memorize "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe

Yay! I finished!

This was fairly easy. I memorized three stanzas at a time and quoted what I knew of the poem daily until I felt I could add some new material. This is really fun to memorize. If you get this down, you’ll be ready for any on-the-spot talent show!

I just reviewed the first 12 stanzas and memorized three more! 15 down, 3 to go! I’m almost done!

http://eapoe.org/works/poems/ravent.htm

Look at it whenever you want to, print it out, format it so there’s three stanzas on a page, change the font size, do whatever is most helpful to you.

(I printed it out on six pages with three stanzas each.)

Okay, I deleted this and then re-added it.

I couldn’t bear the thought of going to the trouble of memorizing the first poem in my goal of “memorize 10 poems” and not actually get to cross something off, especially since my memorization plan for the 10 poems is spread out over a very long period of time, since there’s so much other stuff I want to memorize. (Edit: And that sentence should be taken out and shot. I’m so sorry.)

Last week, I had memorized the first 12 stanzas. I then got very busy, and then I got very sick. My plan today is to rememorize the first 12 stanzas and make sure I’ve got those down solid. If I have time this week I’ll finish up. Then I’ll practice quoting it to friends – it’s really fun to do, all dramatically.

Secretly, I’d kind of like to do it for the poetry quoting section of the speech competition our college holds every year, next year. I’m not sure if they’re continuing it after this year, though, so we’ll have to wait and see.

At one point I had the first four or five stanzas down, but now I’ve forgotten everything. There’s a bunch of other stuff I’m trying to memorize, so this is kind of a long term goal. It’s part of a larger long term goal, which is to memorize ten “long” poems. This is the first of those.