100 Great Poems for Children

163 Pages·2015·0.55 MB·English

by  Deepa Agarwal

Author, poet and translator, Deepa Agarwal writes for both children and adults and has over
fifty published books. A frequent contributor to magazines and journals in India and abroad, she
has also edited and compiled several anthologies. She has received, among others, the NCERT
National Award for Children’s Literature in 1993 for her picture book Ashok’s New Friends,
while her historical fiction Caravan to Tibet was on the IBBY (International Board on Books for
Young People) Honour List 2008. Her work has been translated into several Indian and foreign
languages. Her recent titles include Chanakya: The Master of Statecraft (Puffin Books) and The
Wish-fulfilling Cow and Other Classic Indian Tales (Scholastic India).
Deepa lives in Delhi with her husband and has three daughters and five grandchildren.

Published in Red Turtle by Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2015
7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj New Delhi 110002
Introduction Copyright © Deepa Agarwal 2015
Anthology copyright © Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2015
Copyright for the individual pieces vests with the respective authors or their estates.
While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain permission, this has not been
possible in all cases; any omissions brought to our attention will be remedied in future editions.
Pages 195–197 are extensions of the copyright page.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publisher.
ISBN: 978-81-291-3735-7
First impression 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The moral right of the authors has been asserted.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired
out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published.
To all lovers of poetry
CONTENTS
Introduction
The Scientist Rabindranath Tagore
Where Did You Come from, Baby Dear? George MacDonald
The Yogi’s a Solitary Kabir
Who Has Seen the Wind? Christina Rossetti
Hip-Hop Nature Boy Ruskin Bond
My Shadow Robert Louis Stevenson
The Ghost Keki Daruwalla
My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold William Wordsworth
Rathers Mary Austin
‘Hope’ Is the Thing With Feathers Emily Dickinson
Godfrey Gordon Gustavus Gore William Brighty Rands
Sonnet Toru Dutt
The Little Doll Charles Kingsley
A Roti’s Grudge Natasha Sharma
How the Leaves Came Down Susan Coolidge
Leisure William Henry Davies
Tortoise K. Satchidanandan
Ode to the West Wind Percy Bysshe Shelley
The Palki Song Satyendranath Dutta
If Rudyard Kipling
Our Little Ghost Louisa May Alcott
This Kadamb Tree Subhadra Kumari Chauhan
The Old Brown Horse W.F. Holmes
The Migration of the Grey Squirrels William Howitt
All The World’s a Stage William Shakespeare
Trees Joyce Kilmer
Look Jerry Pinto
Macavity: The Mystery Cat T.S. Eliot
The Forsaken Merman Matthew Arnold
The Yellow Bear Manoj Das
The Blind Boy Colley Cibber
To Flush, My Dog Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Snake David Herbert Lawrence
The First Tooth Charles and Mary Lamb
The Story of Johnny Head-in-Air Heinrich Hoffman
A Child’s Laughter Algernon Charles Swinburne
The One-Eyed Town Gulzar
A Prayer for My Daughter W.B. Yeats
Wordygurdyboom! Sukumar Ray
To See a World William Blake
The Cyber River Shreekumar Varma
The Listeners Walter de la Mare
The Shadow-Catching Baiya Dash Benhur
Invictus William Ernest Henley
The Zoo Vinda Karandikar
No Man is an Island John Donne
Tell Me Not, in Mournful Numbers H.W. Longfellow
I Remember, I Remember Thomas Hood
The Camel Perched Upon a Brick Anonymous
A Noiseless, Patient Spider Walt Whitman
Ode to Beauty John Keats
The Akond of Swat Edward Lear
The Tree House Sivakami Velliangiri
On his Blindness John Milton
Chuang Tzu and the Butterfly Li Po
The Bathing Hymn Saroj Padki
Ulysses Alfred Lord Tennyson
Butterfly Laughter Katherine Mansfield
A Man’s a Man for A’ That Robert Burns
Pippa’s Song Robert Browning
Jabberwocky Lewis Carroll
Coromandel Fishers Sarojini Naidu
Goblins of the Steppes Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin
Breathes There the Man, with Soul so Dead Sir Walter Scott
Daddy Fell into the Pond Alfred Noyes
From Pahari Parrots Eunice de Souza
Granny’s Come to Our House James Whitcomb Riley
The Good-for-Nothing Adil Jussawala
We Are the Music-Makers Arthur William Edgar O’Shaughnessy
The Song of the Sea Barry Cornwall
Samarpreet Sood Anushka Ravishankar
The Chambered Nautilus Oliver Wendell Holmes
Spoooky! Sampurna Chattarji
After the Tempest William Cullen Bryant
Ice Golawalla Beheroze Shroff
The Darkling Thrush Thomas Hardy
Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog Oliver Goldsmith
Shaper Shaped Harindranath Chattopadhyaya
There Is a Pleasure in the Pathless Woods Lord Byron
The Doll Temsula Ao
The Box Lascelles Abercrombie
Hair You Go Again Anju Makhija
Ode on Solitude Alexander Pope
A Glimpse of My Great-Grandmother Mallika Gopal
The Nonsense Verse Alfred Edward Housman
The Mountain and the Squirrel Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Itch K. Ayyappa Paniker
Friends Abbie Farwell Brown
Weather Ambrose Bierce
Kubla Khan Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Testing the Nation Shanta Acharya
Peace Gerard Manley Hopkins
London Snow Robert Bridges
Views And Woes of a Teenager Anupa Lal
The Way of the World Ella Wheeler Wilcox
The Firefly Nirendranath Chakrabarty
Little Brown Baby Paul Laurence Dunbar
Evening Primrose John Clare
Ma’s House Viky Arya
I Will Be Myself Deepa Agarwal
Copyright Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
What is it about poetry that a verse you read in your childhood stays with you for
the rest of your life? Is it the rhythm that seems to match the pulse of your
heartbeat? Or the music of the words that resonates in your head for days on
end? Maybe it’s a sentiment that connects with some deeply felt emotion within
you. It could even be some meaning that you cannot put into words but sense
intuitively in a poem.
We first discover poetry as babies, in the lullabies our mothers and fathers
sing to us, or the nonsense rhymes that grandparents, uncles and aunts repeat
when they play with us. Later, we learn nursery rhymes and chant verses such as
‘Hara Samundar, Gopi Chander’ or ‘Oranges and Lemons’ while playing. And
as we grow older we are introduced to a wider variety of poems—funny and
serious, thoughtful and inspirational. We have to memorize them in class too,
which is so much easier, I always felt, than learning history dates or your
thirteen times’ multiplication table.
When I was asked to put this collection together, I was delighted to get an
opportunity to share some of the poems I had loved as a child (and still do) with
readers who might not have discovered them so far. But of course, I gave serious
thought to what you, the child of today, might like to read.
So what did I assemble? Poems are written on so many different themes and
convey such a variety of moods. Some delight us with their unusual use of
language, others with the heart-warming sentiments they express. Some are
about the familiar things in our lives, like relationships dear to us and our
ordinary, everyday experiences. Others open our eyes to ideas, situations and
events far removed from us.
Talking about relationships, innumerable poems have been composed on
mothers. I have selected four here. ‘The Scientist’, the very first poem, is by
Rabindranath Tagore. Beautifully translated from the Bengali original by
Arunava Sinha, it is about a child sharing the sense of wonder and curiosity he
experiences when face to face with natural phenomena and his own explanations
for these to his mother:
Do you know for whom
They are trying to bloom
Do you think that they don’t have