Here are some poems and speeches I’d like to know by heart, with links to ones I have committed to memory, some of which I’ve written my thoughts under.
Memorised
Puck: “I am that merry wanderer of the night” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1605)
Speech: “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” from Macbeth (1623)
Daffodils by William Wordsworth (1807)
Ozymandias by Percy Shelley (1818)
Mutability by William Wordsworth (1821)
The Eagle by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1851)
Remember by Christina Rossetti (1862)
Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll (1871)
When You Are Old by W.B. Yeats (1893)
The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling (1910)
The Soldier by Rupert Brooke (1915)
Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen (1920)
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost (1923)
Clown in the Moon by Dylan Thomas (1929)
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas (1947)
To learn
“They flee from me that sometime did me seek” by Thomas Wyatt (1535)
Elegy by Chidiock Tichborne (1586)
The Burning Babe by Robert Southwell (1595)
Speech: “No matter where: of comfort no man speak” from Richard II (1597)
Juliet’s speech: “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” (1597)
Juliet’s speech: “Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again” from Romeo and Juliet (1597)
Romeo’s speech: “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?” from Romeo and Juliet (1597)
Speech: “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” from King Lear (1606)
Sonnet 18: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (1609)
Sonnet 29: “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” (1609)
Sonnet 60: “Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore” (1609)
Sonnet 116: “Let me not the to marriage of two minds” (1609)
Prospero’s speech: “Our revels now are ended” from The Tempest (1611)
Song: To Celia by Ben Jonson (1616)
Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes by Thomas Campion (1617)
Speech: “Round about the cauldron go” from Macbeth (1623)
Lady Macbeth’s speech: “The raven himself is hoarse” from Macbeth (1623)
Death, be not proud (Holy Sonnet 10) by John Donne (1633)
To Winter by William Blake (1783)
The Tyger by William Blake (1794)
A Poison Tree by William Blake (1794)
London by William Blake (1794)
Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1797)
Auguries of Innocence by William Blake (1803)
She Walks in Beauty by Lord Byron (1814)
La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats (1819)
What Is Life? by John Clare (1820)
Silence by Thomas Hood (1823)
My Last Duchess by Robert Browning (1842)
I Am! by John Clare (1845)
How Do I Love Thee? by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1850)
The Charge of the Light Brigade by Tennyson (1854)
O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman (1865)
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold (1867)
Growing Old by Matthew Arnold (1867)
The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear (1871)
Invictus by William Ernest Henley (1875)
From a Railway Carriage by R. L. Stevenson (1885)
The Cross of Snow by Longfellow (1879)
The Song of Wandering Aengus by W.B. Yeats (1897)
The Lake of Innisfree by W.B. Yeats (1898)
Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W.B. Yeats (1899)
Drummer Hodge by Thomas Hardy (1899)
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy (1900)
Song by T.S. Eliot (1907)
If by Rudyard Kipling (1910)
The Voice by Thomas Hardy (1914)
In Flanders’ Fields by John McCrae (1915)
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost (1916)
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen (1918)
The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats (1920)
The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower by Dylan Thomas (1933)
Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden (1940)
Naming of Parts by Henry Reed (1942)
How to Kill by Keith Douglas (1943)
Mr Bleaney by Philip Larkin (1955)
First Sight by Philip Larkin (1956)
Wind by Ted Hughes (1957)
The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes (1957)
Morning Song by Sylvia Plath (1961)
The Orange by Wendy Cope (2015)