This year I've been memorizing poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. So far, I've memorized "To R.B.," "God's Grandeur," and "Pied Beauty." And this morning I finished my fourth, "The Sea and the Skylark":

On ear and ear two noises too old to end
Trench—right, the tide that ramps against the shore; 
With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar, 
Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend. 

Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend, 
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score 
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour 
And pelt music, till none ’s to spill nor spend. 

How these two shame this shallow and frail town! 
How ring right out our sordid turbid time, 
Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown, 
Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime: 

Our make and making break, are breaking, down 
To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime.

From Glenn Arbery's "The Poetic Renewal of the World":

Whole poems are instantly present, without recourse to a text, and reciting them has its own pleasures: all that great language alive in this moment, with these friends and the very air you breathe. And on another, more personal level, these poems, once they are held for a time and revived in the memory, begin to reveal why living memory is more than a hard drive. When St. Augustine writes about memory and time, one of his major examples is a psalm he knows by heart—and by heart, with all the implications of really caring about something, is how the English language teaches us to think about what we’ve memorized.

To know something by heart means that you’ve taken it deeply into the center of who you are. When you know a poem by heart, you find that you can not only recite it, but also relive it and let it unfold in new ways, line-by-line, revealing new subtleties that you might have missed in the mere recitation. But even before this meditative exercise begins, the shaping force of a memorized poem has already laid its claim. Long before I ever make a technical point about the “turn” between the octave and the sestet in a Petrarchan sonnet, or even fully discuss what a sonnet is, those who know sonnets by heart have already felt their nature. For example, in the first eight lines of “God’s Grandeur,” Hopkins describes how a world originally charged with the grandeur of God has become inaccessible to modern man because “Generations have trod, have trod, have trod,/And all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil/And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell. The soil/Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.” Just when plodding repetition and world-weariness seem to take over, Hopkins turns the poem in the ninth line: “And yet for all this nature is never spent./There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Having the poem memorized means that it can be thought through at leisure; lines like “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” suddenly take on new resonance.

Memorized poems are a sort of larder, laid up against the hungers of an extended period of solitude. But today we are far less solitary than we were even a few years ago. Anyone equipped with a smartphone—many of my friends would never step outdoors without one—commands a range of poetry that beggars anything the brain can store. Let’s say it’s a gorgeous afternoon in October. You’re walking through a park, and you wish to recall—but can’t quite summon—the opening lines of Keats’ ”To Autumn.” With a quick tap-tap-tap, you have it on your screen. You’re back in the nineteenth century, but you’re also in the twenty-first, where machine memory regularly supplants and superannuates brain memory.

So why undergo the laborious process of memorizing a poem these days, when—tap, tap, tap—you have it at your fingertips? Has this become another outmoded practice? When I was a Boy Scout, in the sixties, I spent some hours trying to learn Morse code and even, on a couple of overly sunny, headachey afternoons, trying to communicate by flag semaphore. Some things were meant to disappear. (And many of my students wish that assignments to memorize poems would follow them.)  

The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms of poetry as echoes or variations of its own insistent beat.”

After all this time, I still have every word of Tennyson’s “Eagle.” He’s a literal part of me, which perhaps accounts for his splendid supremacy in my imagination. No other bird I’ve encountered in poems since—not Keats’ nightingale, or Hardy’s thrush, or Frost’s oven bird, or Clampitt’s kingfisher—can compete with him, roosting as he does in an aerie at the top of the world. Here’s the poem in entirety:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands; 

Close to the sun in lonely lands, 

Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; 

He watches from his mountain walls, 

And like a thunderbolt he falls.   

 Six cents. It was a cheap thrill, and an everlasting one.    

Brad Leithauser, "Why We Should Memorize"