Poems to read together

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Over the course of the National Memory Day project, we asked people living with memory loss to share their favourite poems with us and if they recognised the poems shared during the poetry workshops. There were several poems that came up repeatedly – we’ve put together a list of some of them for you to explore.

Top 12 Favourite Poems

Daffodils by William Wordsworth
The Owl and The Pussycat by Edward Lear
Oh, I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth by Pam Ayres
If by Rudyard Kipling
The Tyger by William Blake
Elegy in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray
Buckingham Palace by A. A. Milne
Sea Fever by John Masefield
Cargoes by John Masefield
Lake Isle of Innisfree by W.B. Yeats
The Listeners by Walter de la Mare
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Other Remembered Poems (that aren’t mentioned above)

Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden
Night Mail by W. H. Auden
The South Country by Hilaire Belloc
A Subaltern’s Love Song by John Betjeman
Jerusalem by William Blake
A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll
You Are Old, Father William by Lewis Carroll
I Saw a Jolly Hunter by Charles Causley
I Wanna be Yours by John Cooper Clarke
The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God by Milton Hayes and Cuthbert Clarke
The Lion and Albert by Marriott Edgar
The Hollow Men by T. S. Elliott
The Ruined Maid by Thomas Hardy
The Pearl by George Herbert
Loveliest Of Trees, The Cherry Now by Alfred Edward Housman
Warning by Jenny Joseph
Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats
Silver by Walter de la Mare
Some One by Walter de la Mare
The King’s Breakfast by A. A. Milne
From a Railway Carriage by Robert Louis Stevenson
Adlestrop by Edward Thomas
Love Song by Spike Milligan (If I could Write Words)
I Love Me Mudder by Benjamin Zephaniah

Other Favourite Poems

Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
Hitcher by Simon Armitage
Christmas by John Betjeman
Diary of a Church Mouse by John Betjeman
The Pied Piper of Hamelin by Robert Browning
Ithaka by C. P. Cavafy
Leisure by W.H. Davies
The Old Oak Tree by W.H. Davies
Macavity: The Mystery Cat by T. S. Eliot
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost
The Deserted Village by Oliver Goldsmith
I Remember, I Remember by Thomas Hood
The Song of the Shirt by Thomas Hood
Warning by Jenny Joseph
Teignmouth by John Keats
Mowgli’s Brothers by Rudyard Kipling
An Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin
On his Blindness by John Milton
Drake’s Drum by Sir Henry Newbolt
Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen
Wintering by Sylvia Plath
Noise by Jessie Pope
Now Spring is Here by Paul Gerard Reed
Mr Blob by E.V. Rieu
The Guest House by Rumi
Sonnet 116 (Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds) by William Shakespeare
Sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day) by William Shakespeare
Escape at Bedtime by Robert Louis Stevenson
Crossing the Bar by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Morte d’Arthur by Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Ulysses by Alfred Lord Tennyson
The Bright Field by R.S. Thomas
Ode: Intimations of Immortality by William Wordsworth
Upon Westminster Bridge by William Wordsworth

Suggested Anthologies to Explore

Dancing By The Light of The Moon by Gyles Brandreth (Michael Joseph; 2019)
The Nation’s Favourite Poems by Griff Rhys Jones (BBC Books; 1996)
Poetry Please: The Nation’s Best-Loved Poems by Roger McGough (Faber & Faber; 2014)
The Map and the Clock: A Laureate’s Choice of the Poetry of Britain and Ireland by Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke (Faber & Faber; 2016)

If you are interested in reading further on the links between poetry and memory, please visit the Cambridge Poetry and Memory project website.

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