Poems to read again and again: a selection of the famous and familiar

That time of year thou mayst in me behold ; Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? ; Let me not to the marriage of true minds ; When to the sessions of sweet silent thoughts ; When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes / William Shakespeare

The passionate shepherd to his love / Christopher Marlowe

Drink to me only with thine eyes / Ben Jonson

Death, be not proud / John Donne

To the virgins, to make much of time ; Delight in disorder / Robert Herrick

On his blindness / John Milton

To my dear and loving husband / Anne Bradstreet

To Althea, from prison / Richard Lovelace

Peace / Henry Vaughan

Hark! the herald angels sing / Charles Wesley

Elegy written in a country churchyard / Thomas Gray

The tyger / William Blake

A red, red rose / Robert Burns

She was a phantom of delight ; The daffodils / William Wordsworth

Breathes there the man with soul so dead? / Sir Walter Scott

Kubla Khan ; The rime of the ancient mariner / Samuel Taylor Coleridge

'Tis the last rose of summer / Thomas Moore

A visit from St. Nicholas / Clement Clarke Moore

Jenny kissed me ; Abou Ben Adhem / Leigh Hunt

She walks in beauty / Lord Byron

Home, sweet home / John Howard Payne

Ode to the West Wind ; Ozymandias ; To a skylark / Percy Bysshe Shelley

Silent night, holy night / Joseph Mohr

To a waterfowl ; Thanatopsis / William Cullen Bryant

Ode on a Grecian urn ; To autumn ; A thing of beauty / John Keats

The spider and the fly / Mary Howitt

Concord hymn / Ralph Waldo Emerson

If thou must love me ; How do I love thee? ; Sonnet from the Portuguese / Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Paul Revere's ride ; There was a little girl ; The village blacksmith ; Hiawatha's childhood ; Christmas bells / Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Barbara Frietchie ; Ichabod / John Greenleaf Whittier

The raven ; Annabel Lee / Edgar Allan Poe

The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám / Edward Fitzgerald

The charge of the Light Brigade / Alfred Lord Tennyson

Old Ironsides / Oliver Wendell Holmes

The owl and the pussycat / Edward Lear

My last duchess / Robert Browning

I hear America singing ; O captain! my captain / Walt Whitman

The battle hymn of the republic / Julia Ward Howe

Dover Beach / Matthew Arnold

Jingle bells / James L. Pierpont

My life closed twice before its close ; Because I could not stop for death ; I heard a fly buzz

when I died ;

I never saw a moor ; There's a certain slant of light / Emily Dickinson

When I am dead / Christina Rosetti

Jabberwocky ; The walrus and the carpenter / Lewis Carroll

Christmas everywhere / Phillips Brooks

Jim / Bret Harte

The garden of Proserpine / Algernon Charles Swinburne

The man on the flying trapeze / George Leybourne

The new colossus / Emma Lazarus

Invictus / William Ernest Henley

When the frost is on the punkin / James Whitcomb Riley

Requiem / Robert Louis Stevenson ; Little Boy Blue ; Wynken, Blynken, and Nod ; Jest 'fore Christmas / Eugene Field

The night has a thousand eyes / Francis William Bourdillon

The man with the hoe ; Lincoln, the man of the people / Edwin Markham

Requiescat / Oscar Wilde

The house by the side of the road / Sam Walter Foss

To an athlete dying young ; When I was one-and-twenty / A.E. Housman

America the beautiful / Katherine Lee Bates

Indian summer / William Wilfred Campbell

Casey at the bat / Ernest Lawrence Thayer

Danny Deever ; Gunga Din ; Mandalay / Rudyard Kipling

The second coming ; The lake isle of Innisfree ; Sailing to Byzantium ; When you are old ; Among school children / William Butler Yeats

Anne Rutledge / Edgar Lee Masters

Richard Cory ; Miniver Cheevy ; The house on the hill ; Mr. Flood's party / Edward Arlington Robinson

Leisure / William Henry Davies

In Flanders fields / John McCrae

The listeners / Walter de la Mare

The shooting of Dan McGrew ; The cremation of Sam McGee ; The spell of the Yukon / Robert W. Service

Patterns / Amy Lowell

Birches ; The death of the hired man ; Stopping by woods on a snowy evening ; The road not taken / Robert Frost

Grass ; Fog ; Chicago ; Cool tombs / Carl Sandburg

Sea fever / John Masefield

The emperor of ice cream / Wallace Stevens

General William Booth enters heaven ; Abraham Lincoln walks at midnight / Vachel Lindsay

The highwayman / Alfred Noyes

Home ; A friend's greeting / Edgar A. Guest

Those two boys / P. Franklin Adams

I hear an army / James Joyce

What Tomas an Buile said in a pub / James Stephens

I shall not care / Sara Teasdale

Trees / Joyce Kilmer

The soldier / Rupert Brooke

Poetry / Marianne Moore

I have a rendezvous with death / Alan Seeger

The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock ; Journey of the magi / T.S. Eliot

Dirge without music ; First fig ; Pity me not / Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ars poetica / Archibald MacLeish

O sweet spontaneous / E.E. Cummings

The Negro speaks of rivers ; Harlem (Dream deferred) / Langston Hughes

Musée des beaux arts / W.H. Auden

This land is your land / Woody Guthrie

Do not go gentle into that good night / Dylan Thomas

The death of the ball turret gunner / Randall Jarrell

Caged bird / Maya Angelou

Bored ; Death of a young son by drowning / Margaret Atwood

Imagine / John Lennon

Blowin' in the wind ; The times they are a-changin / Bob Dylan.