Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0427: Memorize “She walks in beauty like the night” by Byron

Episode Date: October 27, 2015

Patrick asks about memorizing poetry of Lord Byron. I present a method and a resource for memorizing “She walks in beauty like the night”. What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 427. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy, and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Patrick requested memorization materials for memorizing poetry of Lord Byron. Now, I've chosen to give, just as an example, the poem She Walks in Beauty Like the Night and how to memorize that poem, along with the resource that I'll mention at the end of the episode where you can start putting this into practice and memorizing it. So the approach that we take for memorizing poetry at Master of Memory is basically you reduce each line of the poem into a single key word, and that key word will kind of prompt the entire line.

For example, the first two lines of this poem are, She walks in beauty like the night of cloudless climbs and starry skies. But if you focus on the words night and climbs, two of the perhaps more difficult words to recall in those lines, it'll help you to remember the entire line of both of them if you've listened to the poem a few times. Now this particular poem has three stanzas of six lines each, and so six keywords aren't too much to remember in one place. So what I would do is, just for the sake of this poem and what we're doing right now today, is using just a person walking as sort of a memory palace or as a set of pegs that you're going to use to remember the different key words. So for the first stanza, I would imagine the person's feet as they're walking.

And then for the second stanza, I would use the person's hands. And for the third verse, the face. Now, the keywords for the first stanza, which we're placing on the feet, are going to be night, climbs, best, aspect, mellowed, and denied. So what you can do is you can just visualize each of these words or turn them into visual images. For example, you could paint stars on the girl's toenails, and so that represents night. And then you could imagine something climbing up

the feet, so that would be climbs, or perhaps climbing between the toes. And then best, you could imagine that she has the best ankles or something like that, and so on, where you're just placing all of these keywords along her feet. Then we have six more keywords for the second verse which are going to be placed on her hands and then six key words for verse three which are going to be placed on her face. Now if anybody wants to memorize this poem you can just go to masterofmemory.com slash

she walks, all one word, she walks, and it'll direct you to a flashcard set where you can actually just quiz on these three flashcards to learn the key verses. Then, if you just record yourself reading the poem and say it along with it a few times, you'll actually have a very easy time memorizing this poem, probably within about 30 or 60 minutes. Thanks for the request, Patrick, and for everyone listening, what do you want to memorize? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon.