Joan Shelley Rubin’s book Songs of Ourselves documents the use of poems called “memory gems” in these places meant to instill both proper pronunciation and Protestant virtues. For 10 points each:
[10e] Name this sort of place where elocutionary poems like “Old Ironsides” were once recited on Friday afternoons. McGuffey Readers were used almost exclusively in these places.
ANSWER: elementary schools [or primary schools or schoolhouses or classrooms; accept high schools]
[10h] Rubin notes that school boys often recited a passage in this “memory gem” beginning “And what is so rare as a day in June?” The title character of this poem, who once scorned a leper, learns the moral “the gift without the giver / Is bare.”
ANSWER: “The Vision of Sir Launfal” (by James Russell Lowell)
[10m] American schoolgirls likewise were once expected to memorize dactylic hexameter passages in which this character searches the Ozarks for her lost love before finding him convalescing in a Philadelphia hospital.
ANSWER: Evangeline Bellefontaine [accept either underlined name]
<TH, American Literature>