Using Poems for Passwords

Like anyone who works online, I’ve had to come up with a series of new passwords for secure sites that require password changes every few months, or even every month, or else they lock me out. Last week, I came across About.com Antivirus Guide Mary Landesman’s tips for creating a password system that allows you to remember and change secure passwords. (It was in the About Today newsletter, a daily digest of interesting articles from all around About.com, which you can subscribe to here.) Her system is based on coming up with a “passphrase” -- a mnemonic sentence like “My very educated mother just served us nine pizzas” for the order of the planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto) or a name like “Roy G. Biv” for the colors in the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet) -- and then subjecting it to a fairly elaborate code of transformation. I’ve yet to put this system into practice, but today I discovered another great source of passphrases: poems!

from The Christian Science Monitor:
“Essay: Need a New Password? Here’s Literary Help,” by G.K. Vemulapalli
“In a moment of inspiration I chose Iwa&g&g2If for a password. It's an adaptation of the first line of William Butler Yeats’s famous poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’: ‘I will arise and go [now], and go to Innisfree.’” And after this inspiration, Vemulapalli finds that logging on to the network triggers the memory of a favorite poem, a lovely way to begin a day of work on the computer. What poem would you choose for your password?

Related articles:
How to memorize a poem, a step-by-step outline
Profile of mystical/historical Irish poet/playwright W. B. Yeats
Library of poems by W.B. Yeats
Things Fall Apart, a Guide to Yeats’ “The Second Coming”