A brisk little essay by Jim Holt in the New York TImes tells of the ease with which verse can be burned into one's cortex:
[T]he key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits. I knock a couple of new lines into my head each morning before breakfast, hooking them onto what I’ve already got. At the moment, I’m 22 lines into Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” with 48 lines to go. It will take me about a month to learn the whole thing at this leisurely pace, but in the end I’ll be the possessor of a nice big piece of poetical real estate, one that I will always be able to revisit and roam about in.
The trick that worked for me -- and unlike Holt, a Baby Boomer, I wasn't instructed to memorize poems in high school, and so had to rely on my own devices to figure out how to do it -- is to actually type the lines out, two by two at a time, in a Word document. So:
The piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rainThe piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
It may take about ten repetitions before a couplet is committed to memory, but as you gain experience, they'll come faster than that. (Pay attention to punctuation, too, as this will come in handy for rhythm later.) Each time you learn another set of lines, you retype the ones you already learned to put the whole lot of them together. By some weird hand-eye osmosis, this technique usually works, and once learned, it's extraordinarily easy to retain a poem. (If you forget some of it, a brief glance over the text is all that's required for a refresh.)
You may think that mechanically transcribing poems robs them of their musicality and thus defeats the whole point of knowing them by heart. You're right; but the object at first is to learn them. Musicality comes upon successful recitation.
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