![]() Laughter and friends and dreams of Fairyland! When youth and childhood wander hand in hand,Īnd give you freely all which best can please – What splendid hours of your life are these With dross which they regret when they are old. Though few are willing, and their years they fill Our days, and lives, with fingers firm and bold,Īnd make them noble, straight and clean from ill, ![]() Now has rich time brought you a gift of gold –Ī long sweet year which you can shape at will,Īnd deck with roses warm, or with the chillĪnd heartless lilies – God gives strength to mould How far the unknown transcends the what we know. Our playthings one by one, and by the hand Which, though more splendid, may not please him more Still gazing at them through the open door, Leads by the hand her little child to bed,Īnd leave his broken playthings on the floor, Let’s dive into it! My Favorite Poem About Growing Up Take a moment to reflect on these powerful works and the universal themes they evoke. With our handpicked selection, you can find the best poems about growing up all in one convenient location. Our selection features works that explore the joys and challenges of growing up, including poems about growing up too fast and the experiences of growing up as a boy. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.6 Poems About Growing Up as a Boy Our Handpicked Poems About Growing Upĭiscover a carefully curated collection of the most inspiring poems about growing up, thoughtfully categorized for your browsing pleasure. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. The image of the canyon here (a variation on staring into the abyss?) is particularly powerful. The poem wonderfully captures the uncertainties we feel when getting ready to embark upon adult life. ![]() We’ll conclude this pick of great coming-of-age poems with one titled, aptly enough, ‘Adolescence’, by the American poet Adrienne Su (born 1967). It’s a quintessentially Armitigian piece, fusing wit with arrestingly original imagery (the girls being ‘long and cool like cocktails’ in the summer heat) and with the distinctive colloquial voice Armitage uses so well. Probably the best poem ever written about sitting the General Studies A-Level exam, ‘You May Turn Over and Begin …’ is also about sexual desire and adolescence. Simon Armitage, ‘ You May Turn Over and Begin’. 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.ĩ. 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’. We love the final image of the streetlamps pinging into miniature suns, hinting at the new world that has opened up to the girls.Īs the title implies, this is the first in a sequence of adolescence poems Dove wrote – the others can be found online too if you enjoy the first …Ĩ. 1952), a contemporary African-American poet, adopts an almost imagistic precision here in this short poem about a particular memory of adolescence: when she and other teenage girls first heard from their friend what it was like to kiss a boy. We have offered some more words of commentary on this brilliant poem here. ![]() This classic Seamus 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. However, this sulky, sweary teenager-voice which Larkin sometimes adopts at the outset of some of his best poems then gives way to a more thoughtful, sympathetic voice, which understands that each generation has inherited (in both a genetic and cultural sense) certain things from the previous generation, not all of them favourable… One of Larkin’s best-known poems, with an opening line containing one of the most controversial swear words in the English language (you have been warned!), this poem is not so much about adolescence as a poem which expresses a common adolescent view: that one’s parents are to blame for everything.
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