![[The River Houses]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/arms-icon-100x100.png "The River Houses"){kind=icon}
“Nature’s first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold.” (Our ephemeral homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for his birthday and for the first signs of spring.)
🖋 Homeschool Poetry: Literary Lessons for the Whole Year
You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.
Wonderful little lessons on poets and poetry for every week of the year, from the River Houses Homeschool Network. Follow this miniature curriculum for just a few minutes each week to enlarge your students’ understanding of language, literature, history, and more. It’s ideal for homeschool high schoolers and for parents as well! Print your own copy of our River Houses Poetry Calendar on our main homeschool calendar page, and subscribe to our free homeschool newsletter to get more great teaching tips delivered right to your mailbox every week. 📫
🖋 🗡 WONDERFUL WORDS: The Ides of March
![[Constantine Cavafy Stamp]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/cavafy-stamp-1983-104x150.png)
“And if you can’t curb your ambitions, / at least pursue them hesitantly, cautiously. / And the higher you go, / the more searching and careful you need to be.” (Our admonitory homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Constantine Cavafy, for the Ides of March. Beware!)
🌞 🌏 🌕 WONDERFUL WORDS: “The stellar gauge of earthly show”
![[Thomas Hardy Stamp 1990]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/thomas-hardy-stamp-1990-110x150.jpg)
“Is such the stellar gauge of earthly show, / Nation at war with nation, brains that teem, / Heroes, and women fairer than the skies?” (An extra astronomical homeschool poem-of-the-week, a sonnet-masterpiece from Thomas Hardy, for this week’s lunar eclipse.)
🖋 🔭 WONDERFUL WORDS: When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
“Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself, / In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” (Our contrary homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Walt Whitman, for John Herschel and Albert Einstein.)
🖋 🏔 WONDERFUL WORDS: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
![[Wallace Stevens Stamp 2012]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/wallace-stevens-stamp-2012-120x150.jpg)
“The river is moving. / The blackbird must be flying.” (Our imagistic homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Wallace Stevens, for the earliest birds of spring.)
🔭 WONDERFUL WORDS: Watchers of the Skies
“Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men / Look’d at each other with a wild surmise — / Silent, upon a peak in Darien.” (Our visionary homeschool poem-of-the-week, from John Keats, for all homeschool stargazers.)
🖋 🌠 WONDERFUL WORDS: The Truly Great
“Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun / And left the vivid air signed with their honour.” (Our transmigrational homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Stephen Spender, for the great birthdays of February.)
🖋 ❤️ WONDERFUL WORDS: “Unwind the solemn twine, and tie my Valentine!”
![[Emily Dickinson]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/dickinson-stamp-1971-96x150.jpg)
“Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine!” (Our romantic homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for Valentine Week.)
🖋 ❄️ WONDERFUL WORDS: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
“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!)
🖋 🌹 WONDERFUL WORDS: Happy Birthday to Robert Burns!
![[Robert Burns Stamp]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/burns-rose-stamp-1996-150x150.jpg)
“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.)
🖋 🌊 HOMESCHOOL HISTORY & LITERATURE: Remembering Challenger
“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” (Our commemorative homeschool poem-of-the-week, from John Masefield, for the Challenger Seven of 1986.)
🖋 ❄️ WONDERFUL WORDS: An Unexpected “Snow-Storm”
“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.)
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): Lift Every Voice and Sing
“Let our rejoicing rise / High as the listening skies, / Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.” (Our patriotic homeschool poem-of-the-week, from James Weldon Johnson, for the Martin Luther King holiday.)
🖋 ⛸ WONDERFUL WORDS: A Winter Poem for Homeschool Dads
“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.)
🖋 ❄️ WONDERFUL WORDS: “What so soon will wake and grow”
“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.)
🖋 🔔 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Sounds!): Ring Out, Wild Bells!
“Ring out the old, ring in the new, / Ring, happy bells, across the snow: / The year is going, let him go; / Ring out the false, ring in the true.” (Join Tennyson and some skillful bell-ringers to ring in the new year in your homeschool.)
🖋 🍻 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): Auld Lang Syne
“We two once ran along the hills and picked the daisies fine; / But we’ve wandered many a weary foot since those days of long ago.” (Our celebratory homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Burns, for auld lang syne.)
🖋 🎅 WONDERFUL WORDS: ’Twas the Night Before Christmas
![[Santa]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/santa-stamp-1972-96x150.jpg)
“The children were nestled all snug in their beds; / While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads.” (Our festive homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Clement Clarke Moore, for Christmas Eve of course!)
🖋 🍂 WONDERFUL WORDS: The End of a Season
“The leaves are all dead on the ground, / Save those that the oak is keeping / To ravel them one by one / And let them go scraping and creeping / Out over the crusted snow, / When others are sleeping.” (Our pensive homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for the end of fall.)
🖋 📖 WONDERFUL WORDS: Happy Birthday to Emily Dickinson!
“He ate and drank the precious Words — / His Spirit grew robust.” (Our literary homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for her upcoming birthday.)
🖋 🗡 WONDERFUL WORDS: The Hunter Home From the Hill
“’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.)
🖋 🦃 WONDERFUL WORDS: Delicious “Thanksgiving Magic”
“Oh, some like magic made by wands, / And some read magic out of books, / And some like fairy spells and charms / But I like magic made by cooks!” (Our delicious homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Rowena Bastin Bennett, for Thanksgiving!)
🖋 🌠 WONDERFUL WORDS: Of Poems and Meteors
“Stars, I have seen them fall, / But when they drop and die / No star is lost at all / From all the star-sown sky.” (Our sublunary homeschool poem-of-the-week, from A.E. Housman, for the annual Leonid meteor shower.)
🖋 🕊 THE ELEVENTH DAY of the Eleventh Month: We Will Remember Them
![[For the Fallen]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/binyon-stamp-150x150.jpg)
“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: / Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. / At the going down of the sun and in the morning / We will remember them.” (Our commemorative homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Laurence Binyon, for Veterans Day and Armistice Day.)
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS: America’s Choosing Day
“These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships.” (Our electoral homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Walt Whitman, for the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.)
🖋 🌅 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): Turning Toward the Morning
“If I had a thing to give you, / I would tell you one more time / That the world is always turning / Toward the morning.” (Our reassuring homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Gordon Bok, for late October.)
🖋 🍏 🍎 WONDERFUL WORDS: After Apple-Picking
![[Apple Barrels]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/apple-picking-150x100.jpg)
“I am overtired / Of the great harvest I myself desired.” (Our dreamy homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for apple season.)
