Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Memorizing Poetry

6/4/2018

4 Comments

 
Does anyone else remember “memory lines” from high school and before? In English classes, we chose the poems to memorize, up to an assigned number of lines. In social studies, we memorized the opening of the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble to the United States Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address. Having such bounty at my mental fingertips is a gift, for instance when I’m in the dentist’s chair wanting something to focus the mind.

Memorization went out of fashion years ago. Educators argued that it stifled creativity or analytical reasoning. Now people ask, why remember anything when you can look it up on your phone? I submit that the process of memorization exercises mental muscles, so to speak. It promotes gray matter and neuroplasticity. Creative connections draw on a supply of remembered material to connect.

When my late mother-in-law could no longer carry on a conversation, she loved to join in reciting Christopher Robin poems familiar since childhood. In a hopefully distant future, I’d like to think snippets of memorized poetry will still be with me after all else fades into oblivion. 
4 Comments
Lisa
6/4/2018 10:09:48 am

If I read it over once to refresh my memory, I could recite the Gettysburg address. Not sure I'd think of it at the dentist's tho. My mom can still recite many things, including parts of Beowulf, I think. Since she can speak Swedish, she can recite it with a pretty genuine Middle Ages cadence. She's always pleased with herself too.

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Sarah link
6/4/2018 02:54:57 pm

Beowulf! I love it! I can get a lot further into The Rime of the Ancient Mainer than anyone ever wants to hear. My brother and I got going on the Gettysburg Address a few months back and, between us, managed most of it.

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James Phillips
6/4/2018 04:24:13 pm

For me in the North of England it was the poems of Wilfred Own, especially "Dulce et Decirum Est."

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Sarah link
6/5/2018 08:27:31 am

Wow, I just read that "Dulce et Decirum Est" for the first time. Powerful. Hadn't heard of it or Wilfred Own before. I wonder why the difference in choice of poems. Certain most of ours were from England. Perhaps in the Cold War era, American kids weren't supposed to be anti-war. War could be sad ("In Flanders Fields" by Canadian John McCrae) but not awful. And perhaps because the U.S. came into WWI late in the war, gas wasn't as big a part of the American war experience.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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