Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0490: Memorize “Thou Art Dead, As Young and Fair” by Byron

Episode Date: January 22, 2016

Patrick asks about memorizing poetry of Lord Byron. I present a method and a resource for memorizing “Thou Art Dead, As Young and Fair”. 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 490. 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 the poetry of Lord Byron. And so what I've decided to cover in this episode is the poem And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair. It's one of Byron's more famous poems, and this is one of the 80 poems that we're including in our poetry course that we'll eventually release at masterofmemory.com slash poetry.

Now, for this particular poem, I've chosen one or two keywords, generally one keyword per line, from each of the nine lines in each of the eight stanzas. So that is a total of 72 keywords. So you need a pretty good palace for this. But basically in this episode, I'm going to show you how easy it is to remember the lines from these keywords, and then I'll list the keywords for you so that you can work on memorizing this yourself. You'll then want to go find a full recording of this poem that you can practice with, although I don't really want to create that whole recording myself in this particular episode. But, as a spoiler, we might be creating a podcast of the poetry course. That kind of depends on the development of some things. So, you know, in that podcast, we would be recording all of these poems to practice with. You can go and follow the progress on that and maybe help out

with that at masterofmemory.com slash poetry. For now, Lord Byron. We have, And Thou Art Dead as Young and Fair. And again, this has eight stanzas, each of which has nine lines. So that is quite a few keywords. I'm going to list the key words from the first verse or the first stanza after I read the first stanza first. So I'll read it first. And thou art dead, as young and fair as ought of mortal birth, and forms so soft and charms so rare too soon return to earth. Though earth received them in her bed, and o'er the spot the crowd may So the key words are dead for and thou art dead as young and fair. And then ought, which means anything, for as ought of mortal birth. You're the, you know, as young and fair. And then ought, which means anything, for as ought of mortal birth. You're the, you know, as young and fair as anyone. So thou art dead, as young and fair as ought

of mortal birth. And form is the next keyword, and form so soft and charm so rare. And then returned, too soon returned to earth. So see if you can remember dead, ought, form, and returned. Returned goes with too soon returned to earth. Form goes with and forms so soft and charms so rare. And ought goes with as ought of mortal birth. And forms so soft and charms so rare, too soon returned to earth. So see if you can remember these four lines just from the keywords dead, ought, form, returned. And thou art dead, as young and fair as ought of mortal birth, and forms so soft and charms so rare, too soon returned to earth.

Next I'm actually going to skip to the end of the stanza with the keywords eye and grave. There is an eye which could not brook a moment on that grave to look. So before that, we have the people are walking over it, but he's talking about his eye looking at the grave. So there is an eye which could not brook a moment on that grave to look. The keywords are eye and grave. There is an eye which could not brook a moment on that grave to look. Before that, we have received crowd and

carelessness. Because the earth is receiving the body, the crowd is walking over the grave in carelessness. So received, crowd, and carelessness. Though earth received them in her bed, and over the spot the crowd may tread in carelessness or mirth, there is an eye which could not brook a moment on that grave to look. So now remember, the key words are dead, ought, form, returned, received, crowd, carelessness, eye, and grave. In your memory palace, when you store these words, they'll probably go in three separate sublocations in your main location for stanza one. The first location will have dead ought form returned. The next location will have

received crowd carelessness, where the earth is just walking over the grave. And then the last one is talking about the way that the speaker regards the grave, and it's I and grave. So, and thou art dead, as young and fair as ought of mortal birth, and forms so soft and charms so rare, too soon return to earth. Though earth received them in her bed, and over the spot the crowd may tread in carelessness or mirth, there is an eye which could not brook a moment on that grave to look. If you can store those nine keywords in your first general palace location, and then you can store the rest of the keywords from the rest of this poem, then you can memorize this entire poem just by, you know,

reviewing those keywords in your palace while you listen to the poem several times and recite along. Now, I'm not going to go over the entire poem, but here are the key words. In stanza two, we have where, gaze, flowers, behold, enough, loved, rot, stone, and nothing. In the third verse, we have last, which is actually the last word of the line, but it's the one that's emphasized the most. Fervently, change, alter, death, age, falsehood, see, and wrong. Now as a quick comment, when you're storing these words, you're going to have to find some way to store them physically. You don't just want somebody looking at something for the word see. You actually probably want to create an actual physical object for the word see. Maybe a pair of spectacles or something like that always represents

the word see in your palace, repine, charms, decay. Now, even if you aren't interested in memorizing this poem, I would recommend, again, using this as sort of an exercise in imagination to think if you had to store these words yourself, if you were to memorize a poem like this, how would you store these words? Like, nevermore. I would store that as the raven from Edgar Allan Poe's poem. And then sleep might be a pillow because it has to be something physical and visual. And then charms. What will those be? All right, next stanza. Flower, pray, P-R-E-Y, fade, night, shade, cloud, lovely, extinguished, stars, fall.

So extinguished might be a fire extinguisher or something like that. In our next general location, we have wept, tears, near, which is very abstract. You have to think of something creative for that. Vigil, gaze, fold, all eternity returns buried and living. If you can come up with mnemonic imagery that consistently helps you remember the correct words for this, the next step is just to convert that to the entire lines of the poem, which again is not hard if you've listened to the poem and said it a few times while thinking of this imagery. A passage like we did today on Wednesdays. Something related to geography and geography facts on Thursdays with examples on how to memorize those things and some things that you may find helpful and interesting. And then on Fridays, it's open to general questions.

But I'd love to hear your specific questions on any of these specific topics or just the general topics as we've always done. But I do prioritize those specific topics. History, language learning, passage memorization, such as poetry or scripture, and geography. So leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again on Monday. © transcript Emily Beynon