The Daily Poem

Today’s poem, whose full title is “Stilton and Milton; Or Literature in the 17th and 20th Centuries,” has something for book lovers and cheese lovers alike to dig in to. Chesterton once wrote that “p…

Today’s poem, though written for the far more infrequent crowning of monarchs, contains plenty of sentiments fitting for a quadrennial presidential inauguration. Happy reading.

On a pillar on the west…

Though not yet the Dantesque hells that they are today, airports in 1954 were already places of union, separation, and general existential anxiety. This meditation comes from a serious and sphinx-lik…

If hot takes about synonyms are your cup of tea, favorite, darling, jam, or weapon of choice, then today’s poem is for you. Happy reading.

We that acquaint ourselves with every zone,And pass both tropics and behold the poles,When we come home, are to ourselves unknown,And unacquainted still with our own souls.

Today’s poem is Davies’ len…

Today’s poems are selected from Ted Kooser’s The Blizzard Voices, a collection of informal verse commemorating the apocalyptic Great Plains blizzard of 1888. He mined histories and first-hand account…

Today’s poem is a roller-coaster of machismo and vulnerability in that most singular of places–the poetry section of a small bookstore. Happy reading.

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was a popular and proli…

Today’s poem offers an incisive analogy for analogies. Happy reading.

A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University…

Today’s poem draws together marriage and the blessing of water. Happy reading.

If you can see “a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” what can you see in the trashcan at the curb? Apparently quite a bit, if you look closely. Today’s poem, a paean to the unsu…

Does today’s poem contain the secret to minimizing regret in 2025? Kinda, sorta. Happy reading.

In his youth, Robert Service worked in a shipping office and a bank, and briefly studied literature at t…

Happy New Year (and Happy Reading) from The Daily Poem!

Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to academic Calvinist parents, poet, author, and Native American rights activist Helen Hunt Jackson (born Helen …

…I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

Today’s poem seemed an appropriate choice as we endure the death o…

The repetition of the word “unsatisfied” forms a set of bookends in today’s poem. Inside those bookends: earth, sky, and the riches of this world. Beyond them: “The uncontrollable mystery.” Happy rea…

“the Christmas Tree is a tree of fable,/A phoenix in evergreen”

Cecil Day Lewis tackles the leave-taking of Christmas and the emotional upheaval in can work in the hearts of kids from 1 to 92. Happy r…

“To those who have seen/The Child, however dimly, however incredulously,/The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all.”

Christ is born! Merry Christmas and happy reading!

Today’s poem is a selection from Auden’s superb long poem, For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio.

J. R. R. Tolkien loved Christmas–we can find ample proof of this in his Letters From Father Christmas, but also in his choosing December 25 as the day the fellowship of the Ring should set out from R…

Today’s selection may not be traditionally recognized as a holiday poem, but it interprets the Christmas mystery as well or better than many poems written for the season. Happy reading!

In today’s poems-“The Inn at the End of the World” and “The House of Christmas”–Chesterton imagines Christmas as a cosmic waystation for weary pilgrims. Happy reading.