’m one of the people who completely memorized Jabberwocky by osmosis somehow without actually working at it.

Various bits of doggerel from Ogden Nash and others.

The only other poetry I have memorized is due to hearing musical settings of them.

The Owl and the Pussycat (kids’ record)
Richard Cory (No, not the Simon and Garfunkel version)
Der Erlkönig (by Goethe, in German, from the Schubert setting)

51

I used to know The Cremation of Sam McGee and Abdul A-bul-bul Amir, but I’ve forgotten most of them.

52

Hmm… There’s some Shakespeare, of course - Sonnet 116 is the one I can do most easily - “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments…” Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” which I actually memorized by constantly re-reading it when stuck in long drive-through lines (I keep books in my car.) I also have “The Road Less Traveled” - I never wanted to memorize it, but we sang it in choir, so I had no choice. I can’t do a lot of Tolkien, but I can do Sam’s song of courage pretty well, and the beginning of “Earendil was a mariner.” I can also do the poem from The Dark is Rising, all three verses.

Then there’s my absolute favorite limerick, by Edward Gorey

53

After that it goes

Bifel that in that sesoun on a day
In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Canterbury, with ful devout corage…

And that’s where I get stuck. I also still remember the 35 lines of the Miller’s Tale I memorized as an undergrad, and the first 14 lines of Troilus and Criseyde.

And I know enormous swaths of Shakespeare – really, too many to list. (In particular, I have most of Richard II committed to memory, thanks to a BA thesis and a production.)

I also remember most of the songs in Lord of the Rings, mostly because I’ve set a lot of them to music. (This is also how I can remember Donne’s “The Flea” and “Death be not proud,” Rosetti’s “Good Friday,” Herrick’s “The Daffodils,” Jonson’s “My Picture Left in Scotland,” and probably other stuff I’m forgetting.)

Oh, and I could probably recite A.A. Milne’s “King John’s Christmas” if I tried hard enough. :wink:

54

I’ve memorized tons of poems. Glancing through my copy of “Immortal Poems of the English Language”, I can recite offhand:

  • “Western Wind”
  • Shakespeare’s Sonnets - “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”, “No longer mourn for me when I am gone”, “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”, “No more be grieved at that which thou hast done”, “Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day” (my favorite!)
  • a few pages from the second act of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
  • “On my First Son” by Ben Jonson
  • “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by Wordsworth (the first poem I ever memorized) and “My Heart Leaps Up”
  • “Jenny Kissed Me” by Leigh Hunt
  • “Annabel Lee”
  • “Invictus”
  • “Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now” by A. E. Housman, and “When I was one-and-twenty”
  • “An Irish Airman Forsees His Death” by Yeats
  • “If”
  • “Richard Cory”
  • Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"
  • “An Immorality” by Ezra Pound
  • “Dulce et decorum est” by Wilfred Owen (I won a 4H trophy for the stirring rendition I did of this the summer before my senior year of high school)

… and probably a few others I’m forgetting.

I really, really like memorizing poetry, can you tell? :slight_smile:

55

My elementary school was named after Joyce Kilmer, and painted in the main hallway, right across from the lunchroom/gym was “The Tree”. After seeing it and reading it a couple times a day for seven years, I’ve got it pretty well ingrained.

“Stopping by woods on a snowy evening” was the first poem I had to memorize, in seventh grade english. I can also recite “The Road Not Taken”, 'cuz it’s cool, and “Birches”, because of a ridiculous amount of time spent studying it this past school year.

Others:
“Richard Cory”
Various by Shel Silverstein
Not quite poetry, but I can recite almost all of “Romeo and Juliet” by heart. Because I’m just a loser.

56

Quoth Askia:

scurries off to Google

Hm, I stand corrected. I’m not sure if I saw it misattributed to Hughes when I memorized it, or if I just mentally filed it away as “the sort of thing Langston Hughes would have written”.

Oh, and while I’m here, I’ll also add “No man is an island”, by John Dunn, and also a bit of doggeral about O’Ryan the Poacher, whose author I unfortunately don’t know (Googling seems to indicate that it was one Charles G. Halpine, but I can’t find anything definite). And this little ditty

which I’m pretty sure is Nash.

Also countless limericks, of course (including both the dirty and clean versions of the man from Nantucket), but limericks tend to spread memetically, to the point where it’s very hard to know whence they came.

57

good evening friends,

i remember two kiplings:

“gunga din”

you may talk of gin and beer
when you’re quartered safe out ‘ere,
and you’re sent to penny fights an’ aldershot it;
but when it comes to slaughter
you will do your work on water,
and you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of him that’s got it…
and "tommy’

i went into a public house to get a pint o’ beer
the publican he up an’ sez “we serve no redcoats here”
the girls behind the bar they laughed and giggled fit to die
i outs into the street again an’ to myself sez i:

it’s tommy this, and tommy that, an’ “tommy, go away”
but it’s “thank you, mister atkins” when the band begins to play—
the band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
it’s “thank you mister atkins,” when the band begins to play…

58

There are a fair number that I either know in their entirety or large sections of them:

Because I’m Canadian and have attended many Remembrance Day services, John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”:

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Dylan Thomas “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
Dylan Thomas “Fern Hill”
Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”

Robert Louis Stevenson, “Requiem” (mostly 'cause it’s so short I think)

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
There’s also some snippets of Yeats, “I shall arise now and go to Innisfree”, and the much mentioned Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, and to show that I’m not totally obsessed with the subject of mortality (although reviewing this list is a little disconcerting) I know chunks of “Jabberwocky” and “The highwayman came riding, riding, riding; the highwayman came riding up to the old inn door.”

59

I think I know the first 5 lines of everything, but I have special favorites.
My mother wrote a paper in night school when I was about 10, it was about this:

Let us go then, you and I, when evening is stretched out
against the sky
Like a patient anesthetized upon a table.

And I used to have a record of Joan Baez singing Lord Byron:

So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

And that’s my favorite.

60

Oh freddled gruntbuggly, thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee
Groop I implore thee, my foonting turlingdomes
And hooptiously drange me with spindly bindlewurdles
Or I will rend thee in the globberwarts with my blurglecruncheon, see if I don’t!

I tell you, I’m going to be taking this poem to my grave. :smiley: