A haiku for every element.
It's wonderful to have a slate of poems up and ready to go as needed. Strangely, all the poems I know by heart seem to have come from exposure rather than deliberately memorizing. I met a concert pianist who told me that anything he memorized before the age 20, he will never forget. That might also be true of poetry. What's on your list?
My German teacher was a man of classical music, a man of poetry, and a man who always smelled like milk. At the start of the second year of learning German, he said that every man or woman worth their salt knows at least one poem by heart. So he gave us a poem. Every class he'd pick out one random person to recite it, followed by a class recitation. That class was nine years ago, yet I can still recite Das Fraulein Stand am Meere flawlessly.
Here's Google Translate's translation. What do you think of it? The Mistress Stood by the Sea The mistress stood by the sea And sighed long and afraid, It touched her so The sunset. My girl! be merry, That is an old piece; Down here she goes below And returns from behind.
Not bad! Fraulein literally means 'miss', a dimunitive of frau which means 'lady'. Mistress might be too pejorative. I'd translate it like this: The young lady stood by the sea And sighed long and weary, It touched her so much, the sunset. 'My lady! Worry not, it's just an old thing Before you she goes under And will return from behind.
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night - Dylan Thomas She Walks in Beauty -Byron Hamlet's To Be or Not to Be soliloquy -Shakespeare And another short one by Byron, though I don't know the name. If I can add one per month, that would be a good thing for the year.
This poem is handy to know. Recently a friend of mine dropped his iPhone into water. People said to put it in a bag with rice, a common response. (Note - just checked the rice-cell phone solution here.) The rice soution gave me a chance to quote Fire and [R]ice.) From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire But if it had to perish twice I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction rice is also great and will suffice. My friend said, "Wow, did you make that up just now?" Clearly he wasn't a Frost fan. Some say the cell phone will end in fire, some in rice.