Memorizing-Merchant

For the recitation assignment, I chose to recite Lewis Carroll’s  “The Jabberwocky”. At first I was very overwhelmed with the task and extremely nervous because I never considered my self to be very good at memorizing poems. Even though I had to memorize a poem every year through middle school the thought always made me nervous. I think I was always overwhelmed because I never tried to understand what I was reading; I always just tried to memorize the words. This time though, for “The Jabberwocky” I actually found it much easier to memorize once I sat down and tried to see the story behind the poem.  I thought that if I could visualize the story in my head then the words would come easier.

I started off just trying to see who the characters are in the poem and what they are trying to accomplish. I thought it was kind of hard in the beginning since a lot of the words in this particular poem were not English words but after a few reading I understood the main gist of the story. I saw a father and son having a conversation where the father was warning the son of this terrible monster that has terrorized their village for a long time. He is telling his son that he should beware of this terrible monster. Then as this son is thinking about how to defeat this monster here comes the beast through the forest. The son miraculously kills the beast and parades its head for his village to see. The father rejoices and everyone lives happily ever after.

When the story started making sense, the memorizing did not seem as bad. The main technique I used to memorize the poem was writing each stanza multiple times until I remembered the words.  I find this the easiest method to memorize a poem like “The Jabberwocky” because some of the words are made up and it was useful to write these words down to visualize the sounds and note the pattern that Carroll was trying to attain.

Another thing that made this poem easier to memorize was that there was a set rhyme scheme and rhythm. Because of this, I felt like I was memorizing a song and often times I found myself singing the words rather than reciting them which made it easier to remember. Overall  I think this memorizing exercise really helped me try and understand the meaning of the poem instead of just trying to memorize the words.