Little Profits Part 2
One of my New Year’s Projects from 2020 was to memorize a poem each month; I wrote about this around halfway thru and wanted to get an update on the record.
It went fine! I abandoned one poem because I just couldn’t get it to stick, but otherwise I memorized these and really enjoyed the process.
I’ve been using them as little mental exercises when I have downtime, and also they have become a really effective way to get to sleep. I’m afraid that part is so effective that I might
By the time of my last post I had memorized:
- January: Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson
- February: God’s Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins
- March: The Sun says Yes, Adrian Mitchell
- April: The Second Coming, Yeats
- May: The Country, Billy Collins
And then in the second half I’ve added:
- June: Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I’ve always loved this weird poem. I named my wifi network after it long ago, much to the chagrin of my family. I love now having the whole poem at my fingertips. It really does feel like a low-key drug trip.
- July: A passage from Moby Dick (from ch 7, The Chapel), that I may have failed at. I tried, and kind of gave up.! Then switched to an easier set of two short poems: This Be the Verse, Philip Larkin AND Rebuttal by Adrian Mitchell
- August: If-, Rudyard Kipling, which is a little singsongy in the way Kipling is, but goshdarn it I love the manly bluster of Kipling, no matter how unfashionable it is. You’ll be a man, my son!
- September: Back to Moby-Dick the Chapel, tried to pick this up again.
- October: This month was a real failure, I started Scott Cairn’s Embalming, but just couldn’t get it to lock in. SO I jumped ahead to Noember’s poem to get a start on it:
- November: St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. This is one of the poems that I was gearing up for - to have this ready by the actual St Crispins Day.
- December: Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, anon. I love this weird old Christmas hymn and always wanted to have it nailed down. Is a song cheating? Maybe.
My goal in 2021 is to just keep these. Keep trying to remember them and practice when I can. Memorization is so hard!
(Little Profits?) The title of this note comes from the first line of of Ulysses, the poem I started this exercise with: It little profits that an idle king…