An actor who memorizes say Shakespeare for a role has to understand it to be able to speak it and as you say otherwise just gibberish. So I like you I've far too few verses committed to memory but I just have some. Like not trivially by the way I imagine a lot of people being hesitant about this sort of thing. You'll surprise yourself if you start trying to memorize something and just add a line and then you would think you would top out somewhere. It just becomes very natural it's part of your working knowledge, which is getting dangerously close to talking about ROI for poetry.