This past June, my son both graduated from high school and turned eighteen. In the fall, he will head off to college, just as my daughter enters her freshman year of high school. These milestones—and they are major—in their young lives have nudged me into recalling my own high school and college years, with all their attendant highs and lows. Teachers were major players in that drama because teachers were the adults to whom you shifted your admiration, loyalty and allegiance on the road to becoming an adult. Apart from a few duds, most of my teachers were good, and quite a number were outstanding. It is for one of the truly memorable ones that I tapped out the words below:

I can see her still, something so girlish about her straight, chin-length hair and Pappagallo flats, her pleated skirt and Talbots blouse. But once she was standing at the head of the French classroom in the small private school I attended, Evangeline Toms lost any resemblance to a girl. She took charge immediately, and her command of both the French language and the culture from which it emanated was complete.

We liked her because she was young and pretty, but she scared us, too, because she was so strict. We were Brooklyn-bred sophomores who had never seen anything like her. She took us to a restaurant near Lincoln Center where we had to speak only in French; she let us order wine with our lunch, and several of us ­ most notably me ­ got tipsy and flirted wildly with the waiter. On another outing, we went to the old Thalia Cinema to see Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis. We girls had planned to sneak out as soon as the lights dimmed, but from the moment Jean-Louis Barrault’s plaintive, nimble mime appeared on the screen, we were mesmerized. We sat through the movie rapt, ignoring our tubs of popcorn and outsize boxes of Milk Duds, and when the film ended, we begged Mme. Toms to let us see it again.

But more valuable than an abiding love for the French cinema and a firm grasp of the position of the direct object in any given sentence was a gift Evangeline gave me that I didn¹t fully understand at the time. The pace of her class was rigorous, with nightly reading followed by many tests. And to our dismay, we had to memorize a poem as part of our final exam.

In the late 1960s and early ’70s, memorization was considered dull, rote, and perhaps most damning of all, irrelevant ­ relevance being the educational buzzword of the day. I grew up in a system that had replaced history and geography with social studies and current events. So imagine our collective horror when we were faced with the task of committing a poem ­ in French, no less ­ to memory.

Still, it had to be done. I wrote the poem over and over in my notebook; I learned it line by line, as if I were stringing beads on a necklace. When exam day came, and I began to speak the first lines of Pierre de Ronsard’s “Ode à Cassandre” ­ Mignonne, allons voir si la rose / Qui ce matin avait déclose / Sa robe de pourpre au solei / Darling, let us see if the rose / Which this morning has showed / Its robe of purple to the sun. ­ I felt a strange alchemy taking place. By committing the lines to memory, the poem had become mine in some essential way that could not have happened with the mere reading of it. I spoke slowly and softly, concentrating on the sound of the words, the pause between stanzas.

This, I realized, was not just reciting a poem. It was invoking a spell I could cast anytime I said those particular words in that particular sequence. Quickly, too quickly it seemed, it was over. Mme. Toms nodded her head in approval. I had learned the poem by heart. Even better, it was in my heart: I had ingested it and made it my own.

After that, I began to commit poems to memory, just for myself, for the person I would become by having those words inside me. William Blake’s The Tiger. The Shakespearean sonnet that begins “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun.” Poems by W.H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, e.e. cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickenson, William Whitehead, Gerard Manley Hopkins. The habit became a small necessity, my comfort.

More than thirty years later, I have committed perhaps 60 poems to memory. Every now and then, I memorize a new one. My storehouse of poetry has helped me while away the boredom of standing at a Xerox machine at a dead-end job, and acted as a talisman against panic and fear. In the darkened room where I waited for amniotic fluid to be extracted from my uterus, I recited the first 14 lines Romeo and Juliet speak to each other: “If I profane with my unworthiest hand / This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this/ My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand / To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.” When the needle went in, I was ready.

The right poem uttered at the right moment will steady my nerves, articulate my wonder, intensify my delight, apply balm to my sorrow. But the poems I have memorized are more than a source of solace; they are words to live by, my daily prayers. Evangeline must have known that all along. God bless her for insisting that we learn it, too.