Introduction - i: Introduction Unit - 1: January Chapter - 1: Promise - Jackie Kay Chapter - 2: Infant Joy - William Blake Chapter - 3: Poem for a New Year - Matt Goodfellow Chapter - 4: Lines Written by a Bear of Very Little Brain - A. A. Milne Chapter - 5: from Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare Chapter - 6: The Three Kings - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Chapter - 7: Dawn - Ella Wheeler Wilcox Chapter - 8: Life - Charlotte Bronte Chapter - 9: The Pulley - George Herbert Chapter - 10: Letter to N. Y. - Elizabeth Bishop Chapter - 11: Dust of Snow - Robert Frost Chapter - 12: Occasional Poem - Jacqueline Woodson Chapter - 13: The Midnight Skaters - Roger McGough Chapter - 14: To Science - Edgar Allan Poe Chapter - 15: from I Have a Dream - Martin Luther King, Jr. Chapter - 16: The Burial of Sir John Moore - Charles Wolfe Chapter - 17: from Elegy on Captain Cook - Anna Seward Chapter - 18: January - William Carlos Williams Chapter - 19: I'll Tell You How the Sun Rose - Emily Dickinson Chapter - 20: Days - Philip Larkin Chapter - 21: A Colossal Glossary - Paul Muldoon Chapter - 22: Human Family - Maya Angelou Chapter - 23: The Distance - Eleanor Farjeon Chapter - 24: Friendship - Cole Porter Chapter - 25: To a Mouse - Robert Burns Chapter - 26: Ballad of the Totems - Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) Chapter - 27: First They Came for the Jews - Martin Niemoeller Chapter - 28: Yonder See the Morning Blink - A. E. Housman Chapter - 29: from Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare Chapter - 30: Rain - Spike Milligan Chapter - 31: Peas - Anon. Unit - 2: February Chapter - 1: Days - Tony Mitton Chapter - 2: from February - John Clare Chapter - 3: A Giant Firefly - Kobayashi Issa Chapter - 4: All That Is Gold Does Not Glitter - J. R. R. Tolkien Chapter - 5: Spellbound - Emily Bronte Chapter - 6: A Riddle - Jonathan Swift Chapter - 7: A Winter Bluejay - Sara Teasdale Chapter - 8: An Unusual Cat-Poem - Wendy Cope Chapter - 9: It Was Long Ago - Eleanor Farjeon Chapter - 10: Colouring In - Jan Dean Chapter - 11: The Missile - Michael Leunig Chapter - 12: Lift Every Voice and Sing - James Weldon Johnson Chapter - 13: Shrove Tuesday - Celia Warren Chapter - 14: Valentine - Wendy Cope Chapter - 15: All You Need Is Love - John Lennon and Paul McCartney Chapter - 16: Lettuce Marry - Anon. Chapter - 17: It's No Use - Sappho Chapter - 18: from The Great Lover - Rupert Brooke Chapter - 19: Rainbow - John Agard Chapter - 20: A Summing Up - Charles Mackay Chapter - 21: I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail - Anon. Chapter - 22: The Little Mute Boy - Federico Garcia Lorca Chapter - 23: There Is No Frigate Like a Book - Emily Dickinson Chapter - 24: She Was Poor, But She Was Honest - Billy Bennett Chapter - 25: First Sight - Philip Larkin Chapter - 26: The Poetry Grand National - Roger Stevens Chapter - 27: Love's Philosophy - Percy Bysshe Shelley Chapter - 28: In Tenebris - Ford Madox Ford Chapter - 29: My Heart Leaps Up - William Wordsworth Unit - 3: March Chapter - 1: from Under Milk Wood - Dylan Thomas Chapter - 2: The Bright Field - R. S. Thomas Chapter - 3: Extinct - Mandy Coe Chapter - 4: Holi - Chrissie Gittins Chapter - 5: The River in March - Ted Hughes Chapter - 6: Young Lambs - John Clare Chapter - 7: To My Sister - William Wordsworth Chapter - 8: Warning - Jenny Joseph Chapter - 9: The Battle of the Sexes - Liz Brownlee Chapter - 10: Remember - Christina Rossetti Chapter - 11: Mothering Sunday - George Hare Leonard Chapter - 12: Human Affection - Stevie Smith Chapter - 13: Here Comes the Sun - George Harrison Chapter - 14: Green Rain - Mary Webb Chapter - 15: To Daffodils - Robert Herrick Chapter - 16: Go and Catch a Falling Star - John Donne Chapter - 17: Ich Am of Irlaunde - Anon. Chapter - 18: Meeting at Night - Robert Browning Chapter - 19: Historical Associations - Robert Louis Stevenson Chapter - 20: A Morning Song - Eleanor Farjeon Chapter - 21: Spring - Christina Rossetti Chapter - 22: Spring - William Blake Chapter - 23: Sonnet 98 - William Shakespeare Chapter - 24: The Frog and the Nightingale - Vikram Seth Chapter - 25: Today - Billy Collins Chapter - 26: I Remember, I Remember - Thomas Hood Chapter - 27: Ballad of the Bread Man - Charles Causley Chapter - 28: I Watched a Blackbird - Thomas Hardy Chapter - 29: Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now - A. E. Housman Chapter - 30: The Cherry-Tree Carol - Anon. Chapter - 31: Easter Day - Oscar Wilde Unit - 4: April Chapter - 1: April Fool - Louis MacNeice Chapter - 2: The Walrus and the Carpenter - Lewis Carroll Chapter - 3: The Jumblies - Edward Lear Chapter - 4: Who Killed Cock Robin? - Anon. Chapter - 5: First Word (After Helen Keller) - Rachel Rooney Chapter - 6: The People of the Eastern Ice - Rudyard Kipling Chapter - 7: from the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer Chapter - 8: Home-Thoughts from Abroad - Robert Browning Chapter - 9: The Ballad of Semmerwater - William Watson Chapter - 10: Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep - Mary Elizabeth Frye Chapter - 11: In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations' - Thomas Hardy Chapter - 12: Dear Yuri - Brian Moses Chapter - 13: The Song of Wandering Aengus - W. B. Yeats Chapter - 14: The Woods and Banks - W. H. Davies Chapter - 15: Ode to the Loss of the Titanic - Geoffrey Hill Chapter - 16: Will Ye No Come Back Again? - Carolina Oliphant, Lady Nairne Chapter - 17: from The Waste Land - T. S. Eliot Chapter - 18: Waste Land Limericks - Wendy Cope Chapter - 19: Concord Hymn - Ralph Waldo Emerson Chapter - 20: I Had a Dove - John Keats Chapter - 21: from The Old Vicarage, Grantchester - Rupert Brooke Chapter - 22: The Woodspurge - Dante Gabriel Rossetti Chapter - 23: from Richard II - William Shakespeare Chapter - 24: Incident of the French Camp - Robert Browning Chapter - 25: Robinson Crusoe's Wise Sayings - Ian McMillan Chapter - 26: Into my Heart an Air that Kills - A. E. Housman Chapter - 27: o by the by - E. E. Cummings Chapter - 28: Desiderata - Max Ehrmann Chapter - 29: Dancing with Life - Shauna Darling Robertson Chapter - 30: Facing It - Yusef Komunyakaa Unit - 5: May Chapter - 1: Verses said to be written on the Union - Jonathan Swift Chapter - 2: The Merry Month of May - Thomas Dekker Chapter - 3: Tartary - Walter de la Mare Chapter - 4: Back in the Playground Blues - Adrian Mitchell Chapter - 5: The Song of the Banana Man - Evan Jones Chapter - 6: Buckingham Palace - A. A. Milne Chapter - 7: The Pobble Who Has No Toes - Edward Lear Chapter - 8: Impromptu on Charles II - John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester Chapter - 9: What the teacher said when asked: What er we avin for geography, Miss? - John Agard Chapter - 10: For my Niece - Kate Tempest Chapter - 11: from Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe Chapter - 12: On a Lane in Spring - John Clare Chapter - 13: The Lanyard - Billy Collins Chapter - 14: Rondeau - Leigh Hunt Chapter - 15: from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T. S. Eliot Chapter - 16: Instructions - Neil Gaiman Chapter - 17: A Handsome Young Fellow Called Frears - Michael Palin Chapter - 18: Matilda: Who Told Lies, and was Burned to Death - Hilaire Belloc Chapter - 19: Oranges and Lemons - Anon. Chapter - 20: The Mouse's Tale - Lewis Carroll Chapter - 21: Friends - Polly Clark Chapter - 22: Today Is Very Boring - Jack Prelutsky Chapter - 23: A Tragic Story - William Makepeace Thackeray Chapter - 24: Buddha - Tony Mitton Chapter - 25: from The Ballad of Reading Gaol - Oscar Wilde Chapter - 26: