My Experience on Memorising a Sonnet

Memorizing Poetry, Speeches, Books
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I’m new around all this and posting for accountability.

15 days to memorise a random sonnet. I’m reasonably happy about it, just happy to have found the mental strength not to have given up. I discovered I’m more mentally distracted than I thought, literally a few seconds and I’m off on random trivial thoughts.

It took approx 10-20 minutes, ten times a day for 15 days to get this in long-term memory, and I know I’ll need to continue reciting once in a while. I wasted time building unsuitable memory palaces and making assumptions about small words - oh, the pain! A game changer was reading on here the necessity of building images for pronouns and articles. So, I built images for 100+ words, created one or two stories per line and placed this in a point in a physical geographic place. And that took 15 days.

I hope having these images will speed up memorising the next sonnets, which I’ll be sticking with for a few months, why not?

‘Thy self thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel’

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You gained experience, a good use of time.

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The next sonnet took about 10 days. First mistake was resting on my laurels, getting lazy and avoiding the work. Eventually I got down to it and it was slightly easier than the first sonnet. Again, surprised by the reality of a distracted mind, a washing machine mind off on tangents repeatedly, but less so each day - which is improvement. Shakespeare only used around 10 words from the previous sonnet in the next sonnet but I felt more comfortable building images, stories and placing them in a palace.

Interestingly, i completely forgot the sonnet I memorised previously. Literally couldn’t remember the first work of the first line. Took around 30 minutes over two days to get it back. Fairly relaxed about that, no one said this was easy and I expect setbacks and frustrations, I’m not going anywhere.

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Spaced repetition can help with that.

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I think this is a much better method for you. Along with spaced repetition, you won’t forget sonnets verbatim until a very long time. (Just give 20-30 min of your time and with practice, you will be memorizing pages and pages within minutes).

First, take keywords from a text.
second, make pictures for those keywords
third put the keywords around your home
fourth practice reading a page of the text you are learning 10 -20 times
fifth practice recalling the text about 20+ times
sixth delete the images you made
finally, you have it all verbatim memorized for a very long long time.
(optional) spaced recalling/review/repetition.

ENJOY!

I AM OUT

  • MEMORISE
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Wow.

How is this going? I’ve read your approach and I find it very innefficient. Enfasis on this:

So, I wonder how would you memorize, or please if you will, the mnemonic you’d use for something like this, maybe I can offer you insight:

“‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,
When not to be receives reproach of being;
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deemed
Not by our feeling, but by others’ seeing”
-fragment of Sonnet 121

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Firstly, I would have a 14 point palace for each line in the sonnet. (Less than one hour).

Tis = tissue
Better = bet
to be = Toby
vile = villa
than = thich nat hanh
esteemed = estee lauder

Link the tissue to the first point, betting slips with a famous or known Toby written on it. Toby in a villa with Thich opposite Estee’s villa.

When = white hen
not = knot
to be = toby
receives reproach = receding poached eggs
of = david hasselhoff
being; = bees around ING bank

Perhaps estee lauder touching on the second point in the palace. White hens tying knots around Toby, laying poached eggs on David Hasselhoff with bees attacking

And = Andy Murray
the = T
just pleasure = justice of the peace
lost,
which = witch
is = Islamic State
so = spread out
deemed = Dee medicated

As above, as you can see this takes time!!!

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Advise:

Learn to encode an entire verse or line into an image, eventually an entire stanza or paragraph. You don’t need to do it one word at a time to memorise word for word. The power of the association enters into account here.

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Example?

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Verse 1 “Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed,” = Adolf HItler (mnemonic part)
Verse 2 “When not to be receives reproach of being;” = Antifa boycotter (mnemonic part)
Final Mnemonic = Adolf Hitler punches Antifa boycotter.

You place the mnemonic in a loci, and you have both verses, perfectly memorised, you have to make sure to associate the images with the text.

Meanings: Adolf Hitler was a vile person, whoever esteems him… is a joke of a person. Antifa’s tend to be accused of being neo nazis (when they’re not, maybe check KKK, some Proud Boys members).

