On memory & remembering & Yeats

Get a poem in your head

This New York Times article has been stuck in my head since it was published in April:

Like most good things in life, the article is paywalled, but here it is if you want to read it. It’s a pretty noble project, I think, getting NYT readers to memorize a poem over the course of a week. I didn’t do it then, but I’ve since thought a lot about it.

After reading it I was immediately reminded of a moment when I was fourteen and a freshman in high school. I was an awkward kid, blushingly unsure of myself. We were reading Romeo and Juliet in my English class. I had a crush on a girl who sat one desk behind me. I got into my head a kind of feverish fantasy where I would memorize Romeo’s soliloquy from the Act 2 balcony scene; I would memorize it and in some auspicious moment when the girl from the desk behind me and I were alone together or in some private space, I would recite it to her. She, of course, would be immediately besotted and we would 100% be boyfriend and girlfriend from that moment on. The vagaries of romantic love were clearly a total mystery to me then. I did end up memorizing it and it still, mostly, lives up in my dome. I’m going to write it all here, just to see what of it is still remains: