Top Twenty Read-Aloud Poems

Our reading in Knightsbrook Retirement Village as part of the Bealtaine Festival went very well yesterday. An attentive audience attended who were familiar with most of the poems we read and some even read along from the booklet we provided.

Myself and Paddy chose our Top Twenty Read-Aloud Poems based on readability, enjoyability, personal preference and even prejudice. Just our list. Here is it:

1. The Daffodils – William Wordsworth
2. The Lake Isle of Innisfree – W. B. Yeats
3. The Fairies- William Allingham
4. She Moved Through the Fair – Padraic Colum
5. The Fiddler of Dooney - W. B. Yeats
6. A Red, Red Rose - Robert Burns
7. If – Rudyard Kipling
8. The Cremation of Sam McGee – Robert Service
9. The Listeners – Walter de la Mare
10. On Raglan Road - Patrick Kavanagh
11. The Old Woman of the Roads – Padraic Colum
12. Ach I Dunno! – Percy French
13. Warning - Jenny Joseph
14. I See His Blood upon the Rose - Joseph Mary Plunkett
15. Oh I wish I’d Looked after Me Teeth – Pam Ayers
16. Because I Could Not Stop For Death - Emily Dickinson
17. The Village Schoolmaster - Oliver Goldsmith
18. The Brook - Tennyson
19. Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep - Mary Elizabeth Frye
20. I Remember, I Remember – Thomas Hood