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Favourite Poems for Children.

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I’ve got a bit of a poem thing going on at the moment; spending a little bit of time reading them with children and hearing their ideas about meanings and feelings has really inspired me to do more of it. I MEANT to do more of this with my children, it was so part of my Charlotte Mason/PNEU childhood and what I wanted to give my kids, but I haven’t done too well. it’s never too late to change though.

Recently we’ve read Ballad by Auden, The Road Less Travelled and The Owl and the Pussy Cat all in groups and I’ve loved listing to what they think of the poems. It has lit me up enough to want to do this better and really explore poetry more with the kids who want to.

When I think back to my childhood, schooling that included learning and reciting and a home where telling poems was still very much a part of things (my Nana was an elocution scholar and still knew loads) there are lots of poems that mean something to me, either because they are classics or because they just touched a spot in me. I thought I would set a task of finding 100 poems I want to know I read to my children so that they will remember, I hope, that I did.

What poems would you suggest? What made you laugh, think, cry as a child or now? What do you love? What should I put on my list of poems that my children should have heard?

Comments

  1. Without looking in some of my poetry books at home, it’s hard to summon up much of a list, but I’d have to put Jabberwocky on my list, along with some of T.S. Elliot’s practical cat poems (e.g Mcavity the mystery cat) and a lot a lot of Spike Milligan’s silly verse!

  2. Escape at Bedtime by Robert Louis Stevenson (which is one of my all time favourites, it is beautiful)

    Cats Sleep Anywhere by Eleanor Farjeon

    The Meeting by Rachel Field

    • You know, I don’t know any of those (read The Meeting below, it’s beautiful). I am dreadfully under educated for someone with an A in A level English!

      • I chose The Meeting by Rachel Field as a poem to recite for my first English Speaking Board exam when I was a child. I’ve never forgotten it.

  3. Aprilia loves the Child’s Garden of Verse poems. I think some of the Songs of Innocence ones are also lovely (not so keen on Songs of Experience – I’d like childhood to be all warm and fluffy!) and a lot of the other “Romantic” poetry (that’s Romantic as it Wordsworth etc not as it soppy lovey dovey stuff!) is good stuff too.

    The only poem I can remember from childhood is “We’re going to see the rabbit” by Alan Brownjohn (found it here http://www.sheerpoetry.co.uk/junior/carol-ann-duffy-workshop/pollution-poetry-workshop) it’s not exactly a joyful poem but it was one I was really fond of for quite a while for some reason.

  4. My dad used to read us lots of poetry. All of Edward Lear 🙂 Other nonsense poems, e.g. Mervyn Peake. Lewis Carroll’s poems from the Alice books. Hilaire Belloc! Lots of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems for children are rather twee, but I do really like some of them – e.g. My Shadow, Land of Counterpane.

    OK, I am now looking through the “Oxford Book of Poetry for Children” (very battered) for my favourites as a child: The Eagle, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Casey Jones. The Fairies, William Allingham.

    More recent discoveries – Michael Rosen, Charles Causley, Shel Silverstein. Am sure there are many more.

    I was reading “Naming of Parts” to Violet a couple of nights ago 🙂

  6. I was – and still am – entranced by poetry and gulped down great chunks of it as a child – all at home, long before it ever featured on the ‘curiculum’ at school, thank goodness for older sisters with poetry books! Subject matter influenced me – I’d memorise anything with a horse in it – and rythm and language enthralled me

    Tiger Tiger, William Blake
    Jabawoky, Lewis Carol
    The Donkey, G. K. Chesterton
    The Highwayman, Alfred Noyes
    The Lady of Shalot, Alfred Lord Tennyson
    The Young Lochinvar, Walter Scott
    Annabel Lee, Edgar Allen Poe
    almost anything by A.A. Milne
    and a second vote for Cats Sleep Anywhere, Elenor Farjon

    i could probably compile 100 just by myself!

    oh gosh, you have to have Sea Fever by John Masefield as well

    • Well do definitely feel free Mamcrow – any more you think of, let me know. I’m going to make a page with a load of links on it, I think.

  7. I eat my peas with honey. Everybody knows a carrot screams when grated. AA Milne, especially “Have you been a good girl, Jane?”. cummings “In just spring when the world is mud-luscious.” Plath, “Love set you going like a fat gold watch.” Heaney’s “Blackberry Picking.” Yeats Lake Isle of Inishfree. “For I will consider my cat Geoffrey.” “I’m going out to eat worms.” “I think mice are rather nice.” How doth the little crocodile, after how doth the busy little bee. Ogden Nash. Oscar Wilde, “Symphony in Yellow.”

  8. IF…..

    IF you can keep your head when all about you
    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
    If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
    But make allowance for their doubting too;
    If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
    Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

    If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
    If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
    If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
    And treat those two impostors just the same;
    If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
    Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

    If you can make one heap of all your winnings
    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
    And lose, and start again at your beginnings
    And never breathe a word about your loss;
    If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
    And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

    If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
    ‘ Or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch,
    if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
    If all men count with you, but none too much;
    If you can fill the unforgiving minute
    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
    Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
    And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!

  9. This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
    Bringing the cheque and the postal order …

    We used to have a nice picture book version of ‘Cats sleep anywhere’.

  10. I first read this when I was about 12 and have always liked it.

    PIANO
    By D.H. Lawrence
    Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
    Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
    A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
    And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

    In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
    Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
    To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
    And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

    So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
    With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
    Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
    Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

  13. Mud

    Mud is very nice to feel
    All squishy-squash between the toes!
    I’d rather wade in wiggly mud
    Than smell a yellow rose.

    Nobody else but the rosebush knows
    How nice mud feels
    Between the toes.

    ~Polly Chase Boyden~

  14. One here for Freddie – don’t mind if you don’t publish it – its actually a lullaby, we had it read at Henry’s funeral and it makes me blub but is rather lovely.

    Baby’s Boat

    Baby’s boat’s a silver moon
    Sailing o’er the sky
    Sailing o’er a sea of sleep
    While the stars go by.

    Sail, baby, sail far across the sea
    Only don’t forget to sail back again to me.

    Baby’s fishing for a dream
    Fishing near and far
    Her line, a silver moonbeam is
    Her bait, silver star.

    Sail, baby, sail far across the sea
    Only don’t forget to sail back again to me.

  16. All of the above! I still remember a surprising amount of Hiawatha (Minnehaha, Laughing Water …. from infant school!), Wind of the Western Sea, Robert Frost.

    Carla that’s beautiful, my mum used to sing it to me.

  17. ‘Cats sleep anywhere’ was the first poem I memorised as a child. I can still recite it to this day, much to the delight of my children. I’m glad I am not the only person to mention it! think light-hearted is the way to go at this age. There is plenty of time for woe later. x

  18. Eacape at Bedtime by Rober Louis Stevenson

    The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
    Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
    And high overhead and all moving about,
    There were thousands of millions of stars.
    There ne’er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,
    Nor of people in church or the Park,
    As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,
    And that glittered and winked in the dark.

    The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
    And the star of the sailor, and Mars,
    These shown in the sky, and the pail by the wall
    Would be half full of water and stars.
    They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,
    And they soon had me packed into bed;
    But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
    And the stars going round in my head.

  20. The Meeting by Rachel Field

    as i went home on the old wood road
    with my basket and lesson book
    a deer came out of the tall trees
    and down to drink at the brook

    twilight was all about us
    twilight and tree on tree
    I looked straight into its great strange eyes
    and the deer looked back at me

    beautiful brown and unafraid,
    those eyes returned my stare
    and something with neither sound nor name
    passed between us there

    something i shall not forget
    still and shy and wise
    in the dimness of the woods
    from a pair of gold specked eyes

  21. The Listeners, by Walter de la Mare. And yes, yes, yes! to Tiger Tiger, and many of the above! I must come back to this wonderful list when I have more time – very inspiring…

  22. Hi Merry – I used to be on the MuddlePuddle list years ago, and am back to be inspired by you again. This is a great idea. The way we do poetry is to combine it with handwriting practice – I type out a poem using StartWrite software, with blank lines for them to copy each line underneath. We Google images to try to find an interesting illustration too. A good poem inspires them to write it out nicely (though we do read them aloud too , of course). Sometimes we do songs as well. I memorised a few poems as a child and I like to recite them in my head when I’m waiting somewhere, or stressed, or swimming lengths. Trying to remember which ones have been best enjoyed:-

    The Charge of the Light Brigade, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Some great paintings of this, and we found on YouTube an original wax cylinder recording of Tennyson himself reading it. Combined with reading about the Crimean war.

    ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’ by Shakespeare – lovely one for Spring.
    The Lake Isle of Innisfree
    ‘If’ by Kipling
    Macavity
    The Listeners, by Walter de la Mare
    My shadow
    They Told me, Heraclitis, by William Johnson Cory –
    I also love the parody of this which is published in Ken Baker’s book of poems and their parodies:

    They told me Heraclitis, they told me you were dead.
    I never knew your proper name was Heraclitis, Fred.
    You made out you were working-class, you talked with adenoids.
    And so it was a shock to learn you were a Name at Lloyds.

    And now I’m full of doubts about the others at the squat.
    Are they a bunch of yuppies, or Thatcherites, or what?
    Is Special Branch among us, camouflaged with crabs and fleas?
    Is Kev a poncing Xenophon, or Darren, Thucydides?

    ====

    ‘A Little Dog’s Day’ by Rupert Brooke, is fun –
    http://www.poetry-online.org/brooke_little_dogs_day.htm

    Looking forward to reading some of the suggestions above – thanks!

  25. I loved poems as a child & still do.
    Favourites include(d):
    Much AA Milne but particularly Now we are Six

    The Train to Glasgow by Wilma Horsbrugh which I can’t remember all of but starts:
    Here is the train to Glasgow.
    Here is the driver,
    Mr MacIver,
    Who drove the train to Glasgow

    The Lamplighter – Robert Louis Stevenson
    My tea is nearly ready and the sun has left the sky;
    It’s time to take the window to see Leerie going by;
    For every night at teatime and before you take your seat,
    With lantern and with ladder he comes posting up the street.
    Now Tom would be a driver and Maria go to sea,
    And my papa’s a banker and as rich as he can be;
    But I, when I am stronger and can choose what I’m to do,
    O Leerie, I’ll go round at night and light the lamps with you!
    For we are very lucky, with a lamp before the door,
    And Leerie stops to light it as he lights so many more;
    And O! before you hurry by with ladder and with light,
    O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him tonight!

    I was introduced to poetry by my primary 1/2 teacher Mrs Pegg who read poetry to us every day & without whom I might never have encountered any until my High School English teacher who would have put me off for life with her coverage of Philip Larkin, (who to this day I can’t get on with!).
    My mum can’t cope with poetry that doesn’t go “dum de dum de dum” and my dad isn’t a reader.

    • Lol this is why should read all comments before posting a reply! Probably why it is my favourite too!

  27. Michael Rosen – his poems, especially heard on the audiobooks where himself is reading, are tremendous!

  28. [As my tweet]
    Sir Brian Botany. Calico Pie. Wynken, Blynken and Nod. Who has seen the wind? The Listeners. James, James, Morrison Morrison… Royal Slice of Bread [or whatever title is] …at this rate, A.A.M. will have half the book!

  29. Harebell! Harebell!
    If I shall send
    The wind to swing
    Your delicate stem
    When the war end
    Will you ring? Will you ring?

    Listen! Listen!
    My bells all peal.
    Even now I know
    No joy but the sun
    And the wind that I feel
    As it blows me to and fro.

    [Can someone name the author?]

  30. Betty At The Party

    “When I was at the party,”
    said Betty, aged just four.
    “A little girl fell off her chair,
    Right down upon the ßoor;
    And all the other little girls
    Began to laugh, but me –
    I didn’t laugh a single bit,”
    Said Betty seriously.

    “Why not?” her mother asked her,
    Full of delight to Þnd
    That Betty – bless her little heart –
    Had been so sweetly kind.
    “Why didn’t you laugh, my darling?
    Or don’t you like to tell?”
    “ I didn’t laugh,” said Betty,
    “ Cause it was me that fell.”

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