I’ll start, If by Rudyard Kipling.
I want to memorize more Kino poems. Give me your favorites. I’m really looking for one with different themes than the Kipling poem.
Poetry you recite to yourself
I’ll start, If by Rudyard Kipling.
I want to memorize more Kino poems. Give me your favorites. I’m really looking for one with different themes than the Kipling poem.
I have lots.
Song of the Wandering Aengus; W.B. Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree; W.B. Yeats
Two Songs from a Play; W.B. Yeats
Ego Dominus Tuus; W.B. Yeats (particular fragments)
The Magi; W.B. Yeats
The Fisherman; W.B. Yeats (particular fragments)
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; T.S. Eliot (particular fragments)
The Waste Land; T.S. Eliot (particular lines)
Some Trees; John Ashbery (just a single line and the last two lines)
Chinese Whispers; John Ashbery (particular lines)
Buffalo Bill's; E.E. Cummings
Psalms I, XIX, XXIII, and XCI
A Divine Image; William Blake
Introduction to Endymion; John Keats (in particular "...therefore every morrow we are wreathing," etc.,.)
Black Maps; Mark Strand
The Poet; Noguchi, Yone
In a Station at the Metro; Ezra Pound
Silence; Marianne Moore
Remember; Christina Rossetti
Ulysses; Tennyson (certain portions)
The Palace of Art; Tennyson (certain portions)
Tiresias; Tennyson (certain portions)
I feel like I'm forgetting some, bit ironic.
I like it. A bit melodramatic, but the ending saves it.
>The Waste Land
>The Windhover (Hopkins)
>Sestina Altaforte (Pound)
>Various Dickinson pieces
>Ozymandias
>The Flea (Donne)
I ought to learn more really. My aim is something very long, maybe a Browning piece.
Impressive - lots of fragments of long pieces, which is great if they're parts that are most meaningful to you. Ever thought of memorising a long one in its entirety? Learning The Waste Land has noticeably improved my recall. And it's very fulfilling to recite in one go.
If true that's absolutely wack. You should record yourself reading it all from memory, I'd listen to it
>Impressive...Ever thought of memorizing a long one in its entirety?
I generally don't plan on memorization. When the poems really reach me, I memorize them without trying. I do check for accuracy however. So yea, the fragments I have memorized are all parts which reach me, and which I interject into real life casually—usually as commentary or a sort of anthem. I have thought about memorizing longer ones. Even though portions of The Waste Land resonate with me, I don't know if I'd want to memorize the entire thing. I find it a little too dark. Ashbery's Scheherazade would be a candidate for me (though it isn't that long). I would also like to finish off some of the one's I've started. There are several of Sappho's lyrics I would like to learn by heart, but those are not long; Also several speeches by characters in Aeschylus. Perhaps the Iliad would be a contender—follow in Euler's footsteps. I need to memorize a lot more of scripture and more haiku. I didn't write it down, but I know some court tanka by Oshikochi no Mitsune and Otomo Yakamochi as well as my favorite haikuists Kobayashi Issa and, of course, Matsuo Basho, but those are all short. Anyway, I'll definitely memorize more things, but for me it is a sporadic effort which comes in the fire of a moment and then burns forever. I'm not sure if I'll ever be the sort that just gets formal about things.
Apologies, I realise my original comment (which I wrote half asleep before bed) sounds very pragmatic, or as if I'm only approaching poetry recital for the purpose of mnemonic, "brain health", self-help or some other new psychological purpose. All of which I believe miss the purpose of poetry. I think the task of learning a long piece in its entirety is less about completion, than it is about being able to possess a poetic landscape which then reveals itself to you spontaneously in life - there are times I see something in the world, a scene or a detail, and I hear lines of The Waste Land in my head. It's as if the poem is spread out over everything, now that it exists in my mind, and forms a topography with the surfaces of my environment that I can explore, mix together, etc. Sometimes I'll receive only the rhythm of a line, not the content, and I either search for the right words, or I forget that and place my own in their absence - this is where learning poems vocally becomes instrumental in understanding structure, and begins to apply to our own poetry. I've only ever had this happen with a complete poem, whereas fragments have a tendency to fall into obsolescence. Of course this is highly subjective, this is my own experience. To put it more succinctly, it's like having a poetic schematic in my mind which begins to take on it's own character, and ultimately takes on value beyond pure recital.
Conversely, I think your attitude towards your memorised fragments shows a very poetic mind - in a way I envy your ability to see fragments as wholes. Poetry definitely dances around order and anarchy, in that while it creates structures, patterns and metres, it escapes itself in that very same form, since sense/meaning can be extracted from just a single phrase.
I suppose the most important thing is to approach it in the way that is most necessary to your own poetic mind.
Like the sound of your next projects, particularly Sappho and the Tanka (I've not heard those names before, so there's something for me to research). May it bring you a lot of joy, and meaning.
Hope I didn't sound glib in my first reply, or as if I was being snide about you not learning an entire piece.
I've memorized the entire of the Divine Comedy in the original Italian. Took me about 6 months to fully memorize.
If is weak, this is the best Kipling poem.
Why on God's green earth would you memorize that? How pitiful. It's not even his original poem. It has been modified to say Saxon where it once said "English." The poem, The Beginnings, was written in 1917 during WWI—probably after the death of his son during the war. Regardless, it's a pretty shit poem.
Queens - JM Synge.
Too many Hibernians in this thread already.
>Too many Hibernians
Why does that matter?
I went and read it. Absolutely excellent. I can see why you'd recite it. It is exceptionally musical. I had never heard of JM Synge—shame he passed on so young. Thanks for sharing.
Man, English ""poetry"" is just normal prose chopped into verses
>t. imbecile
If you're going to learn things by heart it helps if they're formally strict, like Kipling, If they're freer they really want to be short. Like these:—
SNOWDROP
Now is the globe shrunk tight
Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart.
Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass,
Move through an outer darkness
Not in their right minds,
With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends,
Brutal as the stars of this month,
Her pale head heavy as metal.
— Ted Hughes
NAPOLEON
What is the world, O soldiers?
It is I:
I, this incessant snow,
This northern sky;
Soldiers, this solitude
Through which we go
Is I.
— Walter de la Mare
SHE TELLS HER LOVE
She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers,
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.
— Robert Graves
FRICK Robert Graves.
FRICK Wallace Stevens—fricking pervert. Shit choice, anon.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
By Wallace Stevens
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
By A. E. Housman
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.
Believing what we don’t believe
Does not exhilarate.
That if it be, it be at best
An ablative estate —
This instigates an appetite
Precisely opposite.
---Emily Dickinson
Poems ought to be sung aloud, tasted by the tongue; not limited to the prison of the page.
https://voca.ro/11po2UqR47Lp
ah the old "I'm a college student and hate my dad" poem
classic
Crux Sacra Sit Mihi Lux
Non Draco Sit Mihi Dux
Vade Retro Satana
Numquam Suade Mihi Vana
Sunt Mala Quae Libas
Ipse Venena Bibas
The backbone of the Army is the noncommissioned man.
Memorising has it's place, but I definitely create more poetry than I consume