The shallop flitteth silken-sailed

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And through the field the road run by
To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.

I’ve decided that my dead time — on the walks to and from school, while waiting for class to start, in line at various places, etc. — will no longer go unused. In the past I’ve made this resolution, namely to spend idle moments memorizing poetry or vocabulary, but it’s never worked. And I think I know why: I never took the time to make the material readily available. What I need to do is take an hour or so one of these days (soon) and make up a series of vocab cards that’ll keep me going for a week or more. Before I left work today I took “The Lady of Shalott,” printed it out, and then cut the first four stanzas (part one) into little pieces of paper that fit in my front pocket. And as I walked, I memorized. I figure that within a week (or sooner) I’ll have the whole thing down pat. I have a feeling that this system will actually work. :)

One small sidenote on that: the other day I was studying for my Latin midterm on the Aeneid (which went splendidly, by the way), and so I wrote out some of the vocab and decided to review it during my phonology class. To my surprise, I was able to both memorize the vocab and listen to the teacher without any real breakdown. (Well, yes, I’m sure I would have gotten more out of the lecture had I given it my full attention, but what I did get was quite adequate.) I don’t think this has anything to do with any special abilities, either — instead, I see my time in class as being like a sponge, with lots of air bubbles within where you can pack in extra stuff. It doesn’t really take that much effort to memorize a word here or a word there, repeating it to myself on autopilot while I take notes.

I guess my sidenote ended up being as long as the “main” note. ~sigh~ Anyway, my other exciting news (at least to me) is that I’ll start volunteering at the Provo library next Friday. I’ll be working in the circulation department, peeling stickers off books and alphabetizing them for shelving. Sure, it sounds like it could be boring, but I’m thrilled. It’s only two hours a week for now, but if I love it as much as I think I will, I’ll probably end up adding a few more hours on.

Speaking of books, I gave in again and went back to the book sale. Picked up the Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michael White’s Tolkien biography, and The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture. I had to stop myself from browsing around any more after that. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep myself away from now until the sale ends on Saturday at 2 p.m. We’ll see. :)

And now I’m off to translate more of the Aeneid…

The line you chose for your title is the hardest one in the poem. I can never “frame to pronounce it right” which throws off my cool.

Yay for memorizing poetry. It is fun. I need to finish “The Lady of Shalott” sometime. I like your note card idea. I may steal it. Short sentences rock.

Yes, it’s definitely tough — I kept finding myself saying “The shallop skitteth silken-sailed” or “skippeth” instead. :)

Here, I’ll just give you the note card idea so you don’t have to steal it. ;)

Now you’ve spoiled my fun. It’s so much more satisfying to steal ideas. :D

Excellent poem choice. I had the whole thing memorized at one point. Heck, I had most of Tennyson (the shorter poems) memorized at one point or another…so much for that though. Maybe I’ll try it out as well…recitation is *such* a lost art-

Liz: Okay, then. You’d better not steal my idea, so help me! (Is that good? :))

Joni: It is indeed a lost art. Memorization has fallen by the wayside, and I can practically feel my brain shrinking. Or something like that. The hard thing, in my experience, is keeping it up — you have to review and review and review again until it gets etched into your DNA. If you don’t, then it disappears. (Granted, it comes back fairly easily, but still.) If I ever get locked up in the Chateau d’If, I want to have lots of stuff memorized that I can recite over and over to myself to keep me sane. :)

Ben,

I am enjoying your archives and just wanted to plant a little seed.

I worked for an elementary school where almost every child could recite 10 to 50 fairly long poems by heart. How did this happen? What was the reason for their success? Why was poetry so cool? It was the result of one old man who volunteered in the library. The teachers would send him children that needed a little special love and attention and he would tell them about a poem and then have them memorize it one line at a time.

He would give them a little piece of paper with their line and they would skip off to class with their little treasure. When the child had the line down, they would return and recite it and the man gave them the next line. When that line was memorized and recited correctly, He would have them recite the poem from the beginning up to the present point.

When the entire poem had been memorized, He always found opportunities to grab another child who was learning the poem and have the child that had learned the poem recite it for the learner.

An interesting side note: He always choose poetry that taught a moral or a virtue and made sure that the child understood the point. Oh how I wish there were hundreds of thousands of men like that.

Thanks for that story! Because of your comment I printed out a bunch of short poems and have started memorizing them (I’ve lapsed since this original post), including “Jabberwocky” and John Donne’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Good stuff. :) (I’m now thinking about eventually compiling a book of poems to memorize. I’m sure others have done it, but that wouldn’t stop me. I love typesetting. :))