Bookmark: Readers write about the poems they love and have committed to memory

Last month I wrote about memorizing poetry, and ever since then poems have been popping into my head. The alarming thing is, often I hear them in the voice of the cartoon character Bullwinkle.

You might remember "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show," which had a weekly segment in which Bullwinkle recited poetry. I'd not thought of this in years, but it came rushing back when a reader mentioned "The Daffodils," by William Wordsworth.

"I wandered lonely as a cloud / that floats on high o'er vales and hills." Is it possible not to hear this in Bullwinkle's voice?

In scores of other e-mails and letters, readers mentioned dozens, maybe hundreds of other poems.

Steve Beste didn't grow up memorizing poems but in an Introduction to Poetry class he teaches at Anoka-Ramsey Community College he asks students to memorize a poem of 14 lines.

"I tell them that this is something they will always have with them," he wrote. And he notes "that British soldiers in World War I often recited memorized poems in the trenches to pass the time."

The poems that Elizabeth Everitt of Lake Elmo has committed to memory come from the Bible. "I memorize Psalms," she wrote. "These are ancient words and when are spoken aloud come directly to me from the far past, speaking truth and knowledge."

Minneapolis writer Alison McGhee calls poems "the atomic bombs of literature — tiny but powerful beyond measure."

Her grandfather, "a farmer who didn't graduate high school, used to recite poems off the top of his head." McGhee has also memorized a few dozen poems. "I carry them in my heart. They are companions in the darkness, tiny lights guiding the way."

Several readers mentioned Robert W. Service, whose poems have strong cadence, rhyme and storytelling.

Norm Spilleth of Minneapolis said his favorite Service poem is "Blasphemous Bill":

"You know what it's like in the Yukon wild when it's 69 below / And the ice worms wriggle their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow."

This is a poem to recall during blizzards. Shoveling snow, Spilleth said, "is great fun with Robert Service."

Several readers mentioned Alfred Noyes' "The Highwayman," another poem with a dramatic story and pounding rhythm. "The wind was a torrent of darkness / among the gusty trees. / The moon was a ghostly galleon / tossed upon the cloudy seas."

As a child, Jan Machovsky of St. Louis Park bought an anthology of poetry and spent a summer "lying in the front yard reading and memorizing poems."

Now 79, "When I work in the yard I often recite poems in my head."

Several people mentioned how poems stick with them for decades — Mary MacDonald of St. Paul memorized poems in school and "60 years later, I can still recite them."

Retired teacher Melinda Lebowitz reports from St. Petersburg, Fla., that when she began volunteering at a nursing home, one resident in her 90s could still recite Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee," which she had memorized nearly 80 years before.

"It had become a part of her internal library," Lebowitz wrote. "We connected at that moment, kindred spirits."

And at age 86, Bill Morgan of Sartell, Minn., can still recite some of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," which he learned in high school.

"Memorization was taught to nourish the soul," he writes.

Bullwinkle would certainly agree.

Laurie Hertzel is the Star Tribune's senior editor for books.