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
“I followed the moon,
Or did it follow me?”
“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 …”
“beside the white chickens …”
“I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox …”
“That perches in the soul …”
“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 …”
“The first step, I say, aw’d me and pleas’d me so much …”
“Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not …”
“I play the egg
and I play the triangle …”
“Waves, undulating waves, liquid, uneven, emulous waves …”
“My rhymes no longer shall stand arrayed
Like Prussian soldiers on parade …”
15. Harlem by Langston Hughes
“What happens to a dream deferred?”
“here is the deepest secret nobody knows …”
“Winter kept us warm, covering,
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.”
“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 …”
“Are you alive?
I touch you.”
“The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.”
“Of the pine trees crusted with snow …”
“You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies …”
24. Risk by Anais Nin
“And then the day came …”
“The stand of trees, the dignity …”
“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 …”
“Everywhere you will be somewhere …”
30. Coal by Audre Lorde
“Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows …”
“Upon the glazen shelves kept watch …”
32. I, Too by Langston Hughes
“I, too, sing America.”
“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 …”
“Sometimes in the evening when love
tunes its harp and the crickets …”
“Sing! Can we not sing
as if we were warm, hand-in-hand …”
“The tide is full, the moon lies fair …”
38. [in Just-] by e.e. cummings
“luscious the little
lame balloonman …”
“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 …”
“For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him.
For he is the tribe of Tiger.”
“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 …”
“My stomach does somersaults …”
“Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”
“Singing ghost songs …”
“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 …”
“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 …”
“I never make mistakes,
I’m quite meticulous.”
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky …”
“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 …”
“A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated …”
“So long as the child preferred to me such and such a
player of the flute or singer to the zither …”
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 …”
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.”
“In the desert …”
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.”
“from Africa to a Caribbean hill
de África a las lomas del Caribe …”
