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.

Mr. Mudimbe was unapologetic. “To the question ‘what is Africa?’ or ‘how to define African cultures?’ one today cannot but refer to a body of knowledge in which Africa has been subsumed by Western disciplines such as anthropology, history, theology or whatever other scientific discourse,” he told Callaloo. “And this is the level on which to situate my project.”

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe was born on Dec. 8, 1941, in Likasi, in the Katanga Province of what was then the Belgian Congo, to Gustave Tshiluila, a civil servant, and Victorine Ngalula. At a young age, he said in 1991, he “began living with Benedictine monks as a seminarist” in Kakanda, in pre-independence Congo. He had “no contact with the external world, even with my family, and indeed had no vacations.”

When he was 17 or 18, he recalled, he decided to become a monk, this time among the Benedictine “White Fathers” of Gihindamuyaga, in Rwanda. But in his early 20s, already “completely francophonized,” he abandoned the religious life and entered Lovanium University in Kinshasa, graduating in 1966 with a degree in Romance philology. In 1970 he received a doctorate in philosophy and literature from the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium. He then returned to Congo to teach.

In the 1970s Mr. Mudimbe published, among other writings, three novels, all translated into English: “Entre les Eaux” (1973), published in English as “Between the Waters”; “Le Bel Immonde” (“Before the Birth of the Moon,” 1976); and “L’Écart” (“The Rift,” 1979). The principal characters in these novels “find it impossible to tie themselves to anything solid,” the scholar Nadia Yala Kisukidi commented in Le Monde.

At the end of the 1970s, when the offer came from Mr. Mobutu to be “in charge of, I guess, ideology and things like that,” as Mr. Mudimbe put it to Callaloo, he reflected that “I didn’t think of myself and I still don’t think of myself as a politician.” After he established himself in the United States, his focus turned to essays and philosophy; among other books, he wrote “L’Odeur du Père” (1982), “Parables and Fables” (1991) and “Tales of Faith” (1997).

Someone once defined poetry as “memorable speech.” By that standard, each of us has committed at least some poetry to memory. Nursery rhymes, song lyrics and movie catchphrases all find their way into our heads, often without any effort on our part.

More formal memorization used to be a common classroom ritual. Schoolchildren would stand and recite approved works for their teachers and peers. That kind of learning has mostly gone out of fashion, which may be a sign of progress or a symptom of decline. Either way, school shouldn’t be the only place for poetry.

And learning a poem by heart doesn’t have to be drudgery. It can be a way of holding onto something beautiful, a morsel of verbal pleasure you can take out whenever you want. A poem recited under your breath or in your head can soothe your nerves, drive away the noise of everyday life or grant a moment of simple happiness.

At a time when we are flooded with texts, rants and A.I. slop, a poem occupies a quieter, less commodified corner of your consciousness. It’s a flower in the windowbox of your mind.

There are millions of them available, in every imaginable style, touching on every facet of experience. You could store a whole anthology in your brain.

But let’s start with one: “Recuerdo,” by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

“Recuerdo,” first published in 1919 in Poetry magazine, is the recollection of a night out on the town — or more precisely on the water, presumably the stretch of New York Harbor served by the Staten Island Ferry. We asked some friends of the Book Review — poets, novelists, playwrights, actors and other literature lovers — to recite it for us, and a bunch said yes.

Today, Ada Limón, Ina Garten and Ethan Hawke will introduce you to the poem. Here’s the first of the three stanzas.

Why did we pick “Recuerdo”? We combed through our shelves like Goldilocks, looking for a poem that was just right: not too difficult, but not too simple; not obscure but not a chestnut; not a downer but not frivolous either. We didn’t want a poem that was too long, and we thought something that rhymed would be more fun — and easier — to memorize than a cascade of free verse.

Millay, who was born in Maine in 1892 and was a fixture of the Greenwich Village bohemian scene in the 1920s, caught our eye for a few reasons. In her lifetime, she was a very famous poet.

She was a decidedly modern author who often wrote in traditional forms, and who has stayed popular through 100 years of fluctuating fashion. Her verse, while serious and sophisticated, carries its literary baggage lightly.

When you get to the second stanza of “Recuerdo,” read here by Ina Garten, you realize that it has a hook.

It’s a city poem, but one that incorporates some arresting nature imagery (the sun, the moon, the wan glow of dawn). It delivers a confidential message — addressed to a “you” who shares the memory of those moments by the fire and in the moonlight — while striking a convivial, sociable tone.

The poem concludes with an impulsive act of generosity that carries a hint of melancholy. Here’s Ethan Hawke, reading the third and final stanza.

That’s it. The night is over; another day is here with its obligations and routines; we’re about to trade the open air of the ferry for the crowded underground platforms of the subway.

This poem stands up to repeated readings. It stays in your mind and your ear. It’s a fun poem about having fun, though of course there’s more to it than that. The poem expresses the desire to hold on to a fleeting experience, to fix it in words and images before it’s washed away on the tide of time.

“Recuerdo,” in Spanish, can mean recollection or souvenir, which is kind of perfect. The speaker summons bits and pieces of a memorable night, organizing them into verses that bring those hours back to life, even though they’re gone forever. We pick up those verses, and — impossibly but also unmistakably — we’re right there with her, inhaling the sea-kissed morning air.

So here is the challenge: Memorize this poem! Why? Because it’s unforgettable.

Below, you’ll find a game designed to help you learn “Recuerdo.” Today your goal is to master that wonderful refrain. (Once you’ve done that, you’ll have one third of the poem.) As the Challenge continues through the week, we’ll look closely at how the poem is made, at what it’s about and at the extraordinary woman who wrote it. There will be new games and videos every day, until we disembark on Friday, poem in hand. Bon voyage!

THE POETRY CHALLENGE

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Monday

Learn a poem with us this week. Keep it for a lifetime.

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Tuesday (Available tomorrow)

How rhythm and rhyme make a poem memorable.

Wednesday (Available Apr. 30)

This is a New York poem. After you learn it, you can take it anywhere.

Thursday (Available May 1)

This poem is about staying up all night. Use it to greet the day.

Friday (Available May 2)

We’ve learned a poem this week. Now it’s yours.

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.