Featured Poem: Father’s Day Selection

As many countries around the world, including the UK, celebrated Father's Day yesterday, this week we present a selection of Featured Poems to dedicate to the number one men in all our lives. Why not read one of them with your father, grandfather, or even your great-grandfather if you're lucky enough to have them around still?

Anecdote for Fathers - William Wordsworth

I have a boy of five years old;
His face is fair and fresh to see;
His limbs are cast in beauty's mould,
And dearly he loves me.

The Child Is Father to the Man - Gerard Manley Hopkins

'The child is father to the man.'
How can he be? The words are wild.
Suck any sense from that who can:

Her Father - Thomas Hardy

A cynic ghost then rose and said,
"But is his love for her so small
That, nigh to yours, it may be read
As of no worth at all?

To Her Father with Some Verses - Anne Bradstreet

My stock's so small I know not how to pay,
My bond remains in force unto this day;
Yet for part payment take this simple mite,
Where nothing's to be had, kings loose their right.

Epitaph on my Ever Honoured Father- Robert Burns

Here lie the loving husband’s dear remains,
The tender father, and the gen’rous friend;
The pitying heart that felt for human woe,
The dauntless heart that fear’d no human pride

Epigrams: On my First Son - Ben Jonson

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, lov'd boy.
Seven years tho' wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

A Prayer for My Daughter - William Butler Yeats

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream

Father - Ella Wheeler Wilcox

They thought him just little short of God;
Oh you should have heard the way they said his name –
‘Father.’