The Days of the Month
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
February has twenty-eight alone,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting leap-year--that's the time
When February's days are twenty-nine.
OLD SONG.
Yesterday, hoping to arrange my bookshelves in better order, behind other newer volumes I found an old friend: Poems Every Child Should Know (Doubleday, Page & Company, 1913). On the title page an inscription indicating the book was a present to my Aunt Ruth on her tenth birthday. The collection -- with its poems by Robert Louis Stevenson and Eugene Field and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and so many others -- got me to thinking how much I have enjoyed throughout my life the few poems I have memorized. And finding the poem above reminded me how much I also have valued particular mnemonic devices for remembering critical information.
This brief stanza gives thirteen digits of π: See, I have a rhyme assisting
my feeble brain,
its tasks sometimes resisting.
More poetry for π is available here.
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