Ars poetica...

[fajrdrako]

I'm memorizing a poem for the first time in years.

We were talking about it on one of the Tolkien mailing lists, and comparing which of Tolkien's poems we had memorized. It made me realize how long it has been since I memorized anything - for decades I've amused myself with what I'd already memorized, going over it time and again, forgetting and half-forgetting things. I think I stopped deliberately memorizing poetry when I tried a Wallace Stevens sonnet that utterly defeated me. Faugh. It was good, too.

But now I've started again, with an easy one: the song Frodo sings at the Sign of the Prancing Pony, that starts:

There is an inn, a merry old inn,
beneath an old grey hill,
and there they brew a beer so brown
the man in the moon himself came down
one night to drink his fill.

It's fun. If this works, I'll try another. And maybe eventually conquer that elusive Wallace Stevens poem.