If you’re looking for a way to present poetry in the classroom, free-verse poems are a great place to start. Unlike standard poetry, you’ll find that free-verse poem examples break rules and don’t have to rhyme or follow any specific meter. Since themes of nature, love, and life are often represented, free-verse poems provide plenty of opportunities to teach students how to analyze poetry. Check out our list of the best free-verse poems for the classroom below!
(Note: Every classroom is different, so please be sure to review these poems before sharing them with students to ensure they align with your learning environment.)
Free-Verse Poems for Middle School and High School
1. Follow the Moon by Marie Tully
“I followed the moon,
Or did it follow me?”
2. Splishy, Sploshy Mud by Ava F. Kent
“Splishy, sploshy mud
is the best type of crud!”
3. Fog by Carl Sandburg
“It sits looking …”
4. Autumn by T.E. Hulme
“A touch of cold in the Autumn night …”
5. The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams
“beside the white chickens …”
6. This Is Just To Say by William Carlos Williams
“I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox …”
7. “Hope” is the thing with feathers by Emily Dickinson
“That perches in the soul …”
8. This Is a Photograph of Me by Margaret Atwood
“It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be a smeared print …”
9. The Layers by Stanley Kunitz
“I have walked through many lives, some of them my own …”
10. Beginning My Studies by Walt Whitman
“The first step, I say, aw’d me and pleas’d me so much …”
11. Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander
“Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not …”
12. Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark by D.A. Powell
“I play the egg
and I play the triangle …”
13. After the Sea-Ship by Walt Whitman
“Waves, undulating waves, liquid, uneven, emulous waves …”
14. Free Verse Poem by Robert Graves
“My rhymes no longer shall stand arrayed
Like Prussian soldiers on parade …”
15. Harlem by Langston Hughes
“What happens to a dream deferred?”
16. i carry your heart with me by e.e. cummings
“here is the deepest secret nobody knows …”
17. The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot
“Winter kept us warm, covering,
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.”
18. You Took the Last Bus Home by Brian Bilston
“i still don’t know how you got it through the door …”
19. Silence by Thomas Hood
“There is a silence where no sound may be …”
20. The Pool by H.D.
“Are you alive?
I touch you.”
21. In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.”
22. The Snow Man by Wallace Stevens
“Of the pine trees crusted with snow …”
23. Still I Rise by Maya Angelou
“You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies …”
24. Risk by Anais Nin
“And then the day came …”
25. Praise the Rain by Joy Harjo
“The stand of trees, the dignity …”
26. Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
“Sundays too my father got up early …”
27. Hurry by Marie Howe
“We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store …”
28. The Promise by Jane Hirshfield
“Stay, I said to the spider …”
29. Theories of Time and Space by Natasha Trethewey
“Everywhere you will be somewhere …”
30. Coal by Audre Lorde
“Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows …”
31. Cousin Nancy by T.S. Eliot
“Upon the glazen shelves kept watch …”
32. I, Too by Langston Hughes
“I, too, sing America.”
33. Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
“Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.”
34. Piano by D.H. Lawrence
“Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me …”
35. Sometimes Mysteriously by Luis Omar Salinas
“Sometimes in the evening when love
tunes its harp and the crickets …”
36. Distant Light by Walid Khazindar
“Sing! Can we not sing
as if we were warm, hand-in-hand …”
37. Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
“The tide is full, the moon lies fair …”
38. [in Just-] by e.e. cummings
“luscious the little
lame balloonman …”
39. somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond by e.e. cummings
“in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me …”
40. Atlas by Terisa Siagatonu
“If you open up any atlas
and take a look at a map of the world …”
41. My Cat Jeoffry by Christopher Smart
“For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is the tribe of Tiger.”
42. A Different Kind of Hero by Heather Griffith
“A father being not just a father …”
43. Who Am I? by Natasha L. Bishop
“I am a roller coaster of emotions.
I am a hater of ignorant people, liars …”
44. Whenever You Say I Love You by Kate B.
“My stomach does somersaults …”
45. Mother to Son by Langston Hughes
“Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”
46. Theme in Yellow by Carl Sandburg
“Singing ghost songs …”
47. White-Eyes by Mary Oliver
“In winter
all the singing is in
the tops of the trees
where the wind-bird …”
48. Shoulders by Naomi Shihab Nye
“A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south …”
49. Saccharine Words by Danna Smith
“Honey is scarce these days,
the bees are feeling the sting …”
50. Delight by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater
“Nature does not have
a lost and found table
for summer feathers …”
51. My Mistake by Bob Welbaum
“I never make mistakes,
I’m quite meticulous.”
52. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky …”
53. Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
“I celebrate myself, and sing myself.”
54. Howl by Allen Ginsberg
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked …”
55. A Noiseless Patient Spider by Walt Whitman
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
56. The Dying Lover by Gustave Kahn
So long as the child preferred to me such and such a
player of the flute or singer to the zither,
little I cared
that she loved such and such a player of the flute or
scratcher of the zither.
By the cross-roads I have fallen struck, struck by the
thrust of a sword.
Whose? player of flute or scratcher of zither?
How long the night is to be so slow in dying.
57. The Garden by Andrew Marvell
“How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays …”
58. Accent by Rupi Kaur
my voice
is the offspring
of two countries colliding
what is there to be ashamed of
if English
and my mother tongue
made love
my voice
is her father’s words
and mother’s accent
what does it matter if
my mouth carries two worlds
59. Vacation by Rita Dove
“I love the hour before takeoff,
that stretch of no time, no home …”
60. Tulips by Sylvia Plath
“The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.”
61. In the Desert by Stephen Crane
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
62. Mirror by Sylvia Plath
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
63. Ode to Coffee by Urayoán Noel
from Africa to a Caribbean hill
de África a las lomas del Caribe
to the smiling ruin of our cities
a la feliz ruina de ciudades
anoint the neural vessels we refill
al matorral neural en donde vive
until your acid muse drowns our pities
tu agria musa que ahoga soledades
return us to our tribe that grew dark beans
devuélvenos al semillero isleño
cut through the grease of our late-night omelets
metaboliza la grasa nocturna
and warm this empty diner by the club
trae tu calor a nuestro desvelo
where luckless lovers stare at tiny screens
haz que el amante no muera de sueño
and poets brew old socks into psalmlets
tu borra es poema que embadurna
while dreaming it rains coffee from above.
y sombría tu alegría de cielo.
