When I was a student, rote memory work was fading but I did have to memorize beyond obvious mnemonics like ROYGBIV. I remember committing some Longfellow poems to memory on orders from elementary school teachers. A Longfellow poem about the village blacksmith standing under the spreading chestnut tree comes to mind.

At 76 my memory is worse than ever. That is worrying because thirty-four years of teaching school taught me that having a good memory was a key to academic success. Most of my brightest students had strong memories.

My friend Jim Every (83) knows hundreds of songs by heart and many poems. When we talk movies, he often quotes dialogue from favorite scenes. He insists that his memory skills are from use, development more than an inborn gift. So I have started memorizing again for brain exercise.

Recuerdo —Edna St. Vincent Millay

We were very tired, we were very happy–

We had gone and forth all night on the ferry;

It was bare and bright and smelled like a stable–

But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,

We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;

And whistles kept blowing , and dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very happy–

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,

From a dozen we bought somewhere;

And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,

And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry–

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

We hailed, “Good morrow mother!” to a shawl-covered head,

And bought a paper that neither of us read;

And she wept,”God bless you!” for the apples and pears,

And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

Recuerdo was my first effort. Spanish for something like a souvenir, “recuerdo” is a recollection of riding the Staten Island Ferry. In 2018 I rode the Silver Meteor from Charlotte to Grand Central Station and spent close to a week walking around Manhattan. Of course, I walked across the famous bridge to Brooklyn, too. Of course, I rode the ferry to Staten Island to see the Statue of Liberty and claim another borough.

I wrote the poem longhand which started the memorization and kept a copy in my pocket. When no one was around, I said it aloud. I am not sure what effect committing Reucardo had on my attempt to help my aging brain, but I enjoyed thinking about. The root of memorization is memory and I resurrected my own Statin Island Ferry memory and came to value each line, each word. In the end all we have that makes us human is our memories.

My next poem was shorter and a way to fight the silly times we live in where the puffed up are constantly in our faces media-wise. The meek are not inheriting America in 2025.

I’ Nobody –Emily Dickinson

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you–Nobody–too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’ll advertise–you know!

How dreary–to be–Somebody!

How public–like a Frog–

To tell one’s name–the livelong June–

To an admiring Bog!

Other than dmforrest.smug.mug.com where I post photos and this site I do not have a social media presence. “What I Plan to Do with DANIELFORREST.ORG” sits at the top of this site and explains my reasons for this body of writing. I am not a social media person but I reckon I have some Frog in me. Anyhow Dickinson’s poem speaks to something about how I feel about the current time.

My next handwritten poem for memorization is a famous Frost poem which I knew well back in my teaching years.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening –Robert Frost

Whose wood these are I think I know,

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill with snow.

My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there’s some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Much more elegant on the page than the Dickinson poem, it calms me. I always managed to provoke my students into unraveling it but I enjoyed teasing them that it could be Santa talking. For me it is more than a beautiful statement about resting: I see it as a statement about summoning the will to continue.

Wikipedia reports that Pieter Brueghel’ Landscape with the Fall of Icarus is likely a very good copy from about 1558 of his lost original. Icarus succeeded in flying with wings using feathers attached by beeswax made by his father Daedalus. He was told not to fly toward the sun but did so. Look bottom right to see his legs, one bent the other nearly straight fading into the water.

The painting hangs in The Fine Arts Museum in Brussels where W. H.Auden saw it. I am now working on memorizing Auden’s Musee des Beau Arts. Jim Every said to memorize words that mean something. I like what this poem says about our perceived self-importance.

My pocket copy will likely be with me a long while because the poem is not repetitious or rhyming. Auden’s syntax is as bent and provoking as Dickinson’s.

. . .the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure . . .

The words give me perspective about all my worries and suffering. They keep me in my place.

Time will tell how my memorization experiment goes. If I continue, I may next work on Article 1 from The Constitution as per my concerns expressed in my last blog, “July 4th, the Sermon on the Mount, and Joe Biden’s Definition of America.” Learning the major bones and muscle groups from the old anatomy book I own appeals to me, too.