Of all her abundant writings, Vita Sackville-West valued her poetry most. She favored it above her novels, biographies, country and garden notes, even the history of her beloved Knole. Her longest poem, The Land, was published in 1926 to considerable praise. (Virginia Woolf wrote to her, Yes: that yellow moon is rising on the horizonEveryone admiring Vita, talking of Vita.1) In that year it won the Hawthornden Prize and attracted a readership that has lasted through twenty-two reprintings in England. The poem of 2500 lines, divided into sections for the four seasons, implies historical distance stretching back behind the particulars of country life. Its poetry is as rich and uneven as the landscape itself. Twenty years later in 1946 came The Garden, a little shorter, also divided into seasons. Here her imagination is reined a little closer in, making a poem more personal and less sweeping, in places alive with the flowers of her own garden at Sissinghurst. This poem was awarded the Heinemann prize. The art of memory, invented in classical times and passed down through the Renaissance, offers a fascinating key to these two poems. This ancient way, uncovered in rich detail by Frances Yates, is built upon places and images.2 The places, or memory loci, must be spaces easily grasped by the memory, such as rooms in a house or parts of a geometrical design. The images are visible forms or signs of what we aim to remember. The process of the mnemonic training is then to form the loci clearly in the mind, set into them the images wanted, and later, revisit the places, demanding from each the item it contains. Intense concentration and a keen visual imagination are needed; presumably these can both be developed by practicing the art. Detailed rules are offered by the three earliest writers on the topic, Cicero,