How to Memorize a Poem Quickly
Read the poem aloud several times., Look up words you don’t understand., Learn and internalize the “story” in the poem., Look for connections between stanzas or sections., Figure out the poem’s meter., Memorize the poem’s formal structure., Read the...
Step-by-Step Guide
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Step 1: Read the poem aloud several times.
It’s important to remember that all poetry — whether it rhymes or not — comes from an oral and aural tradition, meaning that it’s meant to be spoken and heard.Before television, poetry was how people entertained themselves with storytelling.
And in a time when literacy was not widespread, poetry took on certain characteristics — from rhyme schemes to metrical form — that helped people who couldn’t simply read the poem off a page to remember how the poem and story progressed.
Before you even begin trying to memorize the poem, read it out loud to yourself several times.
TRY WRITING IT DOWN OR TYPING IT DOWN ON A SPREADSHEET.
Don’t simply read the words off the page; try to perform the poem as though you were telling the story to a crowd of people.
Lower your voice in the quiet moments, and get loud in the emphatic moments.
Use hand gestures to highlight key passages.
Be theatrical.
It’s important that you read the poem out loud, rather than to yourself in your head.
Hearing the poem with your ears will help you pick up on rhymes and rhythms that will help you memorize the poem. -
Step 2: Look up words you don’t understand.
Poets are great lovers of words, so they often use words that we’re not familiar with.
If you’re asked to memorize an older poem, you will likely run across archaic words or grammatical structures that you don’t understand.
Figuring out what those words and sentences mean will help you memorize the poem later.
Take John Donne’s “A Valediction:
Forbidden Mourning” as an example.In the second stanza, you might have to look up the words “tempest” (a storm), “profanation” (disrespecting something spiritual by making it secular and earthly), and “laity” (common people who don’t belong to the clergy or spiritual elite) to understand what the poet is trying to say.
This stanza says, “Let’s be quiet instead of crying a lot and sighing all the time.
If we told these petty commoners about our love, we’d be doing a disservice to how sacred it is.” Sometimes, it’s not the definitions of the words themselves that cause a problem, but the metaphoric use of the words.
Look at stanza 3 of “A Valediction:
Forbidden Mourning.” You may know what all of those words mean individually, but have trouble understanding what that stanza is about.
The “Moving of th’ earth” in this case in an earthquake.
An earthquake causes harm and frightens people, and people do their best to make sense of it in the aftermath.
The “trepidation of the spheres” is the movement of the stars and planets in the sky.
Those movements are far greater in scale, more violent, and, in popular mythology, have a far greater impact on the fate of people on earth.
However, though those movements and their consequences are far greater than that of an earthquake, we lack “trepidation” of them, and fear silly little earthquakes instead.
We are “innocent” or ignorant of the far greater movements that affect our lives, choosing to focus on unimportant details.
This stanza builds the idea that the speaker’s love is unearthly — grander and more important than that of the “dull sublunary (under the moon, on the earth) lovers” in the next stanza.
If you have trouble understanding the meaning of a poem, consult a study guide either from the library or online to help you along., Once you’ve looked up all the unfamiliar words, wordings, and images, you need to learn the poem’s story.
If you don’t understand what the poem’s about, you’ll have as much trouble memorizing it as you would have trying to memorize a string of completely unrelated words that have no meaning.
Before you try to memorize the poem, you should be able to summarize its story easily and completely from memory.
Don’t worry about the actual words in the poem at this point — just a summary of content.
Some poems are “narrative,” meaning that they tell an actual story.
William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” is a good example.In it, the narrator is wandering through nature when he comes across a field of daffodils.
He then describes the daffodils: how they seem to dance in the breeze, how their numbers seemed to stretch like stars across the sky, how happy and joyful their dance seemed, and finally, how the memory of those flowers brings him joy in sad moments when he’s back at home, away from nature. , Not all poems are narrative and tell a clear story with plot points: this happened, then that happened.
