The Best Short Poems to Memorize

Ranker Books
Updated July 31, 2020 69.5k votes 30.6k voters 1.2m views
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Vote up the greatest famous short poems that are easy to commit to memory.

What is the best short poem to memorize? This list includes great poems that are easy to memorize such as "Dream within a Dream," "This Is Just to Say," "Richard Cory," and "First Fig." Memorizing poetry will prove to be an impressive trick at parties, will bring you closer to the poem, and foster a lifelong bond with literature that simply reading these poems doesn't offer. Poetry buffs might also enjoy the best poems about love, the best rhyming poems, and the best epic poems, while theatre fans may want to see the best short monologues. 

Written works have the ability to make us feel. They make us want to believe, be inspired, and live vicariously through the stories we read on the page. They can make us love, laugh, and cry. Though brief, these short poems are full of rich imagery and hidden meaning. It is these elements which provoke readers to dig deeper, and memorizing the poem furthers that relationship even more.

Poets and their poetry have the ability to take readers places and into worlds never imagined. Poets can often be tortured souls or great thinkers who allow readers a new view on the world, sometimes in as few as 10 or 12 line verses. Their skills with words, even when the poem is only a few lines long, draw the reader in, making us want to memorize certain works, like those on this list.

Vote up all good simple and short poems to memorize below, or add the easiest classic famous poems to recite if they aren't already on the list.

Photo: Dead Poets Society
  • 1
    8,024 VOTES

    Fire and Ice

    Some say the world will end in fire,
    Some say in ice.
    From what I’ve tasted of desire
    I hold with those who favor fire.
    But if it had to perish twice,
    I think I know enough of hate
    To say that for destruction ice
    Is also great
    And would suffice.
    • Author: Robert Frost
    8,024 votes
  • 2
    4,154 VOTES

    Nothing Gold Can Stay

    Nature’s first green is gold,
    Her hardest hue to hold.
    Her early leaf’s a flower;
    But only so an hour.
    Then leaf subsides to leaf.
    So Eden sank to grief,
    So dawn goes down to day.
    Nothing gold can stay.
    • Author: Robert Frost
    4,154 votes
  • 3
    2,705 VOTES

    First Fig

    My candle burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
    But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
    It gives a lovely light!
    • Author: Edna St. Vincent Millay
    2,705 votes
  • 4
    3,189 VOTES

    Risk

    And then the day came,
    when the risk
    to remain tight
    in a bud
    was more painful
    than the risk
    it took
    to Blossom.
    • Author: Anaïs Nin
    3,189 votes
  • 5
    2,327 VOTES

    I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

    I'm nobody! Who are you?
    Are you nobody, too?
    Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
    They'd banish us, you know.

    How dreary to be somebody!
    How public, like a frog
    To tell your name the livelong day
    To an admiring bog!
    • Author: Emily Dickinson
    2,327 votes
  • 6
    4,495 VOTES

    Trees

    I think that I shall never see
    A poem lovely as a tree.

    A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
    Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

    A tree that looks at God all day,
    And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

    A tree that may in Summer wear
    A nest of robins in her hair;

    Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
    Who intimately lives with rain.

    Poems are made by fools like me,
    But only God can make a tree.
    • Author: Joyce Kilmer
    4,495 votes