Poems to read together

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

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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

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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