Our Favourite Poems

Poetry is wonderful.

A poem can be any length from a few words to several pages.  It can be about anything.  It can rhyme or simply be a collection of random sounds and words.  You can love a poem or loathe it.  It can make you laugh or cry.

Even if you are not a poetry fan chances are that there is at least one poem you love, or can even recite from memory.  A poem that you discovered as a child and have always remembered or that you have only recently come across.

Here are some of the poems that your local library staff love.  If you agree, disagree or want to tell us about your own favourites you can add to our discussion boards.

 

Carol (Librarian)

  • Ozymandias - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Colin (Assistant Library and Information Services Manager: Children and Young People)

  • Dover Beach - Matthew Arnold 
  • The Whitsun Weddings - Philip Larkin
  • 1 September, 1939 - W.H. Auden 
  • The Voice - Thomas Hardy 
  • A March Calf - Ted Hughes 
  • Snow - Louis MacNeice 
  • Wuthering Heights - Sylvia Plath 
  • Prayer - Carol Ann Duffy
  • On Wenlock Edge - A.E. Housman 
  • A Disused Shed in County Wexford - Derek Mahon 

Coral (Librarian)

  • Paradise Lost (Bks 9 & 10) - John Milton
  • The sun rising - John Donne  
  • The Rape of the Lock - Alexander Pope
  • Composed upon Westminster Bridge - William Wordsworth  
  • Prometheus unbound - Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • The wreck of 'The Deutschland' - Gerard Manley Hopkins
  • The wanderings of Oisin - W.B. Yeats
  • The night mail - W.H. Auden

Jane (Librarian)

  • The Darkling Thrush - Thomas Hardy
  • Sonnet no. 16 - Let me not to the marriage of true minds... - William Shakespeare
  • Daddy - Sylvia Plath
  • The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock - T S Eliot
  • To Autumn - John Keats
  • Pied Beauty - Gerard Manley Hopkins
  • Warning - Jenny Joseph
  • My Last Duchess - Robert Browning
  • Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll
  • King's Cross - Eleanor Farjeon

Janet (Library Assistant - Park)

  • The Pedlar's Caravan - William Brighty Rands

Jemima (Librarian)

  • Goblin Market - Christina Rossetti
  • Time you old Gypsy Man - R.Hodgson
  • Vespers - A.A Milne
  • The Stolen Child - W.B Yeats
  • Jack Frost - Cecily Pike
  • Television - Roald Dahl
  • Hunter Trails - Sir John Betjeman
  • Rebecca who slammed doors for fun and perished miserably - Hilaire Belloc
  • You can't be that - Brian Patten
  • An Old Woman of the Roads - Padraic Colum

 I also like:

  • Tarantella - Hilaire Belloc
  • Twelve Songs lX - W.H Auden
  • If - Rudyard Kipling

Louise (Librarian)

  • Death Be Not Proud - John Donne
  • The Eve of St. Agnes - John Keats
  • Chocolate Cake - Michael Rosen

Sharon (Service supervisor - Children and Young People)

  • Children Learn What They Live - Dorothy Law Nolte

 Suzanne (Librarian)

  • On the Ning Nang Nong - Spike Milligan
  • From a Railway Carriage - Robert Louis Stevenson

Wendy (Library Assistant - Goxhill)

  • I Remember, I Remember - Thomas Hood