Memorising Poetry

At school some learning by heart was compulsory, though not irksome. But this intake was out-distanced many times, as it always is among people who need poetry, by a private anthology, both of those automatically absorbed and of poems consciously chosen and memorized as though one were stocking up for a desert island or for a stretch of solitary.

Patrick Leight Fermor, A Time of Gifts: On foot to Constantinople: from the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube (London: John Murray, 2004), p. 71.