What is wrong with your Tom Meltzer that he can't remember even the first verse of the Ancient Mariner without taking lessons from a professional mnemonist (Memories are made of this, G2, 14 April). The trouble with that poem has always been that, once read, you can't forget it. Like the Mariner himself, it just doesn't go away, it haunts you, it's explosive, it leads you somewhere. Poems are not like telephone directories, just meaningless strings of words, but big, active symbols that work as a whole. (How does Meltzer think actors learn their parts?) I have a lot of poems in my memory because, at some time, I got interested in them and wanted to get their details clear. If you haven't that wish, you are never going to remember them anyway, because you can't use them. This is true, too, of all the other things one might want to remember, such as lists of bones. They won't stick unless you grasp how they are connected. Meltzer's predicament surely casts a strange light on the damage that the computer age has already done to some of our most central, necessary human faculties.
Mary Midgley
Newcastle on Tyne
• "How on earth could anyone memorise all 626 lines of an epic poem such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?" asks Tom Meltzer. Well, we don't know how he did it, but we heard the actor Timothy West recite the poem from memory in Westminster Abbey's Jerusalem Chamber in the 1990s. We were greatly impressed and did wonder if he had done it all. Michael Mayne, dean of Westminster at the time, confirmed that he had.
Chris and Betty Birch
London