Memory Palace

The first poem I memorized was “Pinkle Purr” by A.A. Milne. I was around seven years old when I encountered it and was immediately enchanted. It’s a children’s poem, four stanzas, all with the same hypnotic AA/BB/AA rhyme scheme. It’s a poem about a kitten, Pinkle Purr, and his mother, Tattoo, and their changing relationship as Pinkle Purr grows up, a sort of “Cat’s in the Cradle” for kids, but less sad.

I don’t remember making any effort to memorize it; I just read the poem so many times that it worked its way into me, such that I knew it as well as I knew the theme songs to my favorite TV shows. I’d walk around muttering to myself, trying out different voices and syllable stresses: “Tattoo was the mother of Pinkle Purr/A little black nothing of feet and fur;/And by-and-by, when his eyes came through,/He saw his mother, the big Tattoo.” It was meditative, comforting, an internal metronome that I naturally returned to when I returned to myself.

Perhaps because I started memorizing poems early, before I was forced to do so in school, I never perceived the process as onerous, but rather as a fun challenge, a way to take something I loved and make it a part of me. As a graduate student, I memorized Galway Kinnell’s “Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight,” lines from which still regularly surface in my brain unbidden — “Kiss the mouth / that tells you, here, / here is the world” — even though I can’t recall the whole thing anymore. I love that, amid the practical information and persistent worries and memories good and bad, my mind’s archive contains these bits of beauty, lyrics that float up into consciousness, lovely echoes.

This past week, The Times Book Review ran a weeklong challenge to help readers memorize Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo,” replete with games and videos. (Ethan Hawke’s recitation of “We were very tired, we were very merry, / We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry” is delightful and dramatic; I’d like to hear him do “Pinkle Purr.”) I’m obviously the exact audience for this type of thing, but even if you’re the sort who thinks of memorizing verse as homework, I think this challenge will make you reconsider. The poem is dazzling, and the challenge’s structure makes it almost effortless to absorb it. I love what A.O. Scott and Aliza Aufrichtig write in their introduction: “At a time when we are flooded with texts, rants and A.I. slop, a poem occupies a quieter, less commodified corner of your consciousness. It’s a flower in the windowbox of your mind.”

The flower in my mind’s windowbox that blooms most satisfyingly is “Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves,” by the late-19th century English poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. I memorized it for the first time maybe 20 years ago, and I have made a point of re-memorizing it at regular intervals, whenever I go to recite it and find I can’t do it perfectly without hesitation. It’s a strange, propulsive poem whose rhythm, language and imagery I love so deeply — “Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, ‘ vaulty, voluminous, … stupendous / Evening strains to be time’s vást, ‘ womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night” — that reciting it is a sort of ecstasy.

I found out only recently that Hopkins insisted that the poem should not just be read with the eye, but loudly performed, “almost sung.” In the shower. While driving to work or making dinner. On those insomniac nights when you can’t stop fretting and wish you had something, anything else to think about. This is when memorized poems are most valuable. You can run over the lines in your head, or you can open your mouth, call the verse up from the recesses of your memory, and sing.