🖋 Homeschool Poetry: Literary Lessons for the Whole Year

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” (Our metrical homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for wintry February — with a special lesson on rhyme-scheme mapping!)

“Till all the seas gang dry, my dear, / And the rocks melt wi’ the sun; / I will love thee still, my dear, / While the sands of life shall run.” (Happy birthday to Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland, born on this day in 1759.)

“All friends shut out, the housemates sit / Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed / In a tumultuous privacy of storm.” (An extra wintry homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, for unexpected blizzards.)

“She thinks she’ll never / be so happy, for who else will find her graceful, / find her perfect, skate with her / in circles outside the emptied rink forever?” (Our paternal homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Gail Mazur, for all homeschool fathers.)

“They could not grasp it if they knew, / What so soon will wake and grow / Utterly unlike the snow.” (Our hopeful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Philip Larkin, for all things born in January.)

“’Tis evening on the moorland free, / The starlit wave is still: / Home is the sailor from the sea, / The hunter from the hill.” (Our peaceful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from A.E. Housman, for the beginning of Orion Term.)

“I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired.” (Our dreamy homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for apple season.)

“The Tyrian would not come / Until the North — invoke it.” (Our imperial homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for all late bloomers.)

“Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find / Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, / Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind.” (Our bountiful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from John Keats, for fall.)

“‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart, / ‘Whether they work together or apart.’” (Our encouraging homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for late-summer mowing, the Monarch butterfly migration, and all of us working together, whether we work together or apart.)

“But I am carried back against / My will into a childhood where / Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke; / I lean against my window fenced / From evocations in the air. / When I said autumn, autumn broke.” (Our transitional homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Elizabeth Jennings, for the coming fall.)