The Poetry Memorization Challenge discussion

Wax eloquent.

My favourite poem is Alexander Pope's 'The Rape of the Lock'. It was written in 1714 and is over 700 lines long. I first learned about it in an English 101 course at University and have ever since thought I would like to memorize it. It wasn't until 40 or so years later that I decided to actually memorize it and it took a few months to do so. When one has poetry memorized it requires regular maintenance to keep it from disappearing and though I have recited it to myself a few hundred times over the past few years I never tire of it. Pope's poetry is very dense, every line being packed with ideas. Combine that with English that is 300 years removed from the way we speak now and some effort is required to make out what is going on but to me it seems well worth it. The poem is generally regarded as the greatest 'mock epic' in the English language. It has all of the features of a regular epic (think of Virgil's 'Aeneid', Milton's 'Paradise Lost' and Dante's 'Divine Comedy), namely multiple books (or cantos), heroes and heroic deeds, the intervention of gods, epic battles, etc. but on a humourously smaller scale. Instead of Helen's abduction or the fall of mankind in the Garden of Eden, the story centres on the cutting off of a lock of a young woman's hair by her young admirer, hence the title 'The Rape of the Lock' which in itself is an overblown description of the actual event. The poem pokes gentle fun at the foibles of beautiful women and provides a glimpse into the life of the idle aristocracy of the time. Pope was and probably still is the master of the heroic couplet which is iambic pentameter in which every two lines rhyme. Under such a restricting and potentially monotonous form, he has created a dazzling tour de force of imagery, invention, wit, taste and discernment. Every line is a jewel of delight. People of his day would have been intimately familiar with the stories that Pope parodies in 'The Rape of the Lock', so that when the heroine announces that spades shall be trump in the card game she is playing, everyone listening would immediately think of God saying, 'Let there be light' in 'Paradise Lost', not to mention the Bible itself.. That single example serves to illustrate the constant contrasting between the high-flown and the mundane that the poem is permeated with.