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Learning Poems, Autumn, and Frost

Stray musings on the way we are together, magic, and the Celts

Originally published on my Substack November 11, 2021


Tethered to our machines, we are become cyborgs, demigods commanding access to the totality of human knowledge with our fingertips. Consequently, we no longer memorize anything. While doing my utmost (without success) to avoid becoming crankish or maudlin, I often reflect on the cost.

This lack of familiarity with canonical texts has changed the way we live now and not for the better. Take the rise of philistinism, here’s a conversation that would never occur on television today (what’s the point of literary illusion in art or speech if no one grasps the reference? Memes are less elevating than Virgil).

More dire still is our broken relationship with poetry.

Poems are meant to be spoken. Like an incantation, the words reach the full maturity of their power when the speaker has committed them to memory. It’s a kind of magic with influence over everyone in the radius of the spell. And these transcendent moments in the human experience are now an extreme rarity.

There is no occult force when someone reads off of an iPhone; it’s undignified. We are bereft as the Britons after the destruction of the Druids at Ynys Môn. Episodes such as Dylan Thomas’ ironic rendition of Tennyson’s “The Splendor Falls” are no longer possible (Richard Burton’s version of the story begins at 8:40).

Learning something by rote is frustrating but I never begrudge the time once it’s done. I recently did some research on methods to improve the process and found a pretty slick technique on YouTube. The instructions are as follows; copy out the piece of material you’re going to memorize but drop everything but he first letter of each word and the punctuation. Thus,

    Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
    Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
    Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
    And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
5   Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
    And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
    And every fair from fair sometime declines,
    By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
    But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
10  Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
    Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
    When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
       So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
       So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

becomes

    S     I c       t    t  a s       d  ?
    T    a   m    l      a   m    t        :
    R     w     d  s     t   d       b    o  M  ,
    A   s     ’s l     h    a   t   s     a d   ;
5   S        t   h   t   e   o  h      s     ,
    A   o     i  h   g    c          d   'd;
    A   e     f    f    f    s        d       ,
    B  c      o  n       c        c      u      'd;
    B   t   e       s      s     n   f   ,
10  N   l    p          o  t    f    t    o ’s ;
    N   s     d     b    t    w      t i  h   s    ,
    W    i  e       l     t  t    t    g   ’s :
       S  l    a  m   c   b       o  e    c   s  ,
       S  l    l     t   , a   t    g     l    t  t   .

Now commit the material to memory five lines at a time and test yourself using the truncated text as an aid. When you can speak the entire piece using only the modified text, you’re ready to try without a prompt. It works.

Of course, copying out the text is a slow and painstaking process to do by hand which is why I wrote a little Python program to do this for me (and you). Now go find some captivating words and memorize them!

Fall is the great season for poetry and every year as the days get shorter I find myself returning to what is perhaps my favorite poem: Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight”. It’s a slavish, personal espousal of the tenants of English romanticism (and suitably melodramatic to modern ears).

As the narrator sits by a fire on a still night with his infant son, he juxtaposes his own strict, urban upbringing with the free, bucolic education he envisions for his child. With masterful subtlety Coleridge plays with the idea of adolescent memory and the way we experience our youth as adults.

He chastises organized religion and its drab contrast to nature’s perfection declaiming that while his boyhood was spent in cloistered incarceration, his son’s soul will be molded by the true God in wild places. It is beautiful writing and I am slowly committing it to memory.

With that said, there is no better experience I could share with you than Richard Burton’s sublime reading of “Frost at Midnight” below. I hope you enjoy it.

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