However, all poems are about something, and the best poems — the ones teachers tend to assign in class —develop and progress in some way.
Even if there is no plot, try to figure out the meaning or message of the poem by understanding the connections between stanzas or sections.
Look at Richard Wilbur’s “Year’s End” as an example.This poem begins with a clear setting:
It’s New Year’s Eve (“the dying of the year”), and the speaker is on a street in a neighborhood looking through the window of a house, where he can just see the moving shapes through the frost on the glass.
The majority of the poem progresses through associative imagery, in which one image leads to another purely by whatever association springs into the writer’s mind, rather than by logic or chronology, as it would in a story.So, in this poem, the frosted window from the first stanza makes the poet leap to the image of a frozen lake in the second; a frozen lake looks a little bit like a frosted window, after all.
Frozen in the lake’s surface are the leaves which fell during the freezing process, which are now stuck to its surface, fluttering in the wind like perfect monuments.
That perfection at the end of the second stanza is drawn into the third as “the perfection in the death of ferns.” Also drawn down is the idea of being frozen: just as the leaves were frozen in the lake as monuments in the second stanza, ferns are frozen as fossils in the third.
Also frozen as fossils were mammoths, who lay preserved in ice.
The preservation at the end of the third stanza is brought down to the fourth: the preservation of a dog in the ruins of Pompeii, a city that was obliterated by a volcanic eruption, but whose shapes were preserved by the volcanic ash.
The final stanza draws from the idea of a sudden end at Pompeii, where people were frozen in place unexpectedly, never anticipating their sudden death.
The final stanza brings us back to the scene from the first: it’s New Year’s Eve, the end of another year.
As we “fray into the future,” the poem argues, we should consider all the “sudden ends” the poem has presented to us: the leaf caught in ice, the fossilized ferns and mammoths, the sudden, unexpected deaths at Pompeii.
This poem might be difficult to memorize because it doesn’t have a chronological plot development.
However, by understanding the associative way in which the stanzas are related to one another, you’ll be able to remember: looking through frosted windows on New Year’s Eve → leaf in a frozen lake as perfect monument → perfection of fossilized ferns and mammoths preserved in ice → the bodies preserved in volcanic ash at Pompeii → these sudden ends should be remembered now, at the end of the year, as we look forward to the next. , Meter is the rhythm of a line of poetry; it is composed of metrical feet, or units of syllables with their own distinct accentual patterns.For example, iambs are the most common metrical foot in English poetry.
They have two syllables — the first unstressed, and the second stressed, resulting in a ta-TUM rhythm, as in the word “hel-LO.”Other common metrical feet include: the trochee (TUM-ti; MORN-ing), the dactyl (TUM-ti-ti; PO-et-ry), the anapest (ta-ta-TUM; ev-er-MORE), and the spondee (TUM-TUM; PRAISE HIM).In English, most poems rely on a largely iambic rhythm, though there can be a great deal of metrical variation.
This variation is often found at important moments in the poem; look for variation at key moments in the story you memorized.
The meter of a poem is often constrained by the number of feet in a line.
For example, iambic pentameter means that the lines are composed of five (pent) iambs each: ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM.
An example of an iambic pentameter line from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” is “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Dimeter means there are two feet per line; trimeter has three feet; tetrameter has four; hexameter has six; and heptameter has seven.
Very, very rarely will you see lines extend further than heptameter.
Count out the syllables and rhythms in each line and determine what the meter of the poem is.
This will help you learn the musical cadence of the poem.
For example, there’s a big difference between a poem written in iambic tetrameter, like Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” and one written in dactylic dimeter, like Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”As you did in the very first step, read the poem out loud several times, but pay special attention to the music and rhythm of the lines now.
Read the poem several times until the music, including the metrical variations, feel as natural and predictable to you as that of your favorite song. , A formal poem, also known as metrical verse, is a poem that follows a pattern of some combination of rhyme, stanza length, and meter.You’ve already figured out the meter, but now you need to look at the rhyme scheme, which will in turn tell you how many lines are in each stanza.
