A Poem for Every Day of the Year

Allie Esiri, described in a Tatler profile as 'a poetry powerhouse', is a former English stage, film, and television actress, now a writer. Her iF Poems app was launched to great acclaim and was the Apple Editors' Choice All Time Favourite app. Her books include iF: A Treasury of Poems for Almost Every Possibility and The Love Book. Her collection A Poem for Every Night of the Year was a phenomenal success with rave reviews and her follow-up collection A Poem for Every Day of the Year is just as thoughtful and inspiring. Allie also organizes and hosts live poetry events and is on the advisory board for the Cheltenham Festival. A thousand people attended her event at the National Theatre! Zanna Goldhawk creates her illustrations from her seaside cottage in Cornwall. She takes huge inspiration from nature and animals, and has a mild obsession with colour and pattern (and coffee). Zanna studied illustration at the University of Gloucestershire, where she started her illustrated gifts and stationery business Papio Press with her husband. Now she splits her time between designing beautiful products and illustrating gorgeous books.

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 Brontë 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 Niemöller 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 Brontë 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 García 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: Musée 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