Full Moon - Vita Sackville-West Chapter - 27: God's Grandeur - Gerard Manley Hopkins Chapter - 28: I Am - John Clare Chapter - 29: from Everest Climbed - Ian Serraillier Chapter - 30: Life Doesn't Frighten Me - Maya Angelou Chapter - 31: The Man He Killed - Thomas Hardy Unit - 6: June Chapter - 1: from Greensleeves - Anon. Chapter - 2: Bee! I'm Expecting You! - Emily Dickinson Chapter - 3: from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage - George Gordon, Lord Byron Chapter - 4: Coming - Charlotte Perkins Gilman Chapter - 5: Balloons - Sylvia Plath Chapter - 6: Song of the Dying Gunner AA1 - Charles Causley Chapter - 7: The Throstle - Alfred, Lord Tennyson Chapter - 8: A London Plane-Tree - Amy Levy Chapter - 9: I Lost a World - the Other Day! - Emily Dickinson Chapter - 10: My Shadow Robert - Louis Stevenson Chapter - 11: The End - A. A. Milne Chapter - 12: On Turning Ten - Billy Collins Chapter - 13: The Pleasures of Friendship - Stevie Smith Chapter - 14: The Battle of Naseby - Thomas Babington Macaulay Chapter - 15: from Prayer Before Birth - Louis MacNeice Chapter - 16: Ecce Puer - James Joyce Chapter - 17: The Way Things Are - Roger McGough Chapter - 18: from The Field of Waterloo - Sir Walter Scott Chapter - 19: Father's Hands - Paul Cookson Chapter - 20: Refugees - Brian Bilston Chapter - 21: from A Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare Chapter - 22: Recessional - Rudyard Kipling Chapter - 23: The Land of the Bumbley Boo - Spike Milligan Chapter - 24: The Fiddler of Dooney - W. B. Yeats Chapter - 25: My Mother Saw a Dancing Bear - Charles Causley Chapter - 26: The Naming Of Cats - T. S. Eliot Chapter - 27: The Land of Blue - Laura Mucha Chapter - 28: A Bird Came Down the Walk - Emily Dickinson Chapter - 29: Originally - Carol Ann Duffy Chapter - 30: Ulysses - Alfred, Lord Tennyson Unit - 7: July Chapter - 1: Remembered More for His Beard Now - Philip Ardagh Chapter - 2: Amelia Earhart - Mandy Coe Chapter - 3: Solitude - Ella Wheeler Wilcox Chapter - 4: For You O Democracy - Walt Whitman Chapter - 5: The Tables Turned - William Wordsworth Chapter - 6: Rain in Summer - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Chapter - 7: Checking Out Me History - John Agard Chapter - 8: Miracles - Walt Whitman Chapter - 9: Travel - Edna St Vincent Millay Chapter - 10: The Magic of the Mind - Clive Webster Chapter - 11: The Duel - Eugene Field Chapter - 12: Jerusalem (from Milton) - William Blake Chapter - 13: The Argument of His Book - Robert Herrick Chapter - 14: La Belle Dame Sans Merci - John Keats Chapter - 15: Seven Times One: Exultation - Jean Ingelow Chapter - 16: Particle Poems: 3 - Edwin Morgan Chapter - 17: The School Boy - William Blake Chapter - 18: To You - Langston Hughes Chapter - 19: Harlem Hopscotch - Maya Angelou Chapter - 20: Morning Song - Sara Teasdale Chapter - 21: Little White Lily - George MacDonald Chapter - 22: The Law of the Jungle - Rudyard Kipling Chapter - 23: The Mermaid - Alfred, Lord Tennyson Chapter - 24: The Merman - Alfred, Lord Tennyson Chapter - 25: Annabel Lee - Edgar Allan Poe Chapter - 26: Watching My Dog Sleep - Kate Tempest Chapter - 27: from Psalm 137 Chapter - 28: 'next to of course god america i' - E. E. Cummings Chapter - 29: The Dug-Out - Siegfried Sassoon Chapter - 30: Heat - H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Chapter - 31: A Flea and a Fly - Ogden Nash Unit - 8: August Chapter - 1: Casabianca - Felicia Hemans Chapter - 2: Casabianca (A Parody) - Spike Milligan Chapter - 3: On the Grasshopper and Cricket - John Keats Chapter - 4: Minnie and Winnie - Alfred, Lord Tennyson Chapter - 5: Meg Merrilies - John Keats Chapter - 6: The Horses - Edwin Muir Chapter - 7: The Meadow Mouse - Theodore Roethke Chapter - 8: from A Song About Myself - John Keats Chapter - 9: The Fairy School