A poem can console even when it has nothing consoling to say—much as a person can, simply by being there. A few years ago, a Cambridge University research project surveyed hundreds of poetry-lovers on the effects of memorization. The researchers discovered that people who had learned a poem by heart frequently referred to it as though it were alive. One interviewee told the researchers: “A poem is like a person—if I met you next week I wouldn’t expect you to be the same.” Another said the poems he knew had become “like personal friends deeply rooted in my head.”
When I saw my friend Harold Boatrite lying in his coffin I recited to him — yes, that’s how it felt — Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Felix Randal.” The lines “This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears. / My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears, / Thy tears that touched my heart …” seemed somehow appropriate.
About 25 years ago, John Hollander put together an excellent anthology called Committed to Memory. It appears to be out of print, but not hard to find.
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