By Robert Oliphant

Thanks to the cellular telephone, what C.S. Lewis called the "silent planet" has become far more talkative in the last five years. Positively considered, this means Americans are more and more dropping their passive viewer-listener roles in favor of an increase in spoken intercommunication between friends, colleagues, and even strangers. It also means that the memorization and spoken recitation of poetry are rapidly returning to our K-6 classrooms.

Nationwide, for example, our National Anthem Project is pushing for full memorization of the Star Spangled Banner (all four verses, comprising 320 words); and our Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest, which focuses upon high school students, has been forcefully justified by NEA chairman Dana Gioia as reviving a traditional route toward public speaking confidence and effectiveness.

For parents and teachers, then, here's a short explanation of what lies behind for this new emphasis, along with a ranked list of 100 poems for American K-6 schoolchildren, each of which is well worth learning by heart as a "friend for life," to cite John Barr, president of the cosponsoring Poetry Foundation.

Improving phonemic awareness . . . . Physically considered, what we say is made up of sounds: agitations of the air initiated by organs (teeth, tongue, etc.) whose basic function was, and still is, the chewing of food. What we as human beings perceive is the CONTRAST between sounds, as Pin versus Bin, mAt versus mEEt , Nan versus Dan, Can, Ran, and Fan, etc. Our Nan/Dan examples, by the way, are probably familiar to many readers via the Open Court reading textbooks, and before that textbooks published by Sullivan Associates.

In fact, however, Nan and Dan started fanning each other back in 1962, when the great American linguist Leonard Bloomfield (an architect of our military language learning program) published "Let's Read," a comprehensive K-6 reading textbook still available in libraries and still worth putting to productive use, along with his basic insight that a child's encounter with rhyming words ("minimal pairs," he called them) sharpens the ear's ability to perceive these crucially important contrasts, along with those of alliteration, assonance, and syllable emphasis.

Reciprocally considered, then, the memorization of poetry builds phonemic awareness in children, just as it's phonemic awareness that helps them to learn more poetry later on - and put it to use in developing public speaking skills.

Building multiple-meaning vocabulary power . . . . Any word we use all the time is bound to have many meanings, not just one "official" definition. So it's our multiple-meaning ability to identify from context WHICH meaning is intended that equips us to make sense of the analogies, metaphors, and jokes that turn up in poetry, as with HEAD in "a pin has a head but no tail."

One way or another our children are going to be tested on their awareness of word analogies and other forms of multiple-meaning awareness, just as their parents and grandparents are going to sweat over daily crossword-puzzle challenges like "3 letters: starting point for golfers."

To learn a poem by heart, then, is to acquire a multiple-meaning friend, one whose constant presence keeps this feature alive in our awareness, thereby improving our capacity to understand and be understood in a society where vocabulary power is far more important than spelling skills.

Civilizational literacy . . . . With one exception it's observably accurate to say for all cultures, as did Franz Boas in Race , Language, and Culture, that "all languages are equally complicated and equally hard to learn." But the exception is a very important one, namely vocabulary size ; this is certainly a factually observable feature of American English, whose unabridged dictionaries list roughly 600,000 words (twice as many as German or French).

As opposed to folk culture, a civilization - be it Chinese, Indic, Arabic, or American - is above all a Big Vocabulary that requires its users to possess a reasonably high level of " civilizational literacy" that transcends neighborhood and tribal boundaries.

Acquiring Civilizational Literacy is of course far from easy: mastering 30,000 words is usually as much as we can handle indiviually , even crossword-puzzle afficionados . But poetry can be, and should be, a central element in our personal-best progress toward higher levels of phonemic awareness, multiple-meaning awareness, career mobility, and even social bonding.

Where songs require singers, usually good ones, anyone can learn, recite, and - best of all - remember a poem for years and years and years, especially when encouraged to do so by familiar faces at a twentieth high school reunion.

TO CONCLUDE . . . . As matters now stand, the memorization of poetry is like taking Vitamin C. We all agree that it's worthwhile; but we often disagree on how to take it: pills or powders, juices or fruits, vegetables, etc. So by way of cheap, over-the-counter access, here is an objectively compiled ranked memory-friendly list of 100 public-domain poems, each of which is a practical personal best learning target for K-6 students - especially those who like to work on their own.