under the Loch - John Rice Chapter - 10: I'd Love to Be a Fairy's Child - Robert Graves Chapter - 11: Verses written to the Queen of England - Mary, Queen of Scots Chapter - 12: Manly Sports - Marion Bernstein Chapter - 13: Shakespeare at School - Wendy Cope Chapter - 14: from Macbeth - William Shakespeare Chapter - 15: from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge Chapter - 16: Musee des Beaux Arts - W. H. Auden Chapter - 17: My Last Duchess - Robert Browning Chapter - 18: Don't Let That Horse - Lawrence Ferlinghetti Chapter - 19: And Death Shall Have No Dominion - Dylan Thomas Chapter - 20: How Many Seconds in a Minute? - Christina Rossetti Chapter - 21: Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth - Arthur Hugh Clough Chapter - 22: Who Would True Valour See - John Bunyan Chapter - 23: The Rainy Day - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Chapter - 24: So, We'll Go No More a-Roving - George Gordon, Lord Byron Chapter - 25: The Splendour Falls on Castle Walls (from The Princess) - Alfred, Lord Tennyson Chapter - 26: Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun - William Shakespeare Chapter - 27: Trees - Mark Haddon Chapter - 28: from The Task - William Cowper Chapter - 29: No More Auction Block - Anon. Chapter - 30: Blowin' in the Wind - Bob Dylan Chapter - 30: Fly Away, Fly Away Over the Sea - Christina Rossetti Unit - 9: September Chapter - 1: Bomber's Moon - Mike Harding Chapter - 2: But I Can't - W. H. Auden Chapter - 3: This is the House That Jack Built - Anon. Chapter - 4: Hornbeacon High - Sarah Crossan Chapter - 5: Please Mrs Butler - Allan Ahlberg Chapter - 6: Reading the Classics - Brian Patten Chapter - 7: The Lesson - Edward Lucie-Smith Chapter - 8: An Attempt at Unrhymed Verse - Wendy Cope Chapter - 9: Take a Poem - James Carter Chapter - 10: Pleasant Sounds - John Clare Chapter - 11: The Right Word - Imtiaz Dharker Chapter - 12: The Red Wheelbarrow - William Carlos Williams Chapter - 13: Plums - Gillian Clarke Chapter - 14: from Annus Mirabilis - John Dryden Chapter - 15: The Mummy - Edwin Morgan Chapter - 16: Old Ironsides - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Chapter - 17: Harriet Tubman - Eloise Greenfield Chapter - 18: Joy - Hugo Williams Chapter - 19: Prologue - Patience Agbabi Chapter - 20: Ars Poetica - Archibald MacLeish Chapter - 21: Shut Not Your Doors to Me, Proud Libraries - Walt Whitman Chapter - 22: An Old Woman of the Roads - Padraic Colum Chapter - 23: Digging - Edward Thomas Chapter - 24: Autumn Fires - Robert Louis Stevenson Chapter - 25: Something Told the Wild Geese - Rachel Field Chapter - 26: Wild Geese - Mary Oliver Chapter - 27: The Railway Children - Seamus Heaney Chapter - 28: Barrier - Rachel Rooney Chapter - 29: Autumn Rain - D. H. Lawrence Chapter - 30: Thirty Days Hath September - Anon. Chapter - 10: October Chapter - 1: The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost Chapter - 2: Moonlit Apples - John Drinkwater Chapter - 3: Crab-Apples - Imtiaz Dharker Chapter - 4: Santa Filomena - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Chapter - 5: Autumn - T. E. Hulme Chapter - 6: from The Tyndale Bible Chapter - 7: from 1777 - Amy Lowell Chapter - 8: Thumbprint - Eve Merriam Chapter - 9: Malala - Michaela Morgan Chapter - 10: Give - Simon Armitage Chapter - 11: Drummer Hodge - Thomas Hardy Chapter - 12: Lament of an Arawak Child - Pamela Mordecai Chapter - 13: The Wild Swans at Coole - W. B. Yeats Chapter - 14: William the Conqueror, 1066 - Anon. Chapter - 15: At Senlac Hill, 15 October 1066 - David Harmer Chapter - 16: Not Only - Brian Patten Chapter - 17: The Secret Song - Margaret Wise Brown Chapter - 18: from Who Do You Think You Are? - Carl Sandburg Chapter - 19: Digging - Seamus Heaney Chapter - 20: Diary of a Church Mouse - John Betjeman Chapter - 