I learned from Catherine Robson’s book Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem that the recitation of long poems, in its inception, was primarily a tool to improve people’s memory in order to ultimately improve their knowledge of Biblical verse. I seem to recall that she favored the Romantics.” The point is that the more senses you draw on during the process of memorization, the more effective the end result-thus, hearing the words in your mind, visualizing the imagery, copying the lines into your notebook, reasoning about how the poem’s argument evolves from verse to verse, chunking words together into quotes and phrases, all of this helps, but it then also becomes more apparent that the key ingredient in memorization is time-time to read, re-read, and slowly let your thoughts steep in the words. The length of the poem would determine the length of her workout that day. She worked on a line during each lap, repeating the words in her head until she got back to where the poem was. She would print out a copy of a poem, laminate it, and tape it to the end of her lane at the pool. My friend Juliet Clark told me, “I remember reading, years ago, about a person who memorized poetry while swimming. It could have been any rhythmic physical activity, really.
Slowly, I increased the number of lines I could recite between glances. I walked, stopped to peek at the worn-out printout, and walked again.
As I wandered, lines from the poem came unbidden into my mind, until each physical step turned into a metric foot. Clearly I needed a different approach to physicality, and eventually it found me on the long walks I used to take around the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. Once I’d gotten fragments of the poem down, I tried writing the words out longhand, but found both my hand and mind cramping up from lack of practice. To involve my body physically with the process, I printed it out and traced the letters with my finger as I read, simultaneously whispering the words under my breath (subvocalization, I had read, activates different brain systems and improves the quality of recollection). The first step in memorization is to read your target piece over and over as many times as possible. To fill my new mental hip flask, I selected the liquor of Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” which follows the retired hero’s thoughts as they build up from inchoate yearning to the famous resolve “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” In my twenties, I decided to try my hand at memorizing an entire poem-mostly because I seemed to constantly find myself stuck at some boring public event (panel, seminar, concert) where pulling out a book would be rude. This activity was created by a Quia Web subscriber.Why is poetry these days so hard to remember? Poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter Shakespeare wrote most of his plays in blank verse Christopher Marlowe first used blank verse Her voice, soft and lovely when she SINGS,/Came to me last night in a DREAM./In my head her voice still RINGS/,How pleasant last night must SEEM. Once upon a midnight DREARY, while I pondered,/weak and WEARY./While I nodded, nearly NAPPING, suddenly there came/a TAPPING,/As of some one gently RAPPING, RAPPING at my chamber door.Ī rhyme that comes at the end of lines of poetry
banding/landingĪ rhyme occurring within a line of poetry profound/boundĪccented syllable is followed by an unaccented syllable eg. Rhyme sound is the last syllable of the line, eg. Three lines, usually having the same rhymeĪ similarity of accented sounds between two words, such as sad/mad rhymes can be masculine or feminine The simplest stanza, consisting of two rhymed lines Line of poetry consisting of 2 feet each foot consists of 3 syllables, two unstressed followed by one stressed syllableĪ line of poetry consisting of one foot each foot consists of two stressed syllablesĪ line of poetry consisting of 4 feet each foot consists of two syllables with one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllableĪ group of lines in the formal pattern of a poem Line of poetry consisting of 3 feet each foot consists of 3 syllables, one stressed followed by two unstressed syllables Line of poetry consisting of 5 feet each foot consists of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable Three syllables unstressed unstressed stressedģ syllables stressed unstressed unstressed The process of analyzing poetry's rhythm by looking at meter and feetīasic building block of poetry composed of a pattern of syllablesĭefined by the predominant type of foot and the number of feet within the lines of a poem The poetic line is measured by the number of feet it contains
0 kommentar(er)
