Bookish Family: 100+ Poems to Read Aloud as a Family

Several years ago, I started a tradition of reading the same poem at breakfast every day for a week. I wanted an easy and painless way to expose my kids to more poetry and this seemed like a good way.

I had no idea at the time that this would grow to become the cornerstone of our morning time practice and an amazingly fruitful part of our everyday experience as a family.

Even though Charlotte Mason is speaking about visual beauty in this quote, it captures my feelings about the value of this kind of poetry study

––in fact, every child should leave school with at least a couple of hundred pictures by great masters hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination, to say nothing of great buildings, sculpture, beauty of form and colour in things he see. Perhaps we might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too,––sunsets, cloudscapes, starlight nights. At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold. --A Philosophy of Education, 43

Especially because we read a poem together at least 6-7 times, the poems really become part of our imagination. Moreover, they become part of our collective family culture and we bring them up often when some experience, word, or idea calls them to mind.

With so many beautiful or beautifully expressed ideas and words hanging in the halls of our imagination, we can't help but draw relationships among them and the new things that we discover together individually or as a family.

I, too, get to make these new connections. Whether it is knowing a little more fully what it must have been like for Columbus' crew heading out with the entire known world behind them or musing yet again on the endless changes of the seasons, any good poem contributes to my lifelong process of fitting my existence to existing things as described in Charlotte Mason's 12th Principle:

12. "Education is the Science of Relations"; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books, for we know that our business is not to teach him all about anything, but to help him to make valid as many as may be of––
"Those first-born affinities
"That fit our new existence to existing things." --A Philosophy of Education, xxx

Below is a list of about 100 poems (or songs or passages from Shakespeare) that we have enjoyed together as a family, one week at a time. I've noted the collection where we read that particular poem but know that many of these poems appear in more than one of the books listed below. I've also grouped them into a few categories just for ease of viewing. Most could fit into several categories.

Some may be too silly, too gruesome, too scary, or just not fit with your family culture. Reasonable minds can disagree about what makes a poem good or beautiful! Nevertheless, I hope that you can find many choices to get you started with your own practice of adding beauty to your family's imagination.

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