Look in an online study guide to see if your poem is an example of a particular form of poetry — a Petrarchan sonnet, for example, or a villanelle or sestina.
It may be a nonce form, or a poem whose formal structure does not belong to an entire category of poems, but was instead invented by the poet for the purpose of this poem alone.
There are many reliable online resources where you can learn more about the formal structure of the poem you are trying to memorize.By memorizing the formal structure of the poem, you will be able to jog your memory about what comes next if you get stuck while trying to recite a poem.
For example, if you are trying to recite Edna St.
Vincent Millay’s “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied,” but get stuck after the second line, you can remember that it’s a Petrarchan sonnet, which begins with a rhyme scheme of ABBA.Since the first line ends with “lied” and the second with “pain,” you know that the third line will end with a word that rhymes with “pain” and the fourth with a word that rhymes with “lied.” You can then recall the rhythmic music of the poem (iambic pentameter) to help you hum out the rhythm until the lines come back to you: “I miss him in the weeping of the rain; / I want him at the shrinking of the tide.” , This experience should be very different from the initial readings you did, because now you’ll have a much deeper understanding of the poem’s story, message, and meaning, its rhythm and musicality, and its formal structure.
Read the poem slowly and theatrically, bringing all your new knowledge of the poem to bear in your performance.
The more you commit to the theatrical performance of the piece, the more easily it will plant itself in your brain.
As lines of the poem begin to come naturally to you without your having to look at the page, recite more and more of it from memory.
Don’t be afraid to look down at the page if you need to.
Use it as a guide to jog your memory for as long as you need.
As you continue reading the poem aloud over and over again, you’ll find that more and more lines are coming to you from your memory.
Allow a natural transition from reading off the page to reciting the poem from memory.
After you have successfully recited the poem from memory completely, continue doing so at least five or six more times to make sure you have it down perfectly. -
Step 3: Learn and internalize the “story” in the poem.
-
Step 4: Look for connections between stanzas or sections.
-
Step 5: Figure out the poem’s meter.
-
Step 6: Memorize the poem’s formal structure.
-
Step 7: Read the poem aloud again several times.
Detailed Guide
It’s important to remember that all poetry — whether it rhymes or not — comes from an oral and aural tradition, meaning that it’s meant to be spoken and heard.Before television, poetry was how people entertained themselves with storytelling.
And in a time when literacy was not widespread, poetry took on certain characteristics — from rhyme schemes to metrical form — that helped people who couldn’t simply read the poem off a page to remember how the poem and story progressed.
Before you even begin trying to memorize the poem, read it out loud to yourself several times.
TRY WRITING IT DOWN OR TYPING IT DOWN ON A SPREADSHEET.
Don’t simply read the words off the page; try to perform the poem as though you were telling the story to a crowd of people.
Lower your voice in the quiet moments, and get loud in the emphatic moments.
Use hand gestures to highlight key passages.
Be theatrical.
It’s important that you read the poem out loud, rather than to yourself in your head.
Hearing the poem with your ears will help you pick up on rhymes and rhythms that will help you memorize the poem.
Poets are great lovers of words, so they often use words that we’re not familiar with.
If you’re asked to memorize an older poem, you will likely run across archaic words or grammatical structures that you don’t understand.
Figuring out what those words and sentences mean will help you memorize the poem later.
Take John Donne’s “A Valediction:
Forbidden Mourning” as an example.In the second stanza, you might have to look up the words “tempest” (a storm), “profanation” (disrespecting something spiritual by making it secular and earthly), and “laity” (common people who don’t belong to the clergy or spiritual elite) to understand what the poet is trying to say.
This stanza says, “Let’s be quiet instead of crying a lot and sighing all the time.
If we told these petty commoners about our love, we’d be doing a disservice to how sacred it is.” Sometimes, it’s not the definitions of the words themselves that cause a problem, but the metaphoric use of the words.
