I like poetry
A personal selection of poems
3 min readMay 10, 2025
How it started
- ‘If,’ by Rudyard Kipling
[We had a small, framed copy of this poem in our house when I was growing up, and my brother mentioned in at my mum’s funeral.] - ‘The Owl and the pussycat,’ by Edward Lear
- ‘The Hippopotamus Song,’ by Ian Wallace
[I used to listen to this one on an album when I was a young boy] - ‘Buckingham Palace,’* by A.A. Milne
[this is another from that same album] - ‘The king’s breakfast,’ by A.A. Milne
- ‘One, two, buckle my shoe’
- ‘Leap year poem,’* by Mother Goose
[“30 days hath September”] - ‘Bed in Summer,’ by Robert Louis Stevenson
- ‘The Land of Counterpane,’ by Robert Louis Stevenson
- ‘The Tale of Custard the Dragon,’ by Ogden Nash
- ‘Lobster Quadrille,’ by Lewis Carroll
- ‘The Highwayman,’ by Alfred Noyes
- ‘Macavity: the Mystery Cat,’ by T.S. Eliot
It’s all about rhythm and rhyme
- ‘The Night Mail,’ by W.H. Auden
- ‘Tarantella,’ by Hilaire Belloc [I learnt this one by heart when studying Drama as a teenager: “Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?”]
- ‘maggie and milly and molly and may,’ by ee commings
- ‘Gran can you rap?’ by Jack Ousby
A few classics
- ‘How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
[“Let me count the ways”] - ‘My Heart Leaps Up,’ by William Wordsworth
[“The child is the father of the man”] - ‘Daffodils,’ by William Wordsworth
[“I wandered lonely as a cloud”] - ‘Sonnet 18,’ by William Shakeseare
[“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”] - ‘All the world’s a stage,’ by William Shakeseare
[speech from ‘As you like it’] - ‘Meditation XVII,’ by John Donne
[includes: “No man is an island,” “Any man’s death diminishes me,” and “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”] - ‘If you forget me,’ by Pablo Neruda
- ‘The Soldier,’ by Rupert Brooke, which includes:
“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England”
Poems on old age, loss, death and dying
- ‘Do not go gentle into that good night,’ by Dylan Thomas
- ‘Love,’ by Pablo Neruda
- ‘Song,’ by Christina Rossetti
[“When I am dead, my dearest”] - ‘Remember,’ by Christina Rossetti
[“Better by far you should forget and smile, Than that you should remember and be sad”] - ‘Long Distance II,’ by Tony Harrison
- ‘Funeral Blues,’ by W.H. Auden
[“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone”] - ‘If I should go before the rest of you,’ by Joyce Grenfell
- ‘Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep,’ by Clare Harner
- ‘I have come home’ by Fran Hall
- ‘You’ll never walk alone,’* by Oscar Hammerstein II
Poems that made me smile
- ‘This Is Just To Say,’ by William Carlos Williams
- ‘Cat sleep, anywhere,’ by Eleanor Farjeon
- ‘A silly poem,’ by Spike Milligan:
Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I’ll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?
Very short poems
- ‘14 March 1879,’ by Tom Stoppard:
“Einstein born
Quite unprepared,
For E to equal MC squared”
- ‘Ode to a Goldfish,’ by Gyles Brandreth:
“O,
Wet
Pet.”
- ‘Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes,’ aka ‘Fleas,’ by Strickland Gillilan:
“Adam
Had’em”
- Roger McGough’s ‘New Poem’:
“So far, so good”
- ‘The Lover Writes a One-line Poem,’ by Gavin Ewart:
You!
- ‘Ode to the invisible man’, by Colin McNaughton:
- ‘Dreams,’ by Langston Hughes
- ‘The Good News,’ by Thich Nhat Hanh
- ‘Who’s Who,’ by Benjamin Zephaniah
- ‘Ecclesiasties, chapter 3’, from the Bible
[“There is a time for everything … “a time to be born and a time to die”] - ‘My love is like a red, red rose,’ by Robert Burns
- ‘This Be The Verse,’ by Philip Larkin
- Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver
- The bell and the blackbird, by David Whyte
- ‘Everything is waiting for you’ by David Whyte:
“The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.”
