On Reciting "Kubla Khan" from Memory, a Twitter Conversation

Adam Roberts was discussing his trials with the poems of Geoffrey Hill. He tweeted:

There are poems from "For The Unfallen" I can recite whole from memory, something not true for me of many postwar poets (Dylan excepted & not counting song lyrics). — Adam Roberts (@arrroberts) November 28, 2019

To which I replied:

Do you deliberately set out to memorize is do you just read them and, ZIP!, they're in the memory vault?

Adam:

Some I just read and reread until they stick in my head. Sometimes I do set out to memorise a poem deliberately.

Me:

I've been working on "Kubla Khan" off and on for years, but couldn't recite the whole thing, only 54 lines. Big chunks of it, yes, but not the whole. If I worked just a bit, I'd have it. But then in time it would fall apart (you know, surface of a pond, etc.).

Adam, who is a Coleridge expert:

KK is four poems bolted together; each verse paragraph is a separate thing. Hard to hold all three. I can recite the first and the last, but lose my way in the middle.

Me:

Interesting remark, Adam, very interesting.

I've seen it set in type as 2 stanzas (1-36, 37-54), 3 (1-11, 12-36, 37-54), and of course 4 (1-11, 12-30, 31-36, 37-54). I believe the Crewe ms. goes for two.

But, yes, each of the 4 is its own little universe.

Adam:

KK is four poems bolted together; each verse paragraph is a separate thing. Hard to hold all three. I can recite the first and the last, but lose my way in the middle.

Me:

Interesting remark, Adam, very interesting.

I've seen it set in type as 2 stanzas (1-36, 37-54), 3 (1-11, 12-36, 37-54), and of course 4 (1-11, 12-30, 31-36, 37-54). I believe the Crewe ms. goes for two.

But, yes, each of the 4 is its own little universe.

At that point I broke it off and went to take my morning shower. And then back to Twitter:

So, I was getting out of the shower and I tried a little experiment. I started with l. 37, "A damsel with..." and made it through to the end with no problem. Then I went to the beginning, got through l. 12, and failed at 13. That's the first stanza in the 4 stanza version.

So I skipped over to l. 31, "The shadow of ...", and made it through to 36. That's the third stanza. It's the 2nd stanza that's problematic, the one with the woman, demon lover, and the thrusting fountain.

So we fail at the same point, Adam. You know what they say, great minds fail alike, or is it flail alike?

Adam:

... or that part of the extraordinary genius of the opening & close of the poem inheres in its memorability, where the middle, with its sinuous subterranean river, is, appropriately enough, less so.