When this summer I accepted the madcap challenge to learn 100 poems in a year, I certainly didn't imagine it would be a life-changing experience. Indeed, having never attempted anything remotely like this before - I got all the way through school and university without learning a single poem - I'm not really sure what I expected at all.
OK, I'll admit I rather liked the idea of taking poems into my mind as one might pluck apples from a tree, a sort of intellectual kleptomania. And because it was conceived of as a race, I guess there was also a tinge of macho competitiveness. And yes, I suppose it did cross my mind that reciting poetry would be a sly way to seduce the ladies.
But those shady motives feel rather redundant now. Six months ago a friend and I drew up a list of our favourite poems and having been going strong ever since. I am half way through, but I'm no longer doing this simply because I want to reach the end point. It's been all about falling in love with poetry again, and discovering it as if for the first time.
Right from the start I have found that memorizing revives things that have become stale or deadened. Donne is a case in point. Some years ago I murdered him with an M.Phil and left him crammed into his own "pretty roomes"; but as soon as I learned The Good Morrow he came alive again, back with all his old swagger and charm.
What's more, I am beginning to make sense of poems that I've always found tricky. The tightness and compactness of Shakespeare sonnets, for instance, dictates that, unless you are one of those freaks of nature who can soak this stuff up effortlessly, they take a depressingly long time to learn. But once you have them by heart - which is of course by head - the poems stay with you, resonating in what Seamus Heaney calls the echo chambers of the mind. They unfurl and display their self-delighting inventiveness: time and again, walking down the street, I have little insights and epiphanies.
Its just as illuminating when poems surprise you by how easy they are to learn, for this tells you something about how they're made. Take Gerard Manley Hopkins. So carefully interlocked are his rhythms and rhymes that if you can remember the opening line your mind fetches the rest back. His craft is a kind of trellising or embroidery.
So in a way to commit to memory is to study, but since you don't need a special jargon or any other paraphernalia, it's a very democratic kind of education. And its very, very good fun.
A list of what I have learned so far is set out below. I've another fifty-odd to go, but a handful have been axed from the original list so there are a few spaces left. To that end I'd be fascinated to know what, if you were doing this, you would learn.
Shakespeare sonnets 18, 30, 60, 116. Donne Death be not proud, The Canonization, The Good-morrow, The Sun Rising. Herbert Love (III). Marvell To His Coy Mistress. Lovelace To Althea from Prison. Herrick Gather ye rosebuds. Milton Sonnet 16. Blake London, The Human Abstract, The Tiger. Wordsworth Surprised by joy, and passages from The Ruined Cottage and Tintern Abbey. Byron She walks in beauty. Shelley Mont Blanc (V), Ozymandias. Gerard Manley Hopkins The Windhover, No worst, there is none, As kingfishers catch fire, Gods Grandeur. Housman Into my heart on air that kills. Yeats The Lake Isle of Innisfree, The Second Coming. TS Eliot Prufrock, La figlia che piange. Auden Musee des beaux arts. Muir The Confirmation. Frost The Road Not Taken. ee cummings the great advantage of being alive, i thank you god. Larkin Deceptions, Sad Steps, MCMXIV. Gunn Seesaw. Plath Words. Hughes The Hawk in the Rain, The Thought Fox. Hill September Song. Heaney Postscript, From the Frontier of Writing.
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