July 2022
John Morgan
jwmorgan@alaska.edu
Bio Note: In 1976, I moved with my family to Fairbanks, Alaska to teach for a year in the creative writing program at the University of Alaska. I’m still there. I’ve published seven books of poetry, as well as a collection of essays. My work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, APR and many other journals. For more information, visit my website: www.johnmorganpoet.com

Realms of Gold: On Memorizing Poems

Other than nursery rhymes, the first poem I ever memorized was Rudyard Kipling’s “Gunga Din.” I did it for an assignment in 7th grade English. Back then I had a strong memory and wanted to show it off. “Gunga Din” is a tribute to a lower-caste water carrier who’s killed while serving the British army in India. I was able to forgive the racist elements in the poem because of its famous last line: “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!” The poem, spoken by a cockney soldier, is over 80 lines line long and full of unfamiliar slang so memorizing it wasn’t easy. But helped by the jingly rhymes I managed it and I worked up my cockney accent as well.

Looking back, I can see that this choice was a kind of foreshadowing. The other students in the class were taking on shorter poems that could be easily memorized. Though I wasn’t especially into poetry yet, the choice showed that it held some interest for me. Back then I saw poetry as an elevated use of language that embodied some of life’s mysteries which I would one day want to plumb.

Two years later I memorized “Fern Hill” for my 9th grade English class. By then I had started to write poems of my own. I didn’t find the writing easy or do it particularly well, but I kept my drafts in a notebook, rewriting the poems a couple of time until I felt they were done. We had a recording of Dylan Thomas reading “Fern Hill,” and his theatrical Welsh-accented performance showed me how it should sound. The poem doesn’t rhyme but it’s in syllabic stanzas and the repeating pattern of long and short lines helped. Again there was an element of showing off in tackling such a difficult poem but I was more committed now and had read other poems by Thomas, as well as a book about his raucous alcohol-fueled tours of the U.S.

Memorizing a poem makes it a part of you. Once it’s in your head, you can call it up and say it over to yourself in moments of boredom or stress. It’s a bit like carrying a crown jewel in your pocket that, in a private moment, you can pull out and hold up to the light. You don’t necessary understand the poem better. That takes a different kind of work, a close reading of the imagery and voice that I wouldn’t learn until college. But through memorization the sound and rhetoric of the poem get into you. Having trouble going to sleep? Pull up Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” or Shelly’s “Ozymandias” and they’ll carry you off to a more sleep-friendly place. Washing my hands during the pandemic, I recite Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to be sure I’ve sudsed up long enough to kill all the germs.

In college I memorized a lot of Frost, and other poets too: Chaucer, Milton, Keats (the great odes, among other things), Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and of course Shakespeare. I even tried out for a production of King Lear with a speech by Gloucester’s wicked son, Edmond. The producers complimented my recitation but when they asked me to move around and gesture as I spoke the lines, I froze and couldn’t do it. Something similar happened during my honors oral exam senior year. For my thesis I’d written a psychological study of Keats, but when faced with some of the distinguished professors I’d taken courses from, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Keats biographer Walter Jackson Bate, I froze and had trouble answering their questions. Seeing my difficulty, one of them asked if I could recite Robert Frost’s poem “Spring Pools” from memory. I could. My examiners were impressed and things went better for me after that.

If you’re a writer, memorizing poems can expand your verbal resources. I usually write in free verse, but the regular beat of iambic pentameter creeps into my lines and hopefully gives them some rhythmic backbone. And though the language I use is up to date and far from the poetic diction of Keats, I like to think that his hypnotic density of sound finds its way into my verse. There is always a tension between poetic influences and the struggle for originality. Of course poets need to have a strong sense of individually to stand out, but that doesn’t mean rejecting all the great poets who’ve come before. They should be studied and absorbed and then adapted into our own work. I try to be as widely influenced as possible, not just by one or two poets, but by dozens, by my contemporaries as well as the classics. If I do it right, they become the rich soil my personal voice grows out of.

Approaching 80, my memory isn’t what it used to be and if asked to recite Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” right now, I could only get through the first two or three stanzas, with a few bits from later in the poem thrown in. I do still have some of the ending though: “Forlorn! the very word is like a bell/To toll me back from thee to my sole self!” Da-dah da-dah da-dah, etc. “Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep?”
©2022 John Morgan
Editor's Note: If this essay moves you please consider writing to John (email address above) to say what it is about it that you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL