It took a while for me to learn the words, which I’d repeat to myself while driving in L. A. Trying to speak a poem over and over, you learn to pay attention to all its nooks and crannies: I had to ask myself, is it “a” or “the?” Is the phrase “miraculous influence,” or something else? You have to slow down so intensely to read a poem and take it all in. As I tried to digest it, chew over all its details, I started to feel the way the lines flowed into one another. I started to understand it through its shape.

Here’s what surprised me: When I had it all memorized, I felt elated. I had a physical response to holding all those words in my mind together. A real buzz—that was shocking to me. But it also makes sense because it was the same thing that happened to me at the funeral: Hearing the poem aloud, it had this certain physical magic that I recognized. Speaking it aloud, the same powerful feeling came through. When I spoke the poem, just as when I heard it, I could feel something happening within.

The poem’s meaning shifted for me, too. The line I’d liked so much at first, “We say God and the imagination are one,” began to seem darker. I started to feel it was acknowledging human limitation, addressing the way we invent things to comfort ourselves. That’s when the next line rose up, a line I’d completely overlooked when reading on the page: “How high that highest candle lights the dark.”

This image is expansion and limit all at once. Stevens has just told us that our largest, most expansive thoughts are still contained within us, that our sense of God or something larger exists only within our minds. We feel there’s something larger but, no—that’s in our minds. Yet this idea turns again with “how high that highest candle lights the dark”: Even within our human limitations, how beautiful we can be. It’s still just a little candle, but how high: our beauty, our capacity for thought and feeling, for togetherness. Our humanness is vast and ripe and gorgeous, and, as Stevens says at the end of the poem, “being there together is enough.” Even though he’s struggling with the nature of what we imagine, the poem ultimately enters a place where connection is possible between people. Ultimately, I think it’s a hopeful poem in that way.

Part of the reason the memorization appealed to me is I felt like I want these lines available to me at certain times of my life—if something is difficult, or something is joyous, I want to feel like I have access to words that will help me think about and express what I’m feeling. And the more the better. We can be so vague in our memory of books. Paragraphs that we loved become slippery, then gone. Memorization was a way for me to force myself to be more precise, and to forge a more permanent relationship to the words. It allowed a certain kind of magical construction to get in my mind and simmer there. The work of tinkering with the language it’s that exquisite, that well-wrought, is so exciting—it reminds you what art can do. I had a physical reaction. I felt caffeinated. And that feeling lasted for a long time.