Welcome to the end of the Poetry Challenge — the last stanza of our five-day adventure in verse. (If you missed the beginning or middle, you can catch up here). We hope you are feeling reasonably merry and not unduly tired.

Recently we learned, from a 6-year-old friend, about another poetry week, at an elementary school not far from where Edna St. Vincent Millay grew up. Students there were invited to write down a poem and carry it around in their pockets. If they ran into somebody who was in urgent need of a poem, they would have one ready. You never know when that’s going to happen, so it’s good to be prepared.

This week, “Recuerdo” has been our pocket poem. We’ve made space in our busy days and our buzzing minds to carry around a bundle of couplets. Some of us may have inflicted “Recuerdo” on other people, whether they asked us to or not.

But the question nonetheless arises: Now that you have this poem, what do you do with it? One obvious answer, suggested by our young friend and implied in Millay’s last lines, is to pass it along. These three stanzas are a gift, a souvenir offered by the poet to whomever might have been with her on that ferry ride and, equally, to everyone who wasn’t.

The extravagant, impulsive act of giving that wraps up the night can stand as a metaphor for poetry itself.

The voyagers, seeing a person in need, respond with something that goes far beyond simple charity.

As nourishing as fruit, as precious as money, a poem acquires meaning only insofar as it is shared. The more it is shared, the more meaningful it becomes, since everyone who acquires it will understand it — will use it — in their own way. In other words, “Recuerdo” is now yours. Yours to treasure: to recite under your breath, to whisper in someone’s ear, to declaim at a party. And also yours to squander, to take apart and reconfigure, even to lose.

Now that you’ve learned the poem by heart, you can start to forget it.

Human memory is a curious thing — variable, porous and tenacious. Some mental storage spaces are neatly sorted and cross-indexed, like the files in a doctor’s office. Others are more like kitchen drawers overflowing with odds and ends: candle stubs, matchbooks, lids to missing jars, takeout menus from restaurants that shut down during Covid.

Whichever kind you possess, there is room in it for poems, or pieces of poems. Some of “Recuerdo” may start to go blurry — which one of us ate the pear? — but that slippage is anticipated by the poem itself. It’s not a comprehensive accounting of everything that happened, but a highlight reel, a skein of especially vivid associations and impressions.

Your brain may process the poem in a similar way. When you see a sunrise, the words “a bucketful of gold” might pop into your head. The rhymes and alliterations you labored over this week have become part of your verbal muscle memory. From now on, the wind won’t just blow, it will come cold.

And that repeating first couplet — which comprises six of the poem’s 18 lines and occupied the first day of this challenge — will surely jingle in your pocket for a long time to come. It’s a miniature poem in its own right, suitable for any number of exhilarating, exhausting occasions.

Whether you recite the whole thing every day or pick up scraps of it every now and then, “Recuerdo” is part of your life. That might be as much poetry as you require, but if you find it’s not enough, there’s a lot more where it came from.

There is, first of all, a lot more Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her “Collected Poems” fill more than 700 pages. Or you might prefer her slimmer individual collections, equally full of verses that are witty, heartfelt, mischievous and wise.

A “Recuerdo” algorithm could just as well point you toward poems about boats or New York, toward lyrics about regretting the dawn or seizing the day. Really, though, poetry is an anti-algorithmic art form. It lives through intuitive leaps and improbable inferences, through the unpredictable, uncanny connections between common experience and your own imagination. Every poem is its own recommendation engine, and every reader will find a perfectly idiosyncratic way of following it.

First, though, let us know how you did. Did you learn it? Would you read it for us? We hope you’ll share your thoughts and suggestions with us below. And we hope that further poetic voyages are in store. In the meantime, we’ll always have “Recuerdo.”

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.