Far more years ago than I care to remember, I was a senior in high school taking British literature. What I don’t really mind remembering from that class is the prologue to poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. I had to memorize the first 18 lines of it. The other morning driving to school my daughter told me that she was having to memorize a part of the prologue too. I was in equal turns shocked and pleased. Then I was shocked even more as the first ten lines or so of it spilled from my memory as I recited them as if I were once again in Mrs. Simpson’s English class.
Memorization of poetry is a topic that isn’t usually associated with the arts as a whole, but there’s a pretty strong connection there, and it’s one that goes right to the heart of how we interact with poems and music, even with history.
In 2012, Catherine Robson, a professor of English at NYU, wrote an intriguing book called Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem. She says that one of her intentions in the book is “to show, in a variety of ways, how a poem learned by heart has the potential to create a pronounced and particular form of the affective” relationship between individuals and works of art.
While memorization of poetry as an academic exercise has largely disappeared from contemporary classrooms, the average person’s mind is still chock-full of memorized tidbits of things ranging from Bible verses to nursery rhymes to song lyrics. And we experience what it’s like to have something memorized pretty much every day. There’s much that we memorize without trying to.
I knew a man named Tom Parrish who had apparently memorized more poetry than just about any person I ever knew. I would see him often on Sunday mornings and he would call me over and tell me that he had just been thinking of a particular poem and how it was particularly enlightening to him at that moment. He would then go on to recite line after line that bore directly on the point he was trying to make to me just then.
A fundamental element of this issue is that there are different ways of knowing something, and some ways have certain advantages over others. I can play a gig reading charts to get through tunes, sometimes even if I really don’t even know the tune very well. If I memorize my part however—if I know my part by heart—I interact with the song in a completely different way. I have a different relationship with it. My playing is more vivid, more engaged; it becomes more an expression of myself.
Memorizing something is a way in which we can have an interaction with art in pretty much the deepest most intimate way possible: that of making it part of ourselves.
