We know that poetry has a rhythm to it and the purpose of the rhythm and rhyme is to make remembering poetry easier. In schools and colleges we see children memorising poetry using “learning by heart method” and that does them no good. What happens when we use old traditional method of memorising poetry is this that we forget whatever we memorise within a few days. Not only we forget but also old traditional method of memorising poetry takes a lot of time as it teaches us to keep on repeating and reading the poem for as long as it takes to memorise an entire poem.

But poems are not just to be memorised, to really appreciate a piece of poetry, we must feel the poetry and we must understand the poetry. If we can feel and understand something, we develop a stronger memory for that thing. I think everyone of you knows that we do not forget incidents that have strong emotions attached to them. Do we?

The best way to memorise poetry is first to get a feel for it and then to understand it and finally you should use journey method to memorise it. As we know that we create key images for the text and then use locations in journey method to store those key images and when we want to recall the memorised information, we simply retrace our steps.

Before you start memorising a poem, you should select a journey to store your key images that you will create out of the poem. It is better to use outdoor locations to store key images for poems. Outdoors locations are ideal for memorising poetry because you will be create many key images as outdoor locations provide many stages that you can use to place your key images.

To start memorising a poem, you should convert certain words into key images and then mentally place each of these key images on stages along your journey. You should select those words that are most likely to remind you of an entire line of a poem. For example To remember

Your Love Is Like A Shining Sun

i imagine a red sun shining. That image is enough to remind me of the entire line. For me red means love, because it the the colour that people usually associate it with love. Now i will just place a red shining sun on the first stage of my journey. Then i will use read the next line, come up with a key image and place that key image on the second stage of my journey and so on with the rest of the poem.

Then any time i want to recall the poem, all i will have to do is to just walk through the journey that i used to memorise the poem and images of each stage will remind me of all the lines in sequence.

Now you should pick a poem, select a journey and try this method to memorise the poem, i am sure you will be surprised at how easily you can memorise a poem using this method.