If you enjoyed this pick of the best childhood poems, you might also enjoy these timeless nursery rhymes and these classic poems about schooldays. Duffy paints a fond picture of her time at primary school and on the brink of adolescence, powerfully suggested by the poem’s final image of the sky breaking into a thunderstorm. There aren’t many modern or contemporary poems which recall schooldays with affection, but ‘In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’ does just that. Carol Ann Duffy, ‘ In Mrs Tilscher’s Class’. He says that this made him sad, and he came to realise that this would always happen: soon after the berries had been picked, they would go rotten.ġ0. The speaker recalls the sense of disappointment he and his fellow blackberry-pickers felt when they discovered that the berries had fermented and a fungus was growing on the fruit.
The second stanza then reflects on what happened once the blackberries had been hoarded in a bath placed in a ‘byre’ or shed. The poem is divided into two stanzas: the first focuses on the picking of the blackberries and the speaker’s memories of the experience of picking them, eating them, and taking them home. It’s a rite of passage that we all go through, though it’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when disillusionment begins to cloud our clear and sunny skies of hope. Growing up is about reconciling ourselves, with our hopes and expectations, to the realities of the world, and ‘Blackberry-Picking’ addresses this theme. This classic Heaney poem, published in his first published volume, the 1966 book Death of a Naturalist, is simultaneously about picking blackberries in August and, on another level, about a loss of youthful innocence and a growing awareness of disappointment as we grow up. This poem by one of the Mersey poets of the 1960s captures the bewilderment and confusion of a first day at school: being unsure what to make of the other children, wondering what the railings are for, what a lesson (or ‘lessin’) is. Instead, Larkin reflects matter-of-factly upon his ‘unspent’ childhood where he didn’t do all the usual things associated with growing up.Ĩ. Its title a pointed riposte to Hood’s poem, Larkin’s ‘I Remember, I Remember’ inverts the idea of recalling a happy childhood through rose-tinted spectacles. Philip Larkin, ‘ I Remember, I Remember’.
Listen to Thomas read the whole poem here.ħ. Look at the ‘fire green as grass’, for instance.
‘Fern Hill’ contains some of the most arresting images in all of Thomas’s poetry (and he was a master of the arresting image!). It was written in 1945, just after the end of WWII. In this, one of Thomas’s best-loved poems, he revisits his childhood, using his visits to his aunt’s farm as the subject-matter. The language and imagery of ‘Discord in Childhood’ convey the violent words being exchanged indoors, but – as so often in Lawrence – he does this through focusing on the violence of the natural world outside the family home. ‘Discord in Childhood’ actually belongs to a longer piece which Lawrence never completed the eight lines quoted above are all that he preserved. In 1909, when he began work on the poem that became ‘Discord in Childhood’, Lawrence viewed his childhood as having been a combination of harmonies and discords, as the title of this poem implies. Lawrence’s poem offers a less rosy view of childhood, focusing on the wildness of nature which the child senses beyond his bedroom window, and the sound of his parents arguing within the house. The other voice in a silence of blood, ’neath the noise of the ash … Of a thick lash booming and bruising, until it drowned Whistling delirious rage, and the dreadful sound Within the house two voices arose in anger, a slender lash
#BEST POEMS ABOUT GROWING UP FULL#
Follow the link above to read the full poem and to learn more about it.ĥ.
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