Great story about the S & G song. When I was in my first year in college in Massachusetts, in the spring of 1963, my wonderful English teacher, Naomi Diamond -- whom I discovered 25 years later teaching at Ryerson, and found out then that she was Canadian, gave us this assignment: walk around the college lake, Lake Waban (about a 2 hour walk) and memorize this 8-line poem by Robert Frost: Nature's first green is gold/Her hardest hue to hold/Her early leaf's a flower/But only so an hour./Then leaf subsides to leaf/So Eden came to grief/So dawn comes down to day/Nothing gold can stay. " I know the poem by heart, lo these many years later (I may have got a couple of words wrong). And I was one of the few people who actually completed the walk around the lake, seeing what Frost meant by the leaves looking like flowers -- and feeling the humus and old leaves underfoot, hearing birds, etc. I had grown up in the city and didn't know much about this. i think the experience not only taught me about truly learning a poem by heart (not just "memorizing") but also how poetry does connect to nature. Like Helen Keller learning that the letters "w-a-t-e-r" spelled into her hand meant the water she was feeling -- but in reverse: the nature really "was" in the words. And "subsides" is so lovely -- I used it years later in a poem about my mother, that also brought in birds in the garden.