Look at stanza 3 of “A Valediction:
Forbidden Mourning.” You may know what all of those words mean individually, but have trouble understanding what that stanza is about.
The “Moving of th’ earth” in this case in an earthquake.
An earthquake causes harm and frightens people, and people do their best to make sense of it in the aftermath.
The “trepidation of the spheres” is the movement of the stars and planets in the sky.
Those movements are far greater in scale, more violent, and, in popular mythology, have a far greater impact on the fate of people on earth.
However, though those movements and their consequences are far greater than that of an earthquake, we lack “trepidation” of them, and fear silly little earthquakes instead.
We are “innocent” or ignorant of the far greater movements that affect our lives, choosing to focus on unimportant details.
This stanza builds the idea that the speaker’s love is unearthly — grander and more important than that of the “dull sublunary (under the moon, on the earth) lovers” in the next stanza.
If you have trouble understanding the meaning of a poem, consult a study guide either from the library or online to help you along., Once you’ve looked up all the unfamiliar words, wordings, and images, you need to learn the poem’s story.
If you don’t understand what the poem’s about, you’ll have as much trouble memorizing it as you would have trying to memorize a string of completely unrelated words that have no meaning.
Before you try to memorize the poem, you should be able to summarize its story easily and completely from memory.
Don’t worry about the actual words in the poem at this point — just a summary of content.
Some poems are “narrative,” meaning that they tell an actual story.
William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” is a good example.In it, the narrator is wandering through nature when he comes across a field of daffodils.
He then describes the daffodils: how they seem to dance in the breeze, how their numbers seemed to stretch like stars across the sky, how happy and joyful their dance seemed, and finally, how the memory of those flowers brings him joy in sad moments when he’s back at home, away from nature. , Not all poems are narrative and tell a clear story with plot points: this happened, then that happened.
However, all poems are about something, and the best poems — the ones teachers tend to assign in class —develop and progress in some way.
Even if there is no plot, try to figure out the meaning or message of the poem by understanding the connections between stanzas or sections.
Look at Richard Wilbur’s “Year’s End” as an example.This poem begins with a clear setting:
It’s New Year’s Eve (“the dying of the year”), and the speaker is on a street in a neighborhood looking through the window of a house, where he can just see the moving shapes through the frost on the glass.
The majority of the poem progresses through associative imagery, in which one image leads to another purely by whatever association springs into the writer’s mind, rather than by logic or chronology, as it would in a story.So, in this poem, the frosted window from the first stanza makes the poet leap to the image of a frozen lake in the second; a frozen lake looks a little bit like a frosted window, after all.
Frozen in the lake’s surface are the leaves which fell during the freezing process, which are now stuck to its surface, fluttering in the wind like perfect monuments.
That perfection at the end of the second stanza is drawn into the third as “the perfection in the death of ferns.” Also drawn down is the idea of being frozen: just as the leaves were frozen in the lake as monuments in the second stanza, ferns are frozen as fossils in the third.
Also frozen as fossils were mammoths, who lay preserved in ice.
The preservation at the end of the third stanza is brought down to the fourth: the preservation of a dog in the ruins of Pompeii, a city that was obliterated by a volcanic eruption, but whose shapes were preserved by the volcanic ash.
The final stanza draws from the idea of a sudden end at Pompeii, where people were frozen in place unexpectedly, never anticipating their sudden death.
The final stanza brings us back to the scene from the first: it’s New Year’s Eve, the end of another year.
As we “fray into the future,” the poem argues, we should consider all the “sudden ends” the poem has presented to us: the leaf caught in ice, the fossilized ferns and mammoths, the sudden, unexpected deaths at Pompeii.
This poem might be difficult to memorize because it doesn’t have a chronological plot development.