For me this connection is rather easy to do, because well I made the mnemonic, now go and do it yourself, choose an image to represent the entire verse line or a chunk of words of it for instance: “Out of the night that covers me, black as the pit from pole to pole” == a black ghost (out of the night that covers me) covering a pit ( black as the pit) and inside the pit there’s a pendulum (from pole to pole).

To practice this, try taking your target poems, and break the sentences in meaningful parts, usually where there’s an action performed or event manifest or emotions expressed, or wherever you notice a noun, there you shall make a break.

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I’ll give it a go and let you know how it goes.

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PALACE = CHURCH, PARK, PHARMACY, JUNCTION, CLOCK, COMPANY (LW), BUS STOP, COMPANY (99), TREE, LOADING DOCK, PHARMACY, COMPANY (55), COMPANY(PAPER) & SANDWICH SHOP.

SONNET XI

As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st
In one of thine, from that which thou departest;
And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st,
Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.
Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase;
Without this folly, age, and cold decay:
If all were minded so, the times should cease
And threescore year would make the world away.
Let those whom nature hath not made for store,
Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish:
Look whom she best endowed, she gave the more;
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:
She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby,
Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

1 = SPEEDY GONZALEZ
2 = THIN WITCH
3 = ANDY MURRAY THE VAMPIRE
4 = WHITE CHICKEN
5 = SALVADOR DALI
6 = PIANO
7 = SAHARA
8 = 70
9 = DAVID LETTERMAN
10 = THE JOKER
11 = MIRROR
12 = COCONUT
13 = JUGGLING SEAL
14 = NEWSPAPER

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Gave it a go but found your suggestion impossible. Line four, for example, I needed an image for each word and created a three part story to link them. How would you handle line four?

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Nope. That’s the point. You did what I wanted you to.

I don’t know what “White Chicken” has anything to do with that sentences, but for demonstration I will use these four ways:

  1. Arbitrary: “white chicken”

Image: I see a white chicken calling her chicks and but their are old chickens as they approach to her they become younger and younger and when they reach her they become eggs.
Explanation: in the image there’s a subject possesion children, that calls and these rejuvenate. These image doesn’t care about what the poet meant about the phrase, it cares about holding the key ideas: subject who calls what it owns, youth and conversion (transformation).

  1. What the phrase or a singular word reminds me of.

Image: kid rips appart his clothes Catholic priest clothese and it remains normal kid clothes on him as it should. (symbolic and it could be say that fits Shakespeare)
Explanation: I have chosen two keywords: “youth” and “convertest”, the rest of the phrase doesn’t matter because I associate verse to the impression of visualizing this “youth=kid”, “convertest=converts” from Catholic to non Catholic now if you ask me, how do the association occurs? It’s simple: I read the verse, I thought of “the youth(kid) that converts” and this thought is sufficient enough to remind me of why I thought of this in the first place, in the process of placing this image in a mental loci, it reinforces the association image to verse and later again when you review.

  1. The meaning or what I understand the phrase aims at.

Image: A father calls his son and gives him a candle, the candle lights up as the child just hold it.
Explanation: I think you can guess how it represents the verse. The poem is about youth remaining as one will age, so youth should pass on. The candle being youth, the father the protagonist calls and gives to what his the mandle, so now it’s the turn of the child to hold the candle.

  1. If the meaning is connected to another line, I connect its image with the new I create.

This can speed up the memorization process of texts. Use the previous image or the next idea to form a connection with the current idea. Consider this more for definitions, the aim for me is to reduce the number of loci, regarless of the number of images. You’re going to use the link method or the story method.

Let’s use:

Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.
Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase;

Image:
A father calls his son and gives him a candle, the candle lights up as the child just hold it and presents the candle to Athena who places a crown on the kid, beautiful clothes, and gives him a chest full of coins.
Explanation: Yes, this could be much simpler, but I’m not simple. I guess you can deduce the rest.

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