The poem I remember most from school is I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth, which most people just call Daffodils. I studied it in Year Eight at a school in Rawalpindi, in Pakistan, when I was about thirteen.
Our English teacher, Mrs Qureshi, made the whole class learn it by heart, and we had to recite it standing at the front of the room, one by one. I was terrified, because I had a slight stammer at the time, and I practised it every evening in front of the mirror for two weeks. The poem itself is about the poet walking alone in the countryside and suddenly seeing a huge field of yellow daffodils next to a lake, moving in the wind as if they're dancing. In the last part, he says that years later, when he's lying on his sofa feeling bored or sad, the memory of those flowers comes back to him and fills him with happiness.
At school, honestly, I didn't feel much about it. I'd never even seen a daffodil, and it felt like a very English poem with nothing to do with my life. But now I feel very differently. I'm a software developer in Dubai and I work long hours, and I've realised the poem is really about how a beautiful memory can rescue you on a bad day. I have my own version of daffodils, the apricot orchards near my grandfather's village in the north. And I'm also grateful for the experience of reciting it, because getting through it in front of the class was the first time I felt I could beat my stammer.