Since these poems are all out of copyright, they can legitimately be copied from other sources, including www.poetryoutloud.org and www.thenationalanthemproject.org . In addition, their perennial familiarity ensures that any youngster who learns and recites one of these will establish immediate contact with his or her audience - and keep it.

As will be apparent, our list begins with short easy-to-learn poems. But it moves on step by step to longer, more challenging works - just like the Yellow Brick Road , some might say.

America's 100 Most Memorable Children's Poems in Public Domain: A Ranked List

Note: The primary source for this list has been John Edmund Brewton's Index to Children's Poetry ( Wilson , 1984). Paralleling the Granger's® index, it indicates the current (and lasting) popularity of specific poems via the number of collections in which they appear.

>In the interests of practical memorization the poems are listed here by length in an ascending sequence (ties resolved alphabetically by author). Each entry lists the title first, followed by the last name of its author (including Anon .). Then come its number of words, followed by the number of lines; after this comes an indication of the poem's metrical format, that is, the number of strong beats in each pair of lines, e.g., 4/3 for ballad meter and 5/5 for iambic pentameter (relatively rare in children's poetry).

>By way of personal-best learning help, Education News has recently published a number of practical hands-on articles (see www.educationnews.org/robert-oliphant-previous-columns.htm ). These describe practical techniques for both poetry memorization and memorization-achievement testing.

M1-M10 . . . . Thirty Days, Anon; 30, 6 ; 4/4. . . . Solomon Grundy, Anon; 25 ,10 , 2/2. . . . Caterpillar, Rossetti ; 35 ,10 ; 2-3-4 . . . . Poor Robin, Anon; 38; 6 ; 2/4. . . . Fragment, Tennyson; 39, 6; 4/3. . . . The Wind, Rossetti ; 40, 8; 3/3 . . . Lullaby, Rossetti ; 43, 8' 4/4 . . . The Year's at the Spring , Browning; 47, 8; 2/2. . . . One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, Anon; 51, 20 ; 2/2. . . . Things to Remember; Blake; 61, 10; 4/4

M11-M20 . . . . Monday's Child, Anon; 64, 8; 4/4. . . . The Owl, Tennyson; 64, 14; 4/4. . . . Little Robin Redbreast, Anon; 65, 8 ; 7/7. . . . A Farewell, Kingsley; 66, 8; 5/2. . . . The Months, Rossetti ; 68, 20; 2/2. . . . Red, Red, Rose, Burns; 73, 16; 4/3. . . . Foreign Lands, Stevenson; 71, 20; 3/3. . . . Under the Greenwood Tree, Shakespeare; 74, 16 ; 3/3. . . . Where Go the Boats? Stevenson; 75, 16; 3/3. . . . Trees, Kilmer; 78, 12; 4/4

M21-M30 . . . . The Cow, Stevenson; 78, 12; 4/3; 76U. . . . Eldorado , Poe; 81, 24; 2/3. . . . Windy Nights, Stevenson; 81, 12; 4/3. . . . Bed in Summer , Stevenson; 84, 12; 4/4. . . . On New Year's Day, Anon; 87, 16; 4/4. . . . The Arrow and the Song, Longfellow; 87, 12; 4/4. . . . Count That Day Lost, Eliot; 88, 14; 4/2. . . . Sweet and Low, Tennyson; 88, 16; 4/3. . . . Written in March, Wordsworth; 90, 20; 2/3. . . . Night, Blake; 93, 16; 4/3

M31-M40 . . . . Jim Jay, de la Mare; 96, 20; 2/2. . . . When I Was One and Twenty, Housman ; 96, 16; 4/3. . . . Break, Break, Break, Tennyson; 96, 16. . . . Three Little Kittens, Anon; 98, 40 ; 4/3. . . . To Glow Worms , Marvell; 99, 16. . . . The Lamb, Blake; 105, 20; 3/4. . . . Young Night-Thoughts, Stevenson; 105, 16; 4/4 . . . . The Violet, Taylor ; 107, 16; 4/3. . . . Twins, Leigh; 108, 32; 4/3. . . . Twenty-Third Psalm; 109, 6; cadenced prose, King James Version

