Poem of the Every Few Days?

It is a little over a week since my last (and first) post about this, yet I have been going full hog on these poems. "Ode to the West Wind" is not what I would call "performance ready", but it is definitely memorized. I have some awkward pauses here and there when I am really over-thinking the words and what comes next, but I've found that by focusing on the meter the words flow naturally. Still, I need to be able to start everywhere.

However, I have also memorized (though I admit it's short[ish]) "Ozymandias" and would consider that "recitation ready" and I am quite a good way through "Porphyria's Lover", by Browning. It's a rather dark, Gothic poem so I didn't want to memorize it during the school year (in case I dropped my cheat sheet out of my pocket), but I figure having a "spring break" time limit would help motivate me to memorize it as quickly as possible. At this rate it's looking like a poem a week is very doable for me, though I have to worry a lot about size.

"Ode to the West Wind" was very difficult and it's still not very clean because it takes so much longer to run through any time I want to practice it. I don't like a lot of smaller poems, and my migration to "Porphyria's Lover"-length poems, which is shorter than "Ode" but longer than the rest, is about where I feel comfortable, but I don't know if it is as utilitarian. The difficulty is exponential, not linear, and people are not likely to want to hear a longer poem. The shorter ones have been moderately well-received because they are said and then done, and some have some fun couplets that I can whip out for the situation ("My Name is Ozymandias King of Kings / Look on my works ye might and despair") without having to recite the full poem (one reason why I'm doing this). There is also a considerable benefit to quantity over quality (length, not goodness), because people don't want to hear the same poem over and over (or twice, most of the time). In this case I really shouldn't be memorizing longer ones.

But then I stop and realize nobody's listening to me. This is possibly the third most narcissistic undertaking I have ever initiated; I'm just going to memorize whatever I like and be done with it.

After "Porphyria's Lover" I think I'll begin memorizing as much of the "Odyssey" as I can.