Betzi’s Poetry Blog: How to memorize poems?
For me the memorization process parallels how I begin to experience poems. It takes time and patience to memorize a poem and requires lots of repeating of the lines of the poem, out loud.
There are 5 main aspects of the poem I focus on when I am memorizing:
- The content of the poem (including its tone—sarcastic, romantic, lyric, ironic, etc.)
- Imagery
- Sounds, especially rhyme
- Rhythm—whether it is metrical (has a beat) or is free verse
- Salience – whatever else leaps out at you about that particular poem
The content and tone are usually grasped quickly; it could be assumed that if you are going to the effort to memorize the poem it is because you like it a lot; therefore you are going to have a clear idea of what you think and feel the poem is saying and doing. (This idea will often change, or evolve, as I explore the poem.)
Once I’ve decided on an overall interpretation or sense of the poem, I focus on the imagery. Sometimes imagery will be like a portrait, a landscape, or a mini-narrative. If I can visualize the scene or the sequence of events of the poem, even in a vague way, it can give me a kind of map. And as I memorize or study a poem details and the overall import can become sharper.
If a poem is rhymed, slant or full, it is much easier for me to memorize. For example, the delicious slant rhyme between “crowd” and “bough” in Ezra Pound’s imagist masterpiece, In a Station of the Metro, ties the two lines of the couplet together and makes them resonate. Rhyme gives a poem reverb, and tuning in, literally, to the sound waves as they create a kind of echo can greatly aid memory. Other sound echoes, such as alliteration (as in Pound, the sound linkage between “black” and “bough”) and assonance, also aid the memorization process. (I like to memorize free verse poems as well, but with them, I find I have to rely much more on content and imagery.)
Rhythm is the pattern of stressed and unstressed or lesser stressed syllables in each line of the poem. For the most part, just noticing the alternation of beats and off-beats, or weak and stronger stresses in the flow of syllables suffices. (Ultimately, four levels of stress can be discerned, but more of that another time.) The best system for understanding the alternation of beats (or stresses) is elaborated by Derek Attridge, and the simplest manual explaining this most important aspect of poetry in English, is Meter and Meaning, by Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge.
Lastly, when memorizing, I make note of any salience, or anything from the poem seems outstanding to me. Going back to the Pound example, the metaphorical leap from faces to petals, is striking, and the follow-up leap between the darkness of the metro and the “wet, black bough” is striking as well. The concreteness of the adjectives, “wet” and “black” make the image vivid and easy to visualize. Much more could be said on this subject, but for starters, I hope these thoughts will prove to be helpful.
Ezra Pound: In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
1913