Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0508: Memorize The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe

Episode Date: February 17, 2016

Douglas wants to memorize The Raven by Edgal Allan Poe. I use this episode to provide a system for memorizing The Raven, along with resources for putting this into practice. 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 508. 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. Douglas asked about memorizing The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. Now, what I'm going to do in this episode is present actually the way that I memorized The Raven myself a couple of years ago, including the minimal mnemonics that I used in conjunction with just listening to it and saying it a few times. So basically, to begin, you'll, as I always say, you'll want a recording of the poem that you can listen to and speak along with from the beginning

to the end of this memorization project. But then what I did was just used my 18 object pegs from 1 to 18, and I attached them to each of the verses in a very small made-up memory palace. So I'm imagining the little room that the guy is in when he's sitting there thinking about Lenore and he hears the raven at the window. And I just attach each of my object pegs to each of the verses. Now, the normal thing to do would be to have a keyword from each of these lines and attach each keyword to the object. For example, the second verse is, well, my object is a snowball for 02 for the second verse, and you might have all of these different, you know, keywords for it. December, ember, wished, and then, you know, books and all of those

different lines. But what I did instead is I only memorized basically one idea or one keyword from each of these verses, and I depended on my natural recitation memory and a little bit more association as I went along to remember the rest of the verses. And it's not that hard. So if you just do, again, just boiling it down to the minimum necessary to get the intended result, unless you find yourself getting lost halfway through a verse, in which case you need to relate that back to, you know, your prompt for the rest of the verse back to your object. You can often get away with very, very little mnemonic memorization and rely on those sort of key points throughout it,

but then just remember the poem just by having recited it a few times, depending on how well it works for you. So let's go through these 16 verses and try to imagine the room, a small room that a guy is sitting in, very, very small room that he lives in. It has windows by a sort of bed or couch that he's sitting on, but then it also has a door with a, you know, little statue of a head or a bust next to that. And he also has a bed. So our first object is acid for 01, so a dish of acid. And it says,

And that's the first line. And our key word for that is midnight. So once upon a midnight. And you want to place the stars kind of sparkling in the acid as he's lying there on the couch, kind of depressed, and you can place the acid on something that makes sense really close to him. Next, ah, distinctly, I remember it was in the bleak December. So a little further up, we're going to place a snowball, and the snowball is just going to remind you of December.

That's pretty straightforward. Then when we get to the curtains of the window, a little higher up, we want to attach a semi-truck to those curtains. Maybe it left tire tracks on the curtains, which is odd, but it's memorable. And all we have to remember is curtains, or curtain actually, and the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain. And that will prompt verse three. Verse four is going to be a sorry and so he's already heard the knocking in the previous verse and then you can choose either stronger or hesitating as your key word as long as you remember with hesitating that what he's doing is not hesitating it's hesitating then no longer so you have the sorry to represent that.

And he's kind of throwing his blanket off to get up. And then he opens the door. Verse 5 is going to be a whistle. And he heard what he himself said into the darkness is Lenore. And so you can imagine that he's whistling into the darkness. So we've gotten to the door now. And that's where we have the whistle to represent the fifth verse. So you want peering as your keyword there. Next, at the beginning of the sixth verse,

we have him going back into the chamber, turning back into the chamber, and it says, all my soul within me burning. So I imagine that when he turns around, a leaf kind of blows at him, and that's a sage leaf for verse six. Seven is a sock, and this is where he goes to the window and flings it open. And so you want to imagine that there's a sock standing outside of the window. Now that sock is actually

the raven, but that's okay. And we have the flutter as our keyword there. Then eight, when we come back into the room, the number eight represents sofa. And so it's kind of like we're going back down to the sofa, but imagine a smaller sofa on it. And for those who would argue this isn't exactly a memory palace because we're moving back and forth between places, you might just imagine that things are moving higher

and higher up, because each of these spots is fairly unique, and certainly each of these, the real thing is that each of these numbers is unique. So if you remember which stanza you're on, and you think of your object mnemonic, you'll remember where you are in the poem, both physically in the room, and in terms of just what's going on with the key word in the verse and so on. But really, each of these spots is unique. And so even if it's kind of going back and forth, as the character in the poem does,

