Passage A
A poem learned by heart becomes a possession that cannot be taken away. A student who has memorized a sonnet carries it into every part of life: it comes to mind on a long walk, in a hospital waiting room, at a funeral. Because memorizing requires repeating a poem again and again, the student comes to notice things that a single reading misses, such as how a line break creates a pause or how a repeated sound links two distant images. Memorization also builds the mind’s capacity to hold a complicated structure in order, a skill with uses far beyond poetry.
Memorized poems also give a young reader something to measure later poems against. A student who knows a dozen great poems by heart has absorbed their rhythms and their ways of turning a phrase, and when she meets a new poem she can tell at once whether it is doing something fresh or only imitating what she already knows. This sense of the standard is not learned from a definition. It is built up, line by line, in the memory of a reader who has lived with good writing for long enough to know it.
Critics call the practice outdated in an age when any poem can be found in seconds. But finding a poem is not the same as owning it. A recited poem is spoken in the student’s own voice, and the words, once absorbed, shape the way the student speaks and thinks. Generations of readers have testified that a few lines learned in school stayed with them for the rest of their lives, offering comfort or courage when little else could. A school that skips memorization withholds that gift from its students.
Passage B
Few students enjoy memorizing poems, and the reason is easy to see. The task is often assigned as a drill, with a grade attached, and a student who is afraid of forgetting a line is not thinking about its meaning. A teacher who wishes students to love poetry would do better to ask them to read widely, to talk about what puzzles them, and to write poems of their own. A student who has done so may well memorize favorite lines without being asked, and those lines will mean more because the student chose them.
A further difficulty is that memorization favors certain students over others. Those who find it easy are rewarded, and those who struggle, though they may understand the poem better, are marked down. For a student with a poor memory, the exercise teaches that poetry is something she is bad at, which is precisely the wrong lesson. There are many ways to show that one has engaged with a poem, including a thoughtful paragraph, a performance, or a conversation with classmates, and a teacher who values them all will reach more students.
Nor is memorization a reliable sign of understanding. A student can recite a stanza flawlessly without knowing what its words refer to, and many do. The hours spent in rehearsal might be spent more productively in discussing why a poet chose a particular image or what a poem might have meant to its first readers. Memorization has its place, particularly for poems that a student already loves, but it should be a choice and not a requirement. Poetry that is forced on a student is seldom remembered with affection.