Macabre Before Goth Made it Cool

I’ve decided to give BlogHer’s NaBloPoMo another go this month (Yeah, I did miss yesterday. Oops!). I was a bit disappointed, though, by this month’s theme being poetry. If there is one form of writing that I actually hate, it is poetry. There is just something about “clever” poems that make no real sense that sets my teeth on edge. The twee poetry of nursery rhymes is almost as bad, and adolescent poems about the cruelty of  life make me want to gouge out my eyes. I wish I was kidding, but I really do hate most poetry. This is going to be a difficult month worth of prompts

Today’s prompt is: What was the first poem you ever memorized?

Yes, even though I hate poetry, I have actually memorized a few poems. If we skip over nursery rhymes or poems learnt for the school Christmas pageant (something about a mouse hiding in a Christmas tree, if I remember right), the first poem I ever memorized was Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven.

Yep, every last word. Every Lenore and Nevermore. It was high school and I was going through the typical teen angst. Rather than dressing goth (which was just becoming a thing in the early 90s up here in Canada), I memorized The Raven, listened to Led Zeppelin and became Wiccan. Somehow, at the time, it all went together nicely.

I still listen to Led Zeppelin on occasion, although classical music is my genre of choice nowadays. I don’t self-identify as Wiccan anymore, but I was one for many, many years and those beliefs still influences my life. And, sadly, I don’t remember much of The Raven. But I’m sure that my early exposure to Poe and his Gothic worldview helped to shape my love of H. P. Lovecraft and Victorian horror stories.

Image: Édouard Manet [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons (cropped for size)