These things do I within, in that vast court of my memory. For there are present with me, heaven, earth, sea, and whatever I could think on therein, besides what I have forgotten. There also meet I with myself, and recall myself, and when, where, and what I have done, and under what feelings. There be all which I remember, either on my own experience, or other’s credit. Out of the same store do I myself with the past continually combine fresh and fresh likenesses of things which I have experienced, or, from what I have experienced, have believed: and thence again infer future actions, events and hopes, and all these again I reflect on, as present. “I will do this or that,” say I to myself, in that great receptacle of my mind, stored with the images of things so many and so great, “and this or that will follow.” “O that this or that might be!” “God avert this or that!” So speak I to myself: and when I speak, the images of all I speak of are present, out of the same treasury of memory; nor would I speak of any thereof, were the images wanting.
~ St. Augustine, Confessions Book XIII
The following is a book of poetry suited for memorization, and a small token to you, my humble readers:
Construction of the book is simple. Fold every page according to the instructions above and then assemble the modules in the given order.
The contents of the book are as follows:
- Holy Sonnet X, John Donne
- Holy Sonnet XIV, John Donne
- For Whom the Bells Toll, John Donne
- Air and Angels, John Donne
- Dear Reader, Billy Collins
- The Lanyard, Billy Collins
- When You Are Old and Grey, W.B. Yeats
- The Wilds Swans at Coole, W.B. Yeats
- God’s Grandeur, Gerard Manley Hopkins
- The Windhover, Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Hope, Emily Dickinson
- A Word is Dead, Emily Dickinson
- The Lamb, William Blake
- The Author to Her Book, Anne Bradstreet
- kitchenette building, Gwendolyn Brookes
- The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost
- Jabberwocky, Lewis Carroll
- A Complaint to His Purse, Geoffrey Chaucer
- Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, Dylan Thomas
- On a Favorite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes, Thomas Gray
- She Walks in Beauty, Lord Byron
- The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot
- The Secret, Denise Levertov
- Crossing the Bar, Alfred Lord Tennyson
- Blow, Bugle, Blow, Alfred Lord Tennyson
- All That is Gold Does Not Glitter, J.R.R. Tolkien
- O Captain, My Captain, Walt Whitman
- When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer, Walt Whitman
- To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time, Robert Herrick
- Poema 20, Pablo Neruda
- Excerpt from Aurora Leigh, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- The Hound of Heaven, Francis Thompson
- Sonnet XIX, John Milton
- Excerpt from The Tempest – Act I, Scene 1, lines 1-13, William Shakespeare
- Excerpt from Much Ado About Nothing – Act I, Scene 3, lines 6-77, William Shakespeare
- Excerpt from King Lear – Act I, Scene 2, lines 1-22, William Shakespeare
- Excerpt from A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Act V, Scene 1, lines 414-429, William Shakespeare
- Sonnet XIX, William Shakespeare
- Under the Waterfall, Thomas Hardy
- Petition, W.H. Auden
- Wind, Ted Hughes
- Nicene Creed (Latin)
- The Rear-Guard, Siegfried Sassoon
- Ode to a Nightingale, John Keats
- Porphyria’s Lover, Robert Browning
- Portrait of a Young Artist as a Prematurely Old Man, Ogden Nash
- The Bells, Edgar Allan Poe
