A Special Love For Words

Prior to his death, Roger Ebert penned a love note to poetry:

In the eighth grade Sister Rosanne required us all to learn a poem by heart. I was assigned “To a Waterfowl,” by William Cullen Bryant. For years thereafter 
I regaled listeners with as much of it as they desired:

     Whither, ’midst falling dew,

While glow the heavens with the last steps of day,

Far, through their rosy depths, dost thou pursue

      Thy solitary way?

....Is it unthinkable that today’s grade schools require the memorization of a poem or two? Sister Rosanne assured us we would thank her in later years. When I meet old classmates from those years, I find she was correct.
Another friend of a lifetime is John McHugh, who was born in Sligo, Ireland — Yeats Country. When we met in the late sixties he was a reporter at the Chicago Daily News (where Carl Sandburg had once been the film critic), and I was at the Chicago Sun-Times. John had apparently ingested Yeats in volume, and often on late beery nights he would recite him at O’Rourke’s Pub in Chicago.

I remembered more of  it than I realized.

I've never been much of a lover of poetry, but in the manner of his mention of Sister Rosanne above, our teacher was Tom Brown.  He was our seventh grade English teacher, and he had us memorize and recite numerous poems.  Ones I remember a little bit of include, "When the Frost is on the Punkin'" by James Whitcomb Riley, "Casey at the Bat," and "In Flanders Fields."  The funny part is that a friend of mine who's 8 years younger than I has mentioned two of those at various times on her Facebook page, and people that much older than I have commented on remembering having to learn them, too.  It amazed me how much one teacher could shape the collective conscience of a community.  Apparently, Roger Ebert experienced something of the same thing through poetry.