Quit while you’re ahead. I tried to transfer the Shmoop list of what it offers students to learn, including test prep, but I didn’t succeed. I’m not going to try again. If you are interested you can look up Shmoop.com

The day wasn’t lost, though. I finished - in a manner of speaking -the tweaked draft of my book on ageing. “ In a manner of speaking” means, there’ll be more to come, more tweaking, more work, more checking. This morning I hauled out my great big Chicago Manual of Style , 16th Edition, published 2010, to begin looking up stuff. That’s new enough for me. It was $65 so I’m not going to buy a new one. I’m told it exists only online now, for a price. I still like paper. I still own my grandfather’s Webster’s. I’ll look up its pub date later. Now I read it just for fun, as I used to when I was a kid and it was the most definitive dictionary in the house. There are a tonne of dictionaries in my house today, some of them quite specialized and esoteric. I loove dictionaries. I loove words.

I wonder if there are published collections of poems to memorize. Sure there are. Here a few interesting titles: Committed to Memory, 100 to Memorize, John Hollander (2000); By Heart, 100 Poems to Remember, Ted Hughes; and Poems to Learn by Heart, Caroline Kennedy. So others have thought of this.

I had a cousin, gone at least 12 years ago, who started memorizing poems for comfort, to recite to herself when she lay awake at night. That’s a good use. And I remember a science fiction story - it might have been by Ray Bradbury; it’s shrouded in the distant mists of my memory. After a holocaust of some kind when survivors banded together to help each other survive they pooled not only their physical resources but also their memories. They began to collect whatever people could remember and recite of literature, history, folk tales, lore, whatever, to teach their children and to honour their heritage.

My school generation had Memory Work. I suppose it’’s gone the way of cursive writing.