Yesterday morning, the steamy start to an unseasonably hot, sultry June day, it looked like I’d be late to work.\u00a0\u00a0 I had just missed a bus that would have gotten me there fashionably late, so I had to take a combination of bus and Metro.\u00a0 My mood and my stomach hurt.\u00a0 I’m grateful for my job, but wasn’t thrilled to have to be doing it.<\/p>\n
Morning commutes for some time now have become fruitful writing and thinking times, rich moments of literary output.\u00a0 Yesterday I couldn’t be bothered with either so I pulled out the poem I’m memorizing and spent time with it.\u00a0 I didn’t have to expend the effort to write something.\u00a0 All I had to do was read the portion I was working on, look for patterns, and repeat, repeat, repeat.\u00a0 When a person memorizes poetry, she bathes her mind, her soul, her whole self in rich, healing words.\u00a0 I’m working on a Shakespeare sonnet now filled with phrases that are especially verbally lush.\u00a0 By the time the bus deposited me at the Metro station fifteen minutes later, I felt better.\u00a0 Repeating the sonnet’s words again and again as I worked to memorize it replaced at least part of my pessimism with optimism and peace, and a sense of satisfaction.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
As literary input goes, reading is good and important.\u00a0 Memorizing poems, another way to take in well-written words, gives a very different sort of benefit.\u00a0 When I bathe myself in poetic phrases, I often find I have reduced, at least a little, depression and sorrow.\u00a0 Memorizing poetry installs effective healing words in me, words that heal while I memorize them and heal whenever I repeat them once I have them in my head and in my heart.<\/p>\n
Learning a poem is more than just a nice idea or mental exercise (though it’s both of these, too).\u00a0 Committing a poem to memory gives a real and effective antidote to the sadness and malaise, the lack of energy or caring that everybody feels and knows from time to time.\u00a0 Yesterday morning I was Exhibit A proving this is so.\u00a0 I started the trip feeling crummy and not wanting to write anything.\u00a0 I administered a little poem memory and not long afterwards, felt more optimistic, more creative, and wrote this little essay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday morning, the steamy start to an unseasonably hot, sultry June day, it looked like I’d be late to work.\u00a0\u00a0 I had just missed a bus that would have gotten me there fashionably late, so I had to take a … Continue reading