21: The Night at Trafalgar - Thomas Hardy Chapter - 22: The Village Blacksmith - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Chapter - 23: A Country Boy Goes to School - George Mackay Brown Chapter - 24: Owl Poem - John Hegley Chapter - 25: from Henry V - William Shakespeare Chapter - 26: Love After Love - Derek Walcott Chapter - 27: Paper Boats - Rabindranath Tagore Chapter - 28: Western Wind, When Wilt Thou Blow? - Anon. Chapter - 29: Who Has Seen the Wind? - Christina Rossetti Chapter - 30: In the Dark, Dark Wood - Anon. Chapter - 31: from Hallowe'en - John Kendrick Bangs Unit - 11: November Chapter - 1: from The Devil's Thoughts - Samuel Taylor Coleridge Chapter - 2: Television - Roald Dahl Chapter - 3: The First Men on Mercury - Edwin Morgan Chapter - 4: The Last Laugh - Wilfred Owen Chapter - 5: Please to Remember - Walter de la Mare Chapter - 6: November Night - Adelaide Crapsey Chapter - 7: The Dead - Rupert Brooke Chapter - 8: The Leader - Roger McGough Chapter - 9: Here Dead We Lie - A. E. Housman Chapter - 10: The African Lion - A. E. Housman Chapter - 11: In Flanders Fields - John McCrae Chapter - 12: Dreamers - Siegfried Sassoon Chapter - 13: An Irish Airman Foresees his Death - W. B. Yeats Chapter - 14: My First Day at School - Michaela Morgan Chapter - 15: Sympathy - Paul Laurence Dunbar Chapter - 16: from Epitaphs of the War - Rudyard Kipling Chapter - 17: Written with a Diamond on her Window at Woodstock - Elizabeth I Chapter - 18: Tell as a Marksman - were forgotten - Emily Dickinson Chapter - 19: Abraham Lincoln - Abraham Lincoln Chapter - 20: from The Prophet - Kahlil Gibran Chapter - 21: In Memoriam - E. A. Mackintosh Chapter - 22: Disabled - Wilfred Owen Chapter - 23: Signs of the Times - Paul Laurence Dunbar Chapter - 24: Prayer for Earth - Myra Cohn Livingston Chapter - 25: Benediction - James Berry Chapter - 26: Immigrant - Fleur Adcock Chapter - 27: Nuns Fret Not at their Convent's Narrow Room - William Wordsworth Chapter - 28: Sonnet 116 - William Shakespeare Chapter - 29: Sports Report - Gareth Owen Chapter - 30: Sing me a Song of a Lad that is Gone - Robert Louis Stevenson Unit - 12: December Chapter - 1: Rosa Parks - 1st December 1955 - Joseph Coelho Chapter - 2: Napoleon - Miroslav Holub Chapter - 3: The Raven - Edgar Allan Poe Chapter - 4: The Witch - Mary Elizabeth Coleridge Chapter - 5: Mary Celeste - Judith Nicholls Chapter - 6: On Raglan Road - Patrick Kavanagh Chapter - 7: The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner - Randall Jarrell Chapter - 8: Embarkation, 1942 - John Jarmain Chapter - 9: Some Questions You Might Ask - Mary Oliver Chapter - 10: Refugee Blues - W. H. Auden Chapter - 11: Don't Quit - John Greenleaf Whittier Chapter - 12: The Bells - Edgar Allan Poe Chapter - 13: The Oxen - Thomas Hardy Chapter - 14: Antarctica - Derek Mahon Chapter - 15: little tree - E. E. Cummings Chapter - 16: Forecasts - Jean Kenward Chapter - 17: Christmas is Coming - Anon. Chapter - 18: The Computer's First Christmas Card - Edwin Morgan Chapter - 19: O Little Town of Bethlehem - Phillips Brooks Chapter - 20: Winter-Time - Robert Louis Stevenson Chapter - 21: Puzzle - Philip Waddell Chapter - 22: The Year's Midnight - Gillian Clarke Chapter - 23: Just Doing My Job - Clare Bevan Chapter - 24: Saturday Night at the Bethlehem Arms - Gareth Owen Chapter - 25: I Saw a Stable - Mary Elizabeth Coleridge Chapter - 26: Reindeer Report - U. A. Fanthorpe Chapter - 27: Dear True Love - U. A. Fanthorpe Chapter - 28: from Paradise Lost - John Milton Chapter - 29: The Year - Ella Wheeler Wilcox Chapter - 30: from The Tempest - William Shakespeare Chapter - 31: Ring Out, Wild Bells (from In Memoriam) - Alfred, Lord Tennyson Index - ii: Index of First Lines Index - iii: Index of Poets and Translators Acknowledgements - iv: Acknowledgements