I don't have a lot of regrets, but I have a few. I regret not learning a second language to the point where I can converse. I regret not learning to swim, and I regret giving up the violin. (Though my violin teacher might have thought that was the right decision.)
And I regret not memorizing more poetry. But that is a regret I can do something about, right now. And I intend to.
I've been thinking about this since last fall, when a friend mentioned in passing that he had taken to reciting the poetry of Robert Frost while on his daily walk. When he said this, the poems that I had been required to memorize as a teenager — all while I was in junior high, all under the same English teacher — came rushing back into my brain.
"Blue Girls," by John Crowe Ransom. The prologue to Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet." The opening lines of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" — not the translated version, but the wonderful Middle English version with "shoures soote" and "swich licour." So fun to recite with passion and verve, mystifying your friends!
There are poems I memorized on my own, too: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," which perhaps everyone has memorized. "Dogs and Weather," by Winifred Welles, which I loved as a very young girl, long before I had a dog of my own. And so many others — entertaining poems, rhyming poems, not necessarily important poems but poems that got stuck in my brain almost in spite of myself. (Nursery rhymes, for instance.) (And why have rhymes in the nursery? Hmmm.)
What is the benefit in memorizing poetry? Is there one? Is a benefit necessary?
For me, there is the pure pleasure of running through a poem in full, in my head, when I am away from a screen or a book. Or having a poem, or a few lines of a poem, pop into my head for no apparent reason — because something in life brings to mind those words. Or maybe just for the pleasure of the language, the entirely new way of looking at the world.
In an essay in the New Yorker some years ago, poet and novelist Brad Leithauser wrote of memorizing, "You take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen."
