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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   2284 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 18, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Have any of you ever memorized poems? I understand this is something that used to happen in school at least at one time, but I wonder if it died out entirely.

If so - did you find it worth doing? Or, indeed, the memorization of anything else? (Not referring in this case, to, e.g., the endless Anki decks of medical school, or all of the TCP/UDP ports for your CCNA, but rather just for fun.)

Yes, I have memorized several poems. I'm gifted with an extremely good memory. I'm a formally trained musician and have, over the last 35 or so years, memorized hundreds of songs as well. I can't always immediately recall all of them 100%, but I can brush up 15-20 or so of them in a week to performance level by reviewing the sheets and playing them a couple times. I also enjoy memorizing quotes, passages from books, religious verses etc. I can do pi out to 72 digits w/o brushing up, 144 if I refresh (this is as a song btw, each number is a distinct note). I find the memorization of all these superficially different things to be very similar in practice. In my case I can't really help it. Even brief contact with writing or music can trigger fairly solid, if partial, memories which compel me to put in the work of fully memorizing whatever it was. Its like an itch. I feel like the main sources of this skill are both the naturally very good memory and the formal music training since childhood. Memorizing musical notation feels like memorizing words. I can also "replay" songs in my head with all the instruments differentiated, accurately, beginning to end.

I don't think photographic or eidetic memory are real. Or, at least my own internal experience feels nothing like the descriptions from people that claim to have photographic/eidetic memory. To me it feels like the inability to forget, and I'm pretty sure its a form of, or related to, mental illness, like a weak form of hyperthymesia, but it doesn't really feel like the descriptions of that either. It's not an entirely positive ability. I remember every humiliating thing I've ever done, or awful thing that has been done to me, in vivid detail. I can tell, at the moment I hear or read something, that I'm going to remember it forever. I can also tell when I'm going to struggle to ever remember it; some things just slip right off my brain. Sometimes those things are important. Most stuff falls somewhere in the middle and I can memorize it with a small amount of effort and practice. The worst aspect is if I learn something incorrectly and have the "remember it forever" reaction. When my brain locks onto something inaccurately I will struggle with that for the rest of my life. As a toddler I got east and west reversed in my head. I now have to remember an additional memory that my first recall of these concepts are flipped, like a brain patch. This has caused me to read/study new things very carefully.

I'm completely hopeless with the people's names. There is nothing to grab ahold of, mentally. The sounds that represent that person feel entirely arbitrary. My work requires me to meet and remember a lot of different points of contact for different issues, as well as a rotating roster of my own team of employees. I have to make flashcards and devote time to using them. I also find most people, especially women, largely uninteresting and interchangeable. Unless they aren't, but rare people are rare. The exception to this is if the person's name is in a song. I can reliably make the song start playing in my head when I see them. This was very helpful with my wife when we met 30 years ago; her name is Amy. The song by Pure Prairie League still plays to this day when I look at her.

I recall memorizing The Charge of the Light Brigade and The Destruction of Sennacherib as a yoof, and have had cause to pull out lines from each as the occasional pithy bon mot. I’m sure that if I had memorized more, I would have more pithy bon mots at exactly the right time, which does have a certain value socially. Even among Red-Tribe!

There is an obscure Indian poem that got engrained into my skull during second grade, and somehow never managed to fall out again. I can't really do much with it, because it's a poem for second graders.

Yes. I enjoy it for one but I also ended up with a baby who hated being in the car. Music and poetry recitation got us through so, so many rides in the car. And when she got older it was handy being able to recite on command on boring road trips, at bedtime, or just for fun.

I am old enough that one junior high school English teacher said we needed to be able to recite 100 lines from Romeo and Juliet from memory so we would have something to focus on when we were held hostage in Iran. It stuck, I guess.

From an essay Richard Rorty wrote while he was dying:

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp. Rather, it is because I would have lived more fully if I had been able to rattle off more old chestnuts — just as I would have if I had made more close friends. Cultures with richer vocabularies are more fully human — farther removed from the beasts — than those with poorer ones; individual men and women are more fully human when their memories are amply stocked with verses.

Yes. I have a thing where I memorize Shakespeare sonnets. I have no reason for doing this and it never got me laid, but I am occasionally pretentious enough to recite them. I know a few other poems as well just from repeated reading of them (usually only one and often not even all of one before everyone loses interest). I don't know what benefit it has beyond the same benefit one gets from listening to beautiful music (not catchy, not rhythmic or current , but beautiful): you have knocking around your brain some of the best things, instead of a bunch of memes, porn, etc.

Yes! I had an old-fashioned school curriculum and there was a huge emphasis on verbatim memorisation of all sorts of things including poems. From what I can tell, that’s no longer in fashion though.

Perhaps it’s useful as a generic way to exercise your memory, but I’m not sure the cramming and forgetting learning style that was encouraged was very useful for anything. I remember basically nothing of the vast amounts of information I had to regurgitate. Maybe a line or two, out of dozens of poems? I think it’s mostly a cool party trick, like memorising digits of pi.

I memorized a few poems for English classes in high school. "Eldorado" by Edgar Alan Poe, the balcony soliloquy from Romeo and Juliet, the suicide monologue from Hamlet, The Canterbury Tales prologue in the original Middle English. I've forgotten the Hamlet, but I remember the other three.

On my own, I memorized "A Verb Called Self" by Chatoyance and "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" by Rudyard Kipling.

It's a neat trick, but not very useful. A better use of your time than playing video games; a worse one than cleaning your room.

Fascinating! I also had to memorize the Middle English Canterbury Tales prologue, and can still rattle off the first few lines. I always thought that was a unique quirk of my generally crazed junior-year English teacher.

In 9th grade we had to memorize and recite a poem. As a flex, I memorized The Raven, but then my teacher said it was too long and wouldn't let me recite the whole thing.

There is a clip of Sir Laurence Olivier reciting on Dick Cavett a Shakespearean sonnet. He does it well, beautifully, but fucks up one word. No one picks up on it. I have never told anyone this but I definitely noticed. It gives an odd satisfaction.

I've memorized a lot more songs than poems, but I've memorized a few poems, and a lot more sections of poems. The ones I've memorized, I definitely found worthwhile, which is why I memorized them. Usually this is because they encapsulate some truth or insight in a way that seems most valuable to me.

Memorization usually was accomplished by repititive reading and writing.

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