I read an article advocating the memorization of poetry by children in school. I think memorizing poetry, speeches, and other good examples of well-written material is a very useful exercise for children and adults. I tend to memorize things easily, but even if it’s hard for you to memorize, it can be done. Most children will memorize anything that you read aloud to them every night for a month. Eldest Daughter memorized the 23rd Psalm this way when she was only four years old. I memorized all kinds of things when I was younger: 1 Corinthians 13, John 14, Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe, The Gettysburg Address, The Preamble to the Constitution, The Raggedy Man by Eugene Field, Nobody by Emily Dickinson, various passages from Shakespeare. And look at this list of poets and others that New York schoolchildren used to be required to memorize:

The standard of literacy in the 1927 Course of Study in Literature for Elementary Schools is astonishingly high. Poems for reading and memorization by first-graders include those of Robert Louis Stevenson (Rain and The Land of Nod), A. A. Milne (Hoppity), Christina Rossetti (Four Pets), and Charles Kingsley (The Lost Doll). Second-graders grappled with poems by Tennyson (The Bee and the Flower), Sara Coleridge (The Garden Year), and Lewis Carroll (The Melancholy Pig). In third grade came Blake’s The Shepherd and Longfellow’s Hiawatha, while fourth grade brought Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, and Kipling. In the grades that followed, students read and recited poems by Arnold, Browning, Burns, Cowper, Emerson, Keats, Macaulay, Poe, Scott, Shakespeare, Southey, Whitman, and Wordsworth. Eighth-graders tackled Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address.

What poetry do you have memorized? What do you or would you require your children to memorize?