![[The River Houses]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/arms-icon-100x100.png "The River Houses"){kind=icon}
“The Tyrian would not come / Until the North — invoke it.” (Our imperial homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for all late bloomers.)
🖋 Homeschool Poetry: Literary Lessons for the Whole Year
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
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: “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”
“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.)
🖋 🍃 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Our Summer made her light escape”
![[Emily Dickinson Homestead]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/dickinson-homestead-150x113.jpg)
“And thus, without a Wing / Or service of a Keel / Our Summer made her light escape / Into the Beautiful.” (Our wistful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for the end of summer.)
🖋 🦋 WONDERFUL WORDS: The Tuft of Flowers
“‘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.)
🖋 🍁 WONDERFUL WORDS: Song at the Beginning of Autumn
“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.)
🖋 🏡 “A HANDSOME HOUSE to lodge a friend” (For the New Homeschool Year)
“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!)
🖋 🏡 ENVOY: A Living River by the Door (To Close the Homeschool Year)
“Go, little book, and wish to all / Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, / A living river by the door, / A nightingale in the sycamore.” (Our farewell poem-of-the-week, from Robert Louis Stevenson, for the end of the River Houses homeschool year.)
🖋 🌞 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Poor, middle-agèd summer!”
![[Goldenrod Stamp 2017]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/goldenrod-monarch-2017-stamp-150x96.jpg)
“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.)
🖋 🌠 WONDERFUL WORDS: A Star in a Stoneboat
“From following walls I never lift my eye, / Except at night to places in the sky / Where showers of charted meteors let fly.” (Our clever homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for this month’s Perseid meteor shower.)
🖋 🍻 WONDERFUL WORDS: To the Meteor Rolling Home
“Of thee we think, in a ring we link; / To the shearer of ocean’s fleece we drink, / And the Meteor rolling home.” (Our celebratory homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Herman Melville, for his birthday and for this month’s Perseid meteor shower.)
🖋 🔔 WONDERFUL WORDS: As Kingfishers Catch Fire
“Like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s / Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name.” (Our intricate homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Gerard Manley Hopkins, for his birthday and for the halcyon days of summer.)
🖋 🐝 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Answer, July”
“Where is the Bee — / Where is the Blush — / Where is the Hay?” (Our playful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for July.)
🖋 🕊 WONDERFUL WORDS: Liberty and Peace
“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.)
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS: William Emerson on “A Nation’s Strength”
![[Constitution Stamp 1987]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/we-the-people-stamp-1987-150x82.jpg)
“Not gold but only men can make / A people great and strong.” (Our patriotic homeschool poem-of-the-week, from William Ralph Emerson, for Independence Day.)
🖋 🚂 WONDERFUL WORDS: “It was late June”
![[Blackbird Stamp 1966]](https://riverhouses.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/blackbird-stamp-uk-1966-150x90.jpg)
“And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.” (Our timely homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Edward Thomas, for late June and the birds of summer.)
🖋 🏰 HAPPY FATHER’S DAY WEEK from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“A whisper, and then a silence: / Yet I know by their merry eyes / They are plotting and planning together / To take me by surprise.” (Our paternal homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for Father’s Day, the third Sunday in June.)
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): “O! say can you see?”
“Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam, / In full glory reflected now shines on the stream — / ‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave / O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave.” (Our American homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Francis Scott Key, for Flag Day, the 14th of June.)
🖋 🌞 WONDERFUL WORDS (and Music!): “Sumer is i-cumin in”
“Loudly sing, cuckoo!” (Our ancient homeschool poem-of-the-week, anonymously, for the beginning of our summer term.)
🇺🇸 “AFTER A HUNDRED YEARS / Nobody knows the Place”
“Weeds triumphant ranged / Strangers strolled and spelled / At the lone Orthography / Of the Elder Dead.” (A special peaceful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Emily Dickinson, for Memorial Day.)
🖋 🎓 GRADUATION SEASON: “Set me free to find my calling”
“Bind me not to the pasture, chain me not to the plow, / Set me free to find my calling and I’ll return to you somehow.” (Our promising late May poem-of-the-week, from Marta Keen, for homeschool graduation season and the coming summer.)
🖋 🌟 WONDERFUL WORDS: Hymn to the North Star
“A beauteous type of that unchanging good, / That bright eternal beacon, by whose ray / The voyager of time should shape his heedful way.” (An extra astronomical homeschool poem-of-the-week, from William Cullen Bryant, for Polaris, our Great Star for the month of May.)
🖋 🍃 WONDERFUL WORDS: Robert Frost’s “Birches”
“One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” (Our youthful homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Robert Frost, for springtime play and growing up.)
🖋 🪺 WONDERFUL WORDS: Anne Bradstreet for Mother’s Day
“Great was my pain when I you bred, / Great was my care when I you fed. / Long did I keep you soft and warm / And with my wings kept off all harm.” (Our ornithological homeschool poem-of-the-week, from the early American poet Anne Bradstreet, for Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May.)
📚 🌼 WONDERFUL WORDS: May and the Poets
“Come, ye rains, then if ye will, / May’s at home, and with me still; / But come rather, thou, good weather, / And find us in the fields together.” (Our literary homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Leigh Hunt, for the merry month of May.)
🖋 🌸 WONDERFUL WORDS: Loveliest of Trees
“And since to look at things in bloom / Fifty springs are little room, / About the woodlands I will go / To see the cherry hung with snow.” (Our flowery homeschool poem-of-the-week, from A.E. Housman, for the loveliest of trees.)
🇺🇸 🏇 WONDERFUL WORDS: “The fate of a nation was riding that night”
“A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark, / And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark / Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet: / That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light, / The fate of a nation was riding that night.” (An extra equestrian homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Longfellow, for the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775.)
🖋 🇺🇸 WONDERFUL WORDS: “Here once the embattled farmers stood”
“By the rude bridge that arched the flood, / Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, / Here once the embattled farmers stood / And fired the shot heard round the world.” (Our patriotic homeschool poem-of-the-week, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, for the beginning of the American Revolution in 1775.)
