A Slumber did my Spirit Seal, by William Wordsworth

I told you when I started that I am bad at schedules and consistency, and so there has been a gap in my poetry memorization. Nor have I retained everything I learned earlier this year. Sad, sad, very sad! Still, I have a lot more of it than I used to. And now I have this splendid poem by Wordsworth by heart, one of the ‘Lucy’ poems, which almost clung to me like a magnet, as the best poems so often do. You can find it on Poetry Foundation. My other recitations are here.

(Excuse the background noise of the air vent.)

And here is the passage from ‘The Uncommon Reader’ by George Steiner that made me realize I had stopped memorizing for a year or so and really ought to start again more seriously.

Le Philosophe lisant, like the cultured men around him in a tradition which runs from classical antiquity to, roughly, the First World War, will know texts by heart (an idiom worth thinking about closely). They will know by heart considerable segments of Scripture, of the liturgy, of epic and lyric verse. Macaulay’s formidable accomplishments in this respect — even as a schoolboy he had committed to memory a fair measure of Latin and English poetry — were only a heightened instance of a general practice. The ability to cite Scripture, to recite from memory large stretches of Homer, Virgil, Horace or Ovid, to cap on the instant a quotation from Shakespeare, Milton or Pope, generated the shared texture of echoes, of intellectual and emotive recognition and reciprocity, on which the language of British politics, law and letters was founded. Knowledge by heart of the Latin sources, of La Fontaine, of Racine, of the trumpet-calls in Victor Hugo, has given to the entire fabric of French public life its rhetorical stress. The classic reader, Chardin’s lisant, locates the text he is reading inside a resonant manifold. Echo answers echo, analogy is precise and contiguous, correction and emendation carry the justification of accurately remembered precedent. The reader replies to the text out of the articulate density of his own store of reference and remembrance. It is an ancient, formidable suggestion that the Muses of memory and of invention are one.

I hope you will join me in memorizing more poetry. It might be the best contribution we can all make to literary culture! Soon I will record the Herrick poem I memorized last year too...