Introduction to Literature, spring 2007
Memorization quiz #1

In class March 2, you will be expected to recite a poem from memory. Possible poems are listed below. Please choose a poem that is especially interesting to you, or that you like, even if you don’t know (yet!) what you like about it – you will be living with this poem for a while! You might also choose to memorize the poem you’ll be writing your poetry essay about. The essay and the memorization will reinforce each other and help you gain an even clearer understanding of the poem.

Some suggestions about memorization:

• It helps to understand the poem fully. Be sure to look up any words that you don’t know. The sounds of the poem will help you to memorize it, but it’s even more helpful if those sounds have meaning.
• Work line-by-line – don’t necessarily try to learn the whole poem at once. Get the first line down, then add the second, or start at the end with the last line, and add the next-to-last line, and so on.
• Work on memorization even in odd moments of the day – for example, tape the poem to your mirror and study it while brushing your teeth.
• Do practice saying the poem out loud, not only in your head to yourself. If you just think through it, rather than talking through it, you may not be able to recite it out loud when the time comes. But it also may help to practice writing the poem from memory, as well as speaking it from memory.
• You might try recording yourself reading the poem, and playing the recording, memorizing from what you hear and not just from what you see.
• It sometimes helps to walk around while memorizing. I don’t know why this works, but many students have found it helpful in the past.

Possible poems:

• William Shakespeare, "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought," page 199 in Raffel
• John Keats, "When I have fears that I may cease to be," page 132 in Raffel
• Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias," page 65 in Raffel
• John Donne, "Death, Be Not Proud," available here.