"It provides comfort, or food for thought, when you need it. Since nearly all of what I have by heart is metrical it's of a piece with the music I have by heart, a part of the ongoing rhythm of living."
If I go to hell, I shall not lack for great poetry! I might even get a pass into Heaven and sing in the choir.
Wilbur always made his students memorize Lycidas, and I think that's about 150 lines, the memorization made more difficult because it is heterometrical. He says: "The boys who complained loudest were those who had memorized the entire starting line-ups of every team in the National Football League." It is astonishing what teenagers can do in terms of memorization, and I reiterate, it is very much harder as you age. In my own case, the thousands of lines of Murphy I've memorized crowd out my Keats, my Yeats (Yes, I had Eve of St. Agnes memorized, who didn't?) I vehemently urge that students be "forced" to memorize, and flunk them if they don't. Let them exercise their vacant little brains. I've got a young rock star who is my friend and student, and I'll bet he has 30,000 lines of song lyrics in his pretty head. For those who missed it, Paul Stevens published this recollection of a performance by Aaron the Pooch, who studied with Mason, Sullivan and me:
Aaron Poochigian
“Today, professor, I have prepared the odes.”
Here is a youth who eyes the gods’ abodes
longingly, Helicon and Parnassus,
who studies Latin from the times of Crassus.
His adolescent pimples disappear,
his stutter too. Without a trace of fear
he belts out Kubla Khan and Dover Beach,
all the Romantic odes I’d planned to teach.
A thousand lines, I hear out every tale,
Odes to the West Wind and the Nightingale,
to Evening, Intimations, a Grecian urn.
He’s brought no book, only his heart to burn.
And there I stand thirty-five years ago
saying those lines to Warren in the snow.
Aaron did it in a week. Now he's thirty-five with a published book and two forthcoming to his credit. Memorize.
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