🖋 Homeschool Poetry: Literary Lessons for the Whole Year

“’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.)

“I’ve often wished that I had clear, / For life, six hundred pounds a year, / A handsome house to lodge a friend, / A river at my garden’s end.” (Introducing our first homeschool poem-of-the-week for the new school year, from Horace via Jonathan Swift — and it’s our official River Houses motto, too!)

“Whole fields of golden-rod cannot offset / One meadow with a single violet.” (Our vainglorious homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Helen Hunt Jackson, for late summer.)

“Where is the Bee — / Where is the Blush — / Where is the Hay?” (Our playful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for July.)

“As from the East th’ illustrious King of Day, / With rising Radiance drives the Shades away, / So Freedom comes array’d with Charms divine, / And in her Train Commerce and Plenty shine.” (Our hopeful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Phillis Wheatley, for independent America.)