The primary poem I memorized was “Pinkle Purr” by A.A. Milne. I used to be round seven years previous once I encountered it and was instantly enchanted. It’s a youngsters’s poem, 4 stanzas, all with the identical hypnotic AA/BB/AA rhyme scheme. It’s a poem a couple of kitten, Pinkle Purr, and his mom, Tattoo, and their altering relationship as Pinkle Purr grows up, a kind of “Cat’s within the Cradle” for youths, however much less unhappy.
I don’t bear in mind making any effort to memorize it; I simply learn the poem so many occasions that it labored its method into me, such that I knew it in addition to I knew the theme songs to my favourite TV reveals. I’d stroll round muttering to myself, attempting out completely different voices and syllable stresses: “Tattoo was the mom of Pinkle Purr/A bit of black nothing of toes and fur;/And by-and-by, when his eyes got here by,/He noticed his mom, the large Tattoo.” It was meditative, comforting, an inner metronome that I naturally returned to once I returned to myself.
Maybe as a result of I began memorizing poems early, earlier than I used to be compelled to take action at school, I by no means perceived the method as onerous, however relatively as a enjoyable problem, a option to take one thing I beloved and make it part of me. As a graduate pupil, I memorized Galway Kinnell’s “Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight,” strains from which nonetheless recurrently floor in my mind unbidden — “Kiss the mouth / that tells you, right here, / right here is the world” — though I can’t recall the entire thing anymore. I really like that, amid the sensible info and chronic worries and recollections good and dangerous, my thoughts’s archive accommodates these bits of magnificence, lyrics that float up into consciousness, beautiful echoes.
This previous week, The Occasions E-book Evaluation ran a weeklong challenge to help readers memorize Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo,” replete with video games and movies. (Ethan Hawke’s recitation of “We had been very drained, we had been very merry, / We had gone forwards and backwards all evening on the ferry” is pleasant and dramatic; I’d like to listen to him do “Pinkle Purr.”) I’m clearly the precise viewers for such a factor, however even when you’re the type who thinks of memorizing verse as homework, I believe this problem will make you rethink. The poem is dazzling, and the problem’s construction makes it virtually easy to soak up it. I really like what A.O. Scott and Aliza Aufrichtig write of their introduction: “At a time after we are flooded with texts, rants and A.I. slop, a poem occupies a quieter, much less commodified nook of your consciousness. It’s a flower within the windowbox of your thoughts.”
