Skip to Content

Back to Previous

collection

Summer Poems

Poems to make you one with the sun.

By The Editors

People having fun at the lake

Getty Images

SUMMER DAYS

- Morningside Heights, July
William Matthews
- To Go to Lvov
Adam Zagajewski
- The Whitsun Weddings
Philip Larkin
- On the Move
Thom Gunn
- Sumer is i-cumin in
Anonymous
- Bath
Amy Lowell
- Genius Loci
Brian Teare
- Chinatown Diptych
Jenny Xie
- At My Best
John Rodriguez
- “From the Sustaining Air”
Larry Eigner
- [To Sheila Lanyon, on the Flyleaf of a Book]
W. S. Graham
- A Parking Lot in West Houston
Monica Youn
- “An Archive of Confessions, A Genealogy of Confessions”
Joshua Clover
- Soon the City
Liam Rector

SUMMER LOVE

- The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
- No Name
Emily Berry
- Summer (a love poem)
Frank Lima
- Endless Summer
Nate Pritts
- Anonymous Lyric
Connie Voisine
- Still Life
Roberto Tejada

FOR CHILDREN

- The Swing
Robert Louis Stevenson
- Fireflies in the Garden
Robert Frost
- Bed in Summer
Robert Louis Stevenson
- Firefly
Jacqueline Woodson

SUMMER IN NATURE

- Country Summer
Léonie Adams
- At Noon
Reginald Gibbons
- Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout
Gary Snyder
- More Than Enough
Marge Piercy
- Insect Life of Florida
Lynda Hull
- One With The Sun
A. F. Moritz
- In the Mushroom Summer
David Mason
- The Lake Isle of Innisfree
William Butler Yeats
- Summer
Carlo Betocchi
- The Unknown Bird
Edward Thomas

BASEBALL

- Casey at the Bat
Ernest Lawrence Thayer
- The crowd at the ball game
William Carlos Williams
- Clothespins
Stuart Dybek
- Baseball
Gail Mazur

SUMMER NIGHTS

- Moths
Jennifer O'Grady
- Summer at North Farm
Stephen Kuusisto
- Jet
Tony Hoagland
- The Mower to the Glow-Worms
Andrew Marvell
- First Blues
Saundra Rose Maley
- The World in the Evening
Rachel Sherwood
- Fever
Hailey Leithauser
- Northampton Style
Marie Ponsot
- Nostalgia (The Lake at Night)
Lloyd Schwartz

GARDENING

- In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden
Matthea Harvey
- The Fact of the Garden
Minnie Bruce Pratt
- Paths
John Montague
- The Definition of Gardening
James Tate
- Vespers [In your extended absence, you permit me]
Louise Glück
- Early Cascade
Lucia Perillo
- Planting the Meadow
Mary Makofske
- Mowing
Robert Wrigley
- In These Soft Trinities
Patricia Goedicke

BUGS

- The Butterfly’s Dream
Hannah F. Gould
- The Children
Mark Jarman
- Fireflies
Frank Ormsby

END OF SUMMER

- Three Songs at the End of Summer
Jane Kenyon
- Blackberry-Picking
Seamus Heaney
- Last August Hours Before the Year 2000
Naomi Shihab Nye
- Bright Leaf
Ellen Bryant Voigt
- A Dirge
Christina Rossetti
- September
Deborah Landau
- Summer's Almost Gone
William Trowbridge
- Late Summer
Jennifer Grotz