it just, I think, helps you to remember it more strongly. So anyway, the number is sofa for eight. And the key word is going to be ebony. And so you just imagine a dark sofa, maybe almost made of charcoal or something. And it's then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling. And so if you choose, instead of ebony to do smiling, you might have the couch smiling. But I found that ebony works for me just because I can remember the rest of the verse from that. Next, we have 9, which is a soap bar, and he's talking about how this, you know, kind of weird and ugly bird is speaking plainly because the bird says nevermore.

And so verse 9, the keyword is ungainly. So he's looking at this bird. It's all dirty. He's going, why should this uncivilized, dirty bird be talking? It just needs to be cleaned up with soap. So much I marveled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly. Next we have ten, which is going to be dice, and the raven's up on the bust. And so you might have the dice dropping on the bust's head.

And that's really what the key word is, is bust. Next we have eleven, which is a tooth, and then startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken. And the key word there for me is, I mean, the key meaning is aptly, because it's strange that the bird said nevermore right when it made sense. But I would choose broken as my key verse related to the teeth. And what happens there is just that the, you know, you break the silence. And then you might just imagine that the teeth, you know, do that. And they've spoken very plainly and clearly in something that actually makes sense, which is pretty scary. Next, it's tuna. And we'll put that.

We've been moving up this entire time. Now we'll start moving down. So put the tuna a little lower down, maybe at the top of the door. So there's a tuna can and it's sticking halfway through the door and it's smiling. So the keyword is smiling for stanza 12. Stanza 13, the key is dime or a coin or that's the number for 13. And so he's guessing. So you just imagine that the toin is being tossed in the air just under the tuna can. Maybe it kind of taps the tuna can as it's being tossed. So he's guessing what is going on

with this sort of strange prophetic bird that's come in. He's just guessing that in this stanza. The next stanza is 14. So we have a tire. And what's happening is the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen sensor. So perfumed is my key word there. And you might imagine that this tire is hanging on the doorknob, and it's kind of emitting some sort of smoke or something. So it's like something supernatural is going on. Next we have 15, which is a doll.

And I imagine that sitting at the bottom of the tire there, but we're just moving along. And you might just remember that 15 comes after 14 possibly. And so what's going on there is he calls the Raven a prophet. So you might imagine that this doll is a sort of prophet. And so that's the key word there. Next, he starts with the same line again, but the second time I would emphasize evil. And you're going to associate that with a tissue. 17 is on the floor. So we've finally reached the floor and it's a twig.. And what you particularly want to remember is that this twig is parted. It, you know, has a branch that splits off from another part, and that is the key word, parting. So be that word our sign of parting, because he wants the bird to go away. And then we have this abstract verse, and it's going to be placed in the shadow of the bird,

which is kind of interesting. So that's the place that it is. And that's what this, you know, stanza is about, is the bird's shadow on the floor. And since the keyword is still, because it's like the bird is still there, you might choose something else, maybe sitting, but you're expressing the idea that the raven is still sitting there, and just imagine that maybe the shadow has solidified and turned into a physical object like taffy, which makes the kind of carpet really messy.

But that's the idea there. It just kind of is still sitting there. So yeah, these very minimal mnemonics combined with listening to the poem, studying it a little bit to understand it, and maybe associating a little bit more of the parts of each stanza to these objects will have you memorizing this very quickly as long as you know these object mnemonics. Now, if you don't know these object mnemonics, I would suggest going to masterofmemory.com slash start

for a starter guide on how to use object pegs and things like that to remember numbers, which can help you with poetry and basically any other type of memorization project. Tomorrow, we're doing an anti-trivia podcast episode, which is basically like taking something that people commonly know that's arguably not as important as it should be and going the opposite way and kind of using the numbers to say, well, here's the important stuff. So I'll talk about that more in tomorrow's episode on how to memorize the populations of cats of the world. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon.