With a poem in your head, anything can happen. Whether you’re standing at the bus-stop in the pouring rain, or lying warily in the dentist’s chair, the moment you begin to conjure the words from memory, your imagination takes flight and transports you to a different place. Like a magic carpet, a remembered poem can carry you in an instant from your everyday surroundings to faraway lands, where you will find witches cackling over cauldrons and goblins tempting you with dewberries; Jabberwocks whiffling through the undergrowth and pussy-cats dancing by the light of the moon. Or perhaps the words will bring you closer to home, by capturing a feeling, invoking the past, or offering the comfort of familiarity when you suddenly find your world made strange by uncertainty or loss.
As children, we seem to pick up nursery rhymes effortlessly, and the words and rhythms tumble about in our heads as we play. As adults, though, our brains are often teeming with other things and we may feel that we’ve not only forgotten the lines we once knew, we’ve also lost the ability – and the time – to learn afresh. But even busy lives contain poetry-sized moments: as you walk the dog, chop the vegetables for dinner, or join the end of a snaking queue, a few lines of verse might easily be recited and memorized. And poetry is made up of words that actually want to be memorable. The poems you’ll find here all have their own ways of rising from the page and swirling into your mind; and if you are capable of remembering ‘the cat sat on the mat’, then it is perfectly possible to turn that mat into a flying carpet and get that cat dancing.
As with all magic, there are a few tricks that can help. Often the rhymes are irresistible and tug you on towards the end of each line. Or the rhythm gathers its own momentum, forcing you to gallop along with it, or catching you up in an incantation. There are also poems that sweep you away with a story, or immerse you so completely in an emotion that the pulse of it seems as natural as the beat of your blood. Sometimes, when the poem is more abstract, you will be able to follow a thread of sounds or images, and weave your own pattern through the fabric of the language.
Whether you commit a whole epic to memory, a verse or two, or just a line, the presence of these words in your imagination opens up a new galaxy of possibilities. Like William Blake, you might ‘see a World in a Grain of Sand’; or you may catch sight of other wonders: a crocodile lurking beneath the bath-bubbles, a distant voice on the howl of a gale, a field of daffodils in a traffic jam… Wherever the words take you and whatever you glimpse there, a poem remembered will change your world – and stay in your heart – for ever.