I had a teacher in high school who encouraged us to learn the first two lines of as many poems as possible. She said we could drop them in conversation and people would (1) assume we were intellectual, and (2) never ask us to recite the rest of the poem.
(She couldn't guarantee number 1, but she swore by number 2.) So in the spirit of dear Mrs. Wages, wherever you are:
Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me.
7 comments:
Thank you.I found that a good read,
I enjoyed it too. I never had a great deal of luck memorizing entire pieces, but lines here and there have stuck with me, from Carroll to Yeats.
I had a teacher in high school who encouraged us to learn the first two lines of as many poems as possible. She said we could drop them in conversation and people would (1) assume we were intellectual, and (2) never ask us to recite the rest of the poem.
(She couldn't guarantee number 1, but she swore by number 2.) So in the spirit of dear Mrs. Wages, wherever you are:
Because I could not stop for death,
He kindly stopped for me.
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, we knew no haste...
Well, this could go on for quite a while.
I had a friend in grad school who wrote a parody of this one, about a dinner date between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. The first two lines:
Because I could not stop for Walt,
He kindly stopped for me.
Do obscene limericks count? Somehow, they seem to stay with me.
And why is the first word of my WV ANALN?
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