There’s something about being able to recite a poem or a chunk of verse by heart. If we do this when we’re young these fragments tend to stay with us for life. Especially if they chime with us and reach into our mesh of inner meanings.
When I was about nine and at school we were sometimes required to learn verse so as to be able to recite it aloud in class. Our English teacher gave us pieces that were patterned. Perhaps he favoured traditional verse forms (this was 1957) or perhaps he felt that rhythm and rhyme facilitate the efficient learning of verse. Rhymes suggest their pairing word. Rhythms coax us into recalling exact syntax.
So if it’s a good thing to be able to learn verse by heart, why not use these supports, particularly when in English we have such a strong tradition of patterned, rhyming verse in our literary history?
In British poetry for children, traditional verse writing has persisted with vigour. The intrinsic musical and sonorous qualities of patterned verse seem to have a kind of instinctual appeal to the child’s ear, as to the adult writing for or reading to that child.
Here, then, are 10 poems using rhythm & rhyme which children may enjoy reading out loud or learning to recite from memory.
I cannot truly claim this list as a top 10. I would need days of deliberation to come up with a Tony’s True Top 10. So allow me to call it a Top of the Head Top 10. Ten poems off the top of my head that make for good off-by-heart use.
Here is my list of bygone poems to learn and love, plus three modern echoes (not in order of preference) :
- ‘Some One’, by Walter de la Mare (from Peacock Pie, 1913)
2. ‘Sir Smasham Uppe’, by E.V. Rieu (in A Puffin Quartet of Poets, edited by Eleanor Graham, 1958)
Good afternoon, Sir Smasham Uppe!
We’re having tea: do take a cup!
Sugar and milk? - Now let me see
Two lumps, I think? . . . Good gracious me!
The silly thing slipped off your knee!
Pray don’t apologize, old chap:
A very trivial mishap!
So clumsy of you? - How absurd!
My dear Sir Smasham, not a word!
…
3. ‘Windy Nights’, by Robert Louis Stevenson (from A Child’s Garden of Verses, 1885)
4. ‘My Mother Saw A Dancing Bear’, by Charles Causley (in his Collected Poems for Children, 1996)
My mother saw a dancing bear
By the schoolyard, a day in June.
The keeper stood with chain and bar
And whistle-pipe, and played a tune.
And bruin lifted up its head
And lifted up its dusty feet,
And all the children laughed to see
It caper in the summer heat.
…
5. ‘Bedtime’, by Eleanor Farjeon (in Something I Remember: Selected poems for Children, ed Anne Harvey, 1987 - the poem is much earlier, of course)
6. ‘Chess’, by Julia Donaldson (in Poems to Perform, 2013)
7. ‘Caribbean Counting Rhyme’, by Pamela Mordecai (in Poems to Perform)
8. ‘The Sea (is a hungry dog…)’, by James Reeves (in A Puffin Quartet of Poems)
9. ‘Tea with Aunty Mabel’, by Jeanne Willis (in Poems to Perform)
If you ever go to tea with my Aunty Mabel,
Never put your elbows on the dining-room table,
Always wipe your shoes if you’ve been in the garden,
Don’t ever burp. If you do, say pardon.
…
10. ‘Something Told The Wild Geese’ , by Rachel Field (in Out of the Blue, chosen by Fiona Waters, 1982)
I thought of that last one while trying to come up with something lyrically memorable by an American woman poet. It’s a beaut for reading aloud, learning and reciting.
The next task would be to assemble a list of poems for children to remember and recite that are written by living poets. That’s for another day.
- Tony Mitton won this year’s CLPE poetry award for his atmospheric ballad Wayland, which is available from the Guardian bookshop.
Why not make your own list of poems old and new you’d like to learn and recite? Can you discover your own lost lovelies? Email us at childrens.books@theguardian.com or tweet us @GdnChildrensBks.
