Our anthology of Poems for Fathers begins with a gathering of classic poems to read to or with your dad on Father’s Day:
- Su Tung-p’o,
“On the Birth of His Son” (c. 1070, trans. Arthur Waley, 1919)
- Robert Greene,
“Menaphon: Sephesta’s Song to her Child” (1589)
- Ben Jonson,
“Epigrams: On my First Son” (1616)
- Anne Bradstreet,
“To Her Father with Some Verses” (1678)
- Robert Burns,
“My Father Was a Farmer” (1782)
- William Blake,
“The Little Boy Lost” (1791)
- William Wordsworth,
“Anecdote for Fathers” (1798)
- Emily Dickinson,
“High from the earth I heard a bird” (1896)
- Walt Whitman,
“On the Beach at Night” (1900)
- Edgar A. Guest,
“Father” (1909)
- Rudyard Kipling,
“If” (1910)
- Edgar A. Guest,
“Only a Dad” (1916)
- Gerard Manley Hopkins,
“The Child Is Father To the Man” (1918)
- William Butler Yeats,
“A Prayer for My Daughter” (1921)
- William Butler Yeats,
“A Prayer for My Son” (1921)
To accompany these classics, we’ve collected poems from contemporary poets, written for or about their fathers or their experience of fatherhood:
