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PRE 1914 POEMS

Students must recite one poem published before 1914. For school/college competitions, they can choose from EITHER the Timeline (listed below and available poetrybyheart.org.uk) OR the new Shakespeare Showcase collection.

1 - Beowulf lines 736-789 23 - 1 2 Gawain Poet - Gawain and the Green Knight lines 242-315 lines 713-739 24 - A for St Cecilia’s Day lines 3 - The Wife of Bath’s 1-47 portrait in The General Prologue to the 25 Aphra Behn - A thousand martyrs Canterbury Tales 26 John Wilmot - The mistress 4 Anonymous - I sing of a maiden 27 Anne Finch - The hog, the sheep and the 5 - They flee from me that goat, carrying to a fair sometime did me seek 28 - Epistle to Miss Blount, on 6 Philip Sidney - Song from Arcadia her leaving the town after the coronation 7 Christopher Marlowe - In summer’s heat and 29 Jonathan Swift - A satirical on the death mid-time of the day of a late famous general 8 Chidiock Tichborne - Tichborne’s elegy 30 Mary Leapor - The visit 9 - The good morrow 31 Mary Wortley Montagu - A receipt to cure the 10 Walter Ralegh - Walsingham vapors 11 Mary Sidney Herbert - O 32 - Elegy written in a country church yard lines 1-80 12 Robert Southwell - The burning babe 33 Christopher Smart - My cat, Jeoffry (from 13 - Amoretti LV: so oft as I her Jubilate Agno) do behold 34 Samuel Johnson - On the death of Dr Robert 14 - When that I was and Levet a little tiny boy 35 Charlotte Smith - On being cautioned against 15 - Song to Celia walking on a headland 16 George Herbert - Love (III) 36 William Cowper - Epitaph on a hare 17 Richard Lovelace - To Althea from prison 37 - Slavery: a poem 18 Robert Herrick - To the virgins, to make 38 William Blake - The chimney sweeper (when much of time my mother died...) 19 - Bermudas 39 Joanna Baillie - A mother to her waking infant 20 Katherine Philips - Epitaph 40 - Song: ae fond kiss, and then 21 Henry King - An exequy to his matchless we sever never to be forgotten friend lines 81-120 41 Anna Laetitia Barbauld - The rights 22 Anne Bradstreet - Verses upon the burning of of woman our house

OR any by William Shakespeare

2017 Poetry By Heart Handbook for teachers, librarians and school/college contest organisers

39 PRE 1914 POEMS

Students must recite one poem published before 1914. For school/college competitions, they can choose from EITHER the Timeline Anthology (listed below and available on poetrybyheart.org.uk) OR the new Shakespeare Sonnets Showcase collection.

42 Robert Southey - After Blenheim 67 - Dirge for two veterans 43 Mary Robinson - Female fashions for 1799 68 W.E. Henley - Invictus 44 Anonymous - Lord Randall 69 Algernon Swinburne - A forsaken garden 45 Anonymous - The wife of Usher’s well lines 1-40 46 - The solitary reaper 70 - Inversnaid 47 George Gordon, Lord Byron - The destruction 71 George Meredith - Lucifer in starlight of Sennacherib 72 - A frog’s fate 48 Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Kubla Khan 73 Amy Levy - Philosophy 49 Charles Wolfe - The burial of Sir John Moore 74 Robert Bridges - London snow after Corunna 75 Thomas Hardy - Thoughts of Phena 50 Walter Scott - Proud Maisie 76 - Sing me a song of a 51 - Ozymandias lad that is gone 52 - to a nightingale 77 Mary Elizabeth Coleridge - The witch 53 Felicia Hemans - Casabianca 78 Paul Dunbar - Invitation to love 54 Thomas Love Peacock - The war song of 79 Oscar Wilde - The of Reading Dinas Vawr gaol lines 1-36 55 John Clare - I found a ball of grass among 80 E. Nesbit - The things that matter the hay 81 W.E.B. du Bois - The song of the smoke 56 Robert Browning - Porphyria’s lover 82 - The way through 57 Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Ulysses the woods 58 Emily Bronte - Remembrance 83 C.P. Cavafy - The God abandons Antony 59 Elizabeth Barrett Browning - Sonnets from 84 Walter de la Mare - Miss Loo the Portuguese XXIV 85 G.K. Chesterton - The rolling English road 60 Arthur Hugh Clough - There is no God 86 Amy Lowell - A blockhead 61 William Barnes - My orcha’d in Linden Lea 62 Frederick Tuckerman - An upper chamber in a darkened house 63 Adelaide Anne Proctor - Envy 64 - You are old, father William 65 Emily Dickinson - Snake 66 Matthew Arnold - Dover beach

OR any sonnet by William Shakespeare

2017 Poetry By Heart Handbook for teachers, librarians and school/college contest organisers

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