If you’re joining us in memorizing Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Recuerdo” this week, you probably already have the first two lines stuck in your head. (If you’re just discovering the Poetry Challenge, please check out yesterday’s introduction. It’s never too late to start!)

Once you’ve got these, you’ve learned a third of the poem, since this repeating couplet functions as a mini-chorus at the start of each stanza.

That refrain tells the story in a nutshell. But this poem is more than just a report on one night on the ferry. It recreates the voyage through a flurry of sensory details, embedded in strikingly stylized language.

Those features — the imagery and the sound; what your mind’s eye sees and your physical ears hear — are what make “Recuerdo” a poem, and paying attention to how they work can help us learn it.

“Recuerdo” is a whole mood. Weary and buoyant, the poem captures how it felt to be on that boat. You can see the sky turning color as the morning air breezes up.

You can taste the fruits of the voyage.

Strain your ears just a little, and you can make out the sounds of boats in the harbor.

These impressions — and the vividness of Millay’s language — can help anchor the poem in your mind. But the secret to fixing it in your memory is to learn its structure, to listen to the musical patterns of its language.

Poetry is older than writing, and many of its features originated as aids to memory in an oral, pre-literate culture. It’s easier to find the word you’re looking for if you know it sounds like the other words around it. Rhyme, alliteration and rhythm are not only pleasing to the ear; they’re sticky.

Each line of “Recuerdo” is a poetic wave that breaks on the shore of a rhyme.

Rhyme is just one of the ways poets use repeating sounds to make their work memorable. Alliteration is another, and the English language has a fondness for it that goes back to its earliest literature. In the part of the poem we just heard, clusters of consonants in the middle of the lines knot them together and help you hold on to them.

The poem’s individual words and syllables bob like a string of harbor buoys. Every line is propelled by the cadence of stressed and unstressed syllables. Our ears hear four heavy beats.

This pattern of rhythm and sound — four-beat lines yoked in rhyming pairs — is a familiar one in English. You may have encountered it before you could read, depending on your exposure to Dr. Seuss:

Songwriters are fond of it, including Joni Mitchell:

If you paid attention in English class, you might know it from Andrew Marvell:

As these examples suggest, there’s a lot of variation within the basic pattern — longer or shorter lines, snappy or languorous pacing, playful or wistful emotional effects. Every voice will find its own music. This isn’t math or science, it’s art.

The variation is partly a matter of meter. This is the most technical part of poetry, with its own special jargon, but it’s also intuitive and physical — it lives in the bobbing of your head or tapping of your foot as you read.

A foot, as it happens, is what a unit of meter is called, and while most English poems (including “Recuerdo”) have varying feet, many have one that dominates, keeping time like a bass drum. In this poem, Millay often places her strong beats after two unstressed syllables: da-da-DUM. But like any good poet, she achieves both consistency and variety. In some lines, the syllables land like hammer blows:

In others they spatter like raindrops:

Words are more than sounds and syllables. They communicate emotion and meaning. The words in “Recuerdo” form a bouquet of arresting images and sensations, an experience that will be different for each reader. And even though, for the purposes of memorization, we have pulled apart some of the components of the poem, you can’t really separate sound from sense, or feeling from structure. They all happen at the same time, and work together to create something that resists summary. The poem is its own explanation.

What does a bucketful of gold look like to you? What face do you see when the shawl-covered head turns to acknowledge your greeting? As you answer these questions, you take possession of the poem. It becomes part of you.

Today’s game will help with that process. See how many of its words you already have!

Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio and Joumana Khatib. Additional editing by
Emily Eakin, Tina Jordan, Laura Thompson and Emma Lumeij. Design and development by Umi Syam and
Eden Weingart. Additional design by Victoria Pandeirada. Video production by Caroline Kim.
Additional video production by McKinnon de Kuyper. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg. Illustration
art direction by Tala Safie.

Illustrations by Hannah Robinson.

Audio of “Recuerdo” from “Edna St. Vincent Millay in Readings From Her Poems” (1941, RCA); accompanying
photograph from Associated Press.