Poem Climber Game

A poem you want to learn by heart becomes a tower. You read a stanza, it hides, and then you climb it from memory. Each row of ledges offers three words, and only one is the next word of the poem. Jump to it and you climb. Jump to a wrong word and the ledge crumbles under you. The lines you have recited build up at the top of the screen, with the next word always hidden.

How to play

1. Pick a poem. Its first stanza is shown. Read it for as long as you like, then press CLIMB and it hides.
2. Tap the ledge that carries the next word of the poem. Your climber jumps to it and the word fills the blank in the line at the top.
3. Tap a wrong word and that ledge crumbles. You fall back to the ledge you came from and lose a life, and the crumbled ledge stays gone. Three lives lost end the game.
4. HINT crumbles one wrong ledge for you. It costs no life, but the word is then worth fewer points.
5. Finish a stanza to reach a rest ledge, where the next stanza is shown for study. The last rest ledge is the summit.

Nothing is timed. The stanza stays up until you press CLIMB, and a row of ledges waits for you, so take the time you need. The wrong words on a row come from the same poem and are chosen to look like the right one, so the first letter alone will not carry you. A wrong word is never one that could also be right: no word that follows the same word anywhere in the poem is ever offered beside it.

On a keyboard, press ←, ↑ or → for the left, middle or right ledge, or 1, 2 or 3. Press H for a hint and Enter to climb. Escape or Space pauses, and pausing hides the words.

Scoring

• The right word on the first try: 50 points.
• The right word after one miss or hint on its row: 20 points.
• The right word after two: no points.
• A stanza climbed with no miss and no hint: 200 points more.
• At the summit: 100 points for each life left.

Points never depend on speed. Your five best scores for each poem are saved in this browser, with the line each game reached. In practice, a wrong ledge costs no life and lights up the right one, so you can see the word in its place before you go on. End a practice game from the pause screen. Practice games are not saved.

About the poems

All four poems are in the public domain. Each text is copied word for word from one printed edition, with that edition's spelling and punctuation, so what you learn here is what the book says.

• The Tyger by William Blake, 1794. Text from The Poetical Works of William Blake, edited by John Sampson (Oxford, 1905).
• Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818. Text from The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford, 1914).
• Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare, 1609. Text from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, edited by William J. Rolfe (1883).
• Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, 1871. Text from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, chapter 1 (Macmillan, 1872).

The Tyger keeps William Blake's own spelling and marks from the plate he engraved, which is why one ledge says SIEZE and two say & where you might expect AND. Shakespeare's sonnet and Ozymandias are printed as single blocks of fourteen lines, so the game cuts each into four short parts to study one at a time. You can read Ozymandias, Sonnet 18 and Jabberwocky in our collection of poems to memorize, where some spellings follow other editions.

The game drills the words in order, which is rote memory. To hold a long poem, give each line or stanza a place in a memory palace and put a picture of its opening words there. Our guide to how to memorize poetry explains the method.

Find more poems to learn in our lists of poems to memorize, or try our other free memory games.