However, by understanding the associative way in which the stanzas are related to one another, you’ll be able to remember: looking through frosted windows on New Year’s Eve → leaf in a frozen lake as perfect monument → perfection of fossilized ferns and mammoths preserved in ice → the bodies preserved in volcanic ash at Pompeii → these sudden ends should be remembered now, at the end of the year, as we look forward to the next. , Meter is the rhythm of a line of poetry; it is composed of metrical feet, or units of syllables with their own distinct accentual patterns.For example, iambs are the most common metrical foot in English poetry.
They have two syllables — the first unstressed, and the second stressed, resulting in a ta-TUM rhythm, as in the word “hel-LO.”Other common metrical feet include: the trochee (TUM-ti; MORN-ing), the dactyl (TUM-ti-ti; PO-et-ry), the anapest (ta-ta-TUM; ev-er-MORE), and the spondee (TUM-TUM; PRAISE HIM).In English, most poems rely on a largely iambic rhythm, though there can be a great deal of metrical variation.
This variation is often found at important moments in the poem; look for variation at key moments in the story you memorized.
The meter of a poem is often constrained by the number of feet in a line.
For example, iambic pentameter means that the lines are composed of five (pent) iambs each: ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM ta-TUM.
An example of an iambic pentameter line from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” is “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Dimeter means there are two feet per line; trimeter has three feet; tetrameter has four; hexameter has six; and heptameter has seven.
Very, very rarely will you see lines extend further than heptameter.
Count out the syllables and rhythms in each line and determine what the meter of the poem is.
This will help you learn the musical cadence of the poem.
For example, there’s a big difference between a poem written in iambic tetrameter, like Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” and one written in dactylic dimeter, like Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”As you did in the very first step, read the poem out loud several times, but pay special attention to the music and rhythm of the lines now.
Read the poem several times until the music, including the metrical variations, feel as natural and predictable to you as that of your favorite song. , A formal poem, also known as metrical verse, is a poem that follows a pattern of some combination of rhyme, stanza length, and meter.You’ve already figured out the meter, but now you need to look at the rhyme scheme, which will in turn tell you how many lines are in each stanza.
Look in an online study guide to see if your poem is an example of a particular form of poetry — a Petrarchan sonnet, for example, or a villanelle or sestina.
It may be a nonce form, or a poem whose formal structure does not belong to an entire category of poems, but was instead invented by the poet for the purpose of this poem alone.
There are many reliable online resources where you can learn more about the formal structure of the poem you are trying to memorize.By memorizing the formal structure of the poem, you will be able to jog your memory about what comes next if you get stuck while trying to recite a poem.
For example, if you are trying to recite Edna St.
Vincent Millay’s “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied,” but get stuck after the second line, you can remember that it’s a Petrarchan sonnet, which begins with a rhyme scheme of ABBA.Since the first line ends with “lied” and the second with “pain,” you know that the third line will end with a word that rhymes with “pain” and the fourth with a word that rhymes with “lied.” You can then recall the rhythmic music of the poem (iambic pentameter) to help you hum out the rhythm until the lines come back to you: “I miss him in the weeping of the rain; / I want him at the shrinking of the tide.” , This experience should be very different from the initial readings you did, because now you’ll have a much deeper understanding of the poem’s story, message, and meaning, its rhythm and musicality, and its formal structure.
Read the poem slowly and theatrically, bringing all your new knowledge of the poem to bear in your performance.
The more you commit to the theatrical performance of the piece, the more easily it will plant itself in your brain.
As lines of the poem begin to come naturally to you without your having to look at the page, recite more and more of it from memory.
Don’t be afraid to look down at the page if you need to.
Use it as a guide to jog your memory for as long as you need.
As you continue reading the poem aloud over and over again, you’ll find that more and more lines are coming to you from your memory.
Allow a natural transition from reading off the page to reciting the poem from memory.
After you have successfully recited the poem from memory completely, continue doing so at least five or six more times to make sure you have it down perfectly.
About the Author
Beverly Cook
Specializes in breaking down complex lifestyle topics into simple steps.
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