The primary poem I memorized was “Pinkle Purr” by A.A. Milne. I used to be round seven years outdated once I encountered it and was instantly enchanted. It’s a kids’s poem, 4 stanzas, all with the identical hypnotic AA/BB/AA rhyme scheme. It’s a poem a few kitten, Pinkle Purr, and his mom, Tattoo, and their altering relationship as Pinkle Purr grows up, a form of “Cat’s within the Cradle” for youths, however much less unhappy.
I don’t bear in mind making any effort to memorize it; I simply learn the poem so many occasions that it labored its means into me, such that I knew it in addition to I knew the theme songs to my favourite TV reveals. I’d stroll round muttering to myself, making an attempt out completely different voices and syllable stresses: “Tattoo was the mom of Pinkle Purr/Somewhat black nothing of toes and fur;/And by-and-by, when his eyes got here via,/He noticed his mom, the large Tattoo.” It was meditative, comforting, an inside metronome that I naturally returned to once I returned to myself.
Maybe as a result of I began memorizing poems early, earlier than I used to be compelled to take action in class, I by no means perceived the method as onerous, however moderately as a enjoyable problem, a strategy to take one thing I beloved and make it part of me. As a graduate scholar, I memorized Galway Kinnell’s “Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair within the Moonlight,” strains from which nonetheless usually floor in my mind unbidden — “Kiss the mouth / that tells you, right here, / right here is the world” — regardless that I can’t recall the entire thing anymore. I really like that, amid the sensible data and protracted worries and recollections good and dangerous, my thoughts’s archive accommodates these bits of magnificence, lyrics that float up into consciousness, pretty echoes.
This previous week, The Occasions E-book Evaluation ran a weeklong problem to assist readers memorize Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo,” replete with video games and movies. (Ethan Hawke’s recitation of “We had been very drained, we had been very merry, / We had gone forwards and backwards all night time on the ferry” is pleasant and dramatic; I’d like to listen to him do “Pinkle Purr.”) I’m clearly the precise viewers for one of these factor, however even when you’re the kind who thinks of memorizing verse as homework, I believe this problem will make you rethink. The poem is dazzling, and the problem’s construction makes it virtually easy to soak up it. I really like what A.O. Scott and Aliza Aufrichtig write of their introduction: “At a time once we are flooded with texts, rants and A.I. slop, a poem occupies a quieter, much less commodified nook of your consciousness. It’s a flower within the windowbox of your thoughts.”