Road Apples by Tim Sanders
April 4, 2011

Oh yeah, well memorize this

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I am a fan of memorization. When I was a kid, during the Taft administration, memorization was a big deal. Teachers made us memorize important historical dates, multiplication tables, and even Einstein’s E=mc˛ equation, which we suspected had something to do with either atom bombs or time travel. We were also expected to memorize all the U.S. presidents, in order, although back then there were only seven or eight.

One of the first pieces of literature we had to memorize was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Had I been bright enough, I’d have followed the lead of one student who walked to the front of the class and intoned: “Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address was Room 407, Balmoral Arms Hotel, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.” Then he sat down, amidst thunderous applause. But I wasn’t bright enough, and instead memorized the whole speech. I don’t regret it, though. It was one of the best presidential speeches in American history. It was short, direct, and had a rhythmic quality to it that still enchants the listener (unless that listener is your wife, who tells you as soon as you finish the ‘Four Score and Seven Years Ago’ part that she’s heard it a million times, and yes, it’s great that you still know it, but puleeeeeease shut up!).

I can still recite all 24 lines of Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “Old Ironsides,” the poem that helped keep the U.S.S. Constitution from the scrap heap back during the early 1800s. Mrs. Tabor, an asthmatic who taught high school English when she wasn’t wheezing, loved that poem, and had an old record which featured some long forgotten actor–probably one of the Barrymores–quoting “Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! etc.” in stentorian tones. That record inspired Phil Myers to rise dramatically from his desk, stride slowly to the front of the class, and, in a deep, falsetto voice that cracked up everyone in the room except for Mrs. Tabor, recite: “AY, TEAR HER TATTERED INSIDES OUT. LONG HAVE THEY WAVED ON HIGH!” All of the recitations that followed were anticlimactic.

I used to know most of “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which began with the ominous lines “It was the schooner Hesperus, that sailed the wintry sea; and the skipper had taken his little daughter, to bear him company.” and continued in that morbid direction until the ship wrecked on a reef called Norman’s Woe and the entire crew was lost. The daughter, who’d been delighted to take that cruise with Daddy and all those sailors during Spring Break, was found the next morning, lashed to the floating mast, frozen as stiff as a carp. It is not a very pleasant poem, which is probably why I’ve forgotten most of it.

Sometimes I’m not sure how much of what I remember of those poems is original material, and how much is satirical. There was a poem by Felicia Dorothea Hemans called “Casabianca,” about a ten, eleven, or fourteen-year-old son of a French ship’s captain named Louis de Casabianca. The brave boy refused to leave his post until he received orders from his father, who, being an experienced French naval officer, had left the ship when he first smelled smoke. The poem begins with the famous line: “The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled; the flames that lit the battle’s wreck shone round him o’er the dead.” I never learned that stanza, but I did memorize certain other versions, like “The boy stood on the burning deck, the flames ‘round him did roar; he took a bar of Ivory Soap and washed himself ashore.” Another popular version had it: “The boy stood on the burning deck, eating peanuts by the peck; his father called, he would not go, he loved those boiled peanuts so.”

I’m not sure why we did so much memorizing back then, but I do know that our music gave us a natural advantage. It lent itself to memorization. If, for example, you wanted to remember the lyrics to one of the great musical scores of the Twentieth Century, then all you had to do was imagine yourself striding manfully into study hall, and the words just seemed to fall into place: “Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl. Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl.” And of course it only followed that “As-a I walk through this world, nothing can stop the Duke of Earl. And-a you, you are my girl, and no one can hurt you, oh no.” No one had to decipher those lyrics, they said what they said and they meant it. You were a Duke, darn it, and your girl was a Duchess, and the both of you could walk proudly through your Dukedomish paradise, which included study hall and a section of bleachers in the gymnasium, because didn’t nobody mess with no Duke of Earl.

Today’s young folks, probably because of their alleged music, are at a real disadvantage, memorization-wise. I’ll admit that I know absolutely nothing about Hip-Hop, except that I really, really don’t like it. But just to give Hip-Hoppers, or whatever they’re called, the benefit of the doubt, I went to my computer and picked a Hip-Hop song at random. The lyrics are by somebody named Keri Hilson, who apparently is famous for either Hipping or Hopping, or possibly both. The song is called “Pretty Girl Rock,” and actually contains lines like: “My name is Keri, I’m so very Fly oh my, it’s a little bit scary. Boys wanna marry, looking at my deri. You can stare, but if you touch it, then I’m a bury.” Now you can diagram those lines fourteen different ways, and none of them will make any sense, grammatically. How some poor high school child can memorize lines like that, imagining herself to be either a zipper or a winged insect with eight legs and huge, compound eyes, who plans not “to bury” something or someone, but just to be “a bury,” is beyond me.
 
Given today’s pop culture, maybe memorization is no longer necessary. Perhaps it’s just as well.