The more common idiom for doing something that is recalled and not seen is to do it “from memory.” From is more appropriate than by in this idiom because memory may be regarded as a receptacle and not as an agent. For example:

Painting from memory can be just as productive as painting from sight.

If you’ve ever repeated a rhyming poem from memory in front of an audience, you’ve given a recitation.

Pewsey clergyman Canon Gerald Osborne is to perform a remarkable feat of faith and memory by reciting in public the whole of Mark’s Gospel from memory.

George Doi, a nisei, reconstructed the map from memory in March 1993.

The process of committing something to memory for later recall is “to learn it by heart.”

Learning texts by heart once held a more valued place in the elementary and high school curriculum than it does now.

When I was a child, school children were encouraged to memorize poems like Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” and speeches like Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.”

In her 90s, my mother could still recite poems she learned as a child in the Chicago public schools.

Visiting a family in France one summer, I was treated to the experience of hearing members of three generations recite a tale of Fontaine—in unison and with great mutual pride. Poems learned “by heart” in childhood enrich the rest of life.

Here are some examples of the idiom “by heart”:

Learning poetry by heart ignites the imagination—Andrew Motion.

Miss Allan encouraged us to learn poetry by heart, for which I am everlastingly grateful now that I am registered as blind and still have memories of some of the loveliest poems ever written.

In Poems to Learn by Heart, Kennedy stresses the importance of memorizing poetry and presents a collection of poems that she believes everyone should internalize.

[David Cameron] said his youngest daughter Florence was so obsessed with the movie [Frozen] that he found he’d learned it off by heart.

Note: Learning “by heart” is not the same thing as learning “by rote.” Rote learning is more or less mindless. Learning a poem one neither likes nor understands for the sake of reciting it one time for a grade is a pointless exercise. Learning a poem or a speech “by heart,” on the other hand, is a process that engages the mind and the emotions.

Bottom line: We recite from memory what we have learned by heart.

Credit: DWT