M41-M50 . . . . Merry Margaret, Skelton; 109, 34; 2/2. . . . The Star, Taylor ; 110, 20; 4/3. . . . Land of Counterpane , Stevenson; 112, 16; 4/4. . . . Up-Hill, Rossetti ; 112, 16; 4/4. . . . A Boy's Song, Hogg; 113m 16; 4/4. . . . Happy Songs, Blake; 115, 20; 4/4. . . . Concord Hymn, Emerson; 115, 16; 4/4. . . . America , 116, 28; 3/2. . . . The Marine Hymn, 125, 12; 7/7. . . . Books of the Old Testament, Anon, 124; 4/4

M51-M60 . . . . Kings of England , Anon; 126, 28 ; 2/2. . . . Light Shining Out of Darkness, Cowper; 132, 24; 4/3. . . . Solitude, Wilcox; 144, 24; 3/3. . . . Mary's Lamb, Hale; 132, 24; 4/3. . . . Abou Ben Adhem , Hunt; 138, 18; 5/5. . . . Opportunity , Sill; 135, 17; 5/5. . . . The Months, Coleridge; 144, 23; 4/4. . . . My Heart's in the Highlands , Burns; 145, 16. . . . The Creation, Alexander; 147, 28; 3/3. . . . America , the Beautiful, Bates; 152, 24; 4/3

M61-M70 . . . . Old Ironsides, Holmes; 151, 24; 4/3. . . . It Isn't the Town, It's You, Glover; 152, 16; 4/3. . . . Our Presidents, Anon; 155, 30 ; 4/4. . . . Meg Merrilies , Keats; 155, 27 ; 3 /4. . . . Where Did You Come From? MacDonald; 156, 24; 4/4. . . . I Remember, I Remember, Hood; 160, 48; 3/4. . . . Jabberwocky, Carroll; 161, 28; 4/4. . . . Thanksgiving Day, Child; 162, 30; 4/3. . . . Advice by Polonius to Laertes , Shakespeare; 165, 22; 5/5. . . . My Shadow, Stevenson; 162, 15; 7/7

M71-M80 . . . . Soliloquy by Hamlet, Shakespeare; 165, 22; 5/5. . . . Little Boy Blue, Field; 168, 24; 4/3. . . . The Daffodils, Wordsworth; 167, 24; 4/3. . . . Sea Fever, Masefield ; 168, 12; 7/7. . . . Myself, Guest; 173, 24; 4/3. . . . The Boy Reciter , Everett; 179, 26; 4/ 4;. . . . The Owl and the Pussycat, Lear; 198, 33; 4/3. . . . To a Waterfowl, Bryant; 200, 32; 3/5. . . . Battle Hymn of the Republic; Howe; 201, 20; 7/7 . . . The House That Jack Built; 204, 67; 4/4

M81-M90 . . . . Death of a Mad Dog, Goldsmith; 208, 32; 4/3. . . . Good King Wenceslas; Anon; 215, 40; 4/3. . . . The Lobster Quadrille, Carroll; 216, 18; 7/7. . . . All the World's a Stage, Shakespeare; 217, 27; 5/5. . . . A Psalm of Life, Longfellow; 234, 27; 4/4. . . . My Mother, Taylor; 240, 40; 4/4. . . . The Children's Hour, Longfellow; 231, 40; 3/3. . . . The Day Is Done, Longfellow, 243, 44 ; 3/3. . . . Wynken , Blynken , and Nod, Field; 256, 48; 4/3. . . . The Gettysburg Address, Lincoln; 258, 22 (prose)

M91-M100 . . . . If, Kipling; 259, 32; 5/5. . . . Columbus, Miller; 265, 40; 4/4. . . . The Universal Prayer, Pope; 273, 52; 4/3. . . . Dover Beach , Arnold ; 296, 37; 3-4-5 . . . . The Star Spangled Banner, Key; 320, 32; 4/4. . . . Barbara Frietchie , Whittier; 420, 60; 4/4. . . . Casey at the Bat, Thayer; 54o, 52. . . . A Visit from St. Nicholas, Moore; 576, 64; 4/4. . . . Paul Revere's Ride, Longfellow; 1024, 128; 4/4. . . . The Raven, Poe; 1,075; 108; 7/7