It's been too long since I posted here but I am remedying that now.
Today I began a personal project in observance of National Poetry Month. Inspired by the story in the book A SHAKESPEAREAN ACTOR PREPARES (co-authored by Michael York) of Dame Sybil Thorndike memorizing a poem every morning before breakfast to "keep her memory in trim," I have set myself the challenge of memorizing poem every day. I'm giving myself the whole day, not just the time before breakfast, although, since I don't usually eat until very late afternoon, it might happen anyway. I am choosing mostly sonnets by Shakespeare. I am supplementing these with a few speeches from his plays, divided into 14-line segments, and some sonnets by others - Spenser, Frost, Milton, Wordsworth, and Meredith.
Today I memorized sonnet #129, which begins, "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame/ Is lust in action." I am planning to take note of the experience, which is quite enlightening. At the end of every day, as I did today, I plan to video myself performing the poem looking directly into my camera lens as proof that I have memorized the poem. Today it took me 12 takes before I was satisfied that I knew the poem as well as I aimed to. I kept getting it and losing it at various times of the day. I started memorizing in earnest around 5:30am or so and felt I had it at 6:15am. At least I got through it without a hitch in the quiet early morning of my home office. But as I tried to recite it for my wife on the crowded drive to work, I lost parts - no doubt due to the distraction of traffic. As I continued to work on it in my Falk office, I would lose certain parts. Sometimes, when trying to launch into the sonnet cold after having trained my mind concentratedly on another project, I would creep through it almost word by word. Then after a few run throughs, I would be able to recite it smoothly. Sonnet 129 is particularly difficult because the meter is violated by a choppy rhythm of single words - "Savage, extreme, rude, cruel..." Many of the lines are end-stopped and I found it hard to link them to the following lines.
As I work through this project, I am taking notes to eventually turn into an article to submit to Oral Tradition, Text and Performance Quarterly or another academic journal I can find that might be interested.
Tomorrow's sonnet is his last, sonnet #154, which begins, "The little Love-God, lying once asleep..."
I am already working on it - at least just familiarizing myself with it. So my official day is not necessarily from midnight to midnight but from one evening to the next, much like the Hebrews count them - "and the evening and the morning were the first day."
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