Ok, I know, enough Shakespeare already -- but I'm wondering, Hubski, what have you memorized?
I took an "introductory to poetry" class in college and our final exam was to recite a poem from memory. I took our book from class, opened it to a random page and chose Elizabeth Bishop's The Fish. I can still get about this far before failing reading it live:
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my
hook fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.....
It was an intimidating experience for me, but a formative one.
I had a similar experience back in highschool. My German teacher was the kind of teacher who'd be listening to Beethoven on 11 when you'd enter his class, the one who'd shout at you if you disrupted his lessons. Wonderful guy. He believed that no person was worth his salt if he couldn't recite one poem. So he learned us a German poem:
Das Fräulein stand am Meere
Und seufzte lang und bang,
Es rührte sie so sehre
Der Sonnenuntergang.
"Mein Fräulein! Sein Sie munter,
Das ist ein altes Stück;
Hier vorne geht sie unter
Und kehrt von hinten zurück.
I think I am at a slight advantage here.
I know the beginning of Puck's speech from the end of Midsummer Night's - one of my favorite of Shakespeare's...
If we spirits have offended
think but this and all is mended
that you have but slumbered here
while these visions did appear...
all that we see and seem
is but a dream within a dream
And from Romeo and Juliet; "Ah! That's a degree to love!" R&J are talking and J says she pities R and he says that then. It is a line that makes me think.
I will go you neck-to-neck on Simon & Garfunkel, too :) - I have squandered my resistance on a pocket full of mumbles such are promises. (Their "Cecelia" is my formative song.) I could do a lot of song lyrics. Billy Joel. Build Me Up Buttercup.
And countless poems, which I think has come up in discussion on Hubski somewhere before. I've memorized: The Raven - though some of it I've lost - the first poem I ever memorized, and this is my inner geek coming out, was The Lay of Luthien from LOTR -
The leaves were long, the grass was green
the hemlock-umbels tall and fair
and in the glade a light was seen
of stars in shadow shimmering
Tinuviel was dancing there
the light of stars was in her hair
and in her raiment, glimmering.
There Beren came from mountains cold
and lost he wandered under leaves
and where the Elven river rolled
he walked alone, and sorrowing...
I have Dickinson memorized (Hope is the thing with feathers...), I have Frost (Whose woods these are I do not know). I've memorized Philip Larkin's This Be The Verse and Atwood's "You Fit Into Me," Muriel Rukeyster's "the Conjugation of the Paramecium," like thenewgreen I have memorized Bishop but I went for "The Art of Losing." Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much WIth Us" and Neruda's "Love."
Interestingly, I do not have any poems of mine memorized.
The whole thing? Do you still remember it? Do you pull it out from time to time as a party trick? (Canons to the left of them/Canons to the right of them/Canons in front of them/Volley'd and thunder'd)
Yeah, I'm with you on S&G. Here are two we can start with:
1. The Boxer - (I am just a poor boy/though my story's seldom told)
2. America (Let us be lovers/we'll marry our fortunes together)