Poetry Tea Summer 2018

This week, we hosted a Poetry Tea, as I like to do at least once a year. (It would be a wonderful goal to do it once quarterly, but we can all have dreams.)

A Poetry Tea fosters a love of poetry, and also allows opportunities to learn through doing cleaning a house for guests, setting a table, planning a menu, cooking and/or buying pre-made food, decorating (linens, flowers, statues, etc.), practicing good host/guest manners, dressing to suit the occasion, and cleaning up afterward. It is wonderful all-around and I encourage anyone who feels the internal nudge to go ahead and try hosting one yourself.

To accommodate our guests, I set up the dining room for the children ages 7 and older, and the kitchen for the children younger than that, with one mother in each room to supervise.

The books laid out in the older children's rooms

Our enthusiastic older set of children

The younger children had a simpler table, but still a fancy one.

Poems to read to the younger set

I read aloud poems to the younger set, who were 6, 5, 4, 2, 2, and baby. Our poems were funny and goofy, and my audience was held captive by snacks.

The younger set lasted perhaps for twenty minutes, and then, with attention span fading fast, they were allowed to go to the play room. Meanwhile, the older children absolutely embraced the event, and continued reading poems to each other for probably an hour and a half! The mother supervising that room did not even stay, and yet those children simply wanted to keep reading beloved poetry to each other. It warmed our mothers' hearts so!

At the end of it all, the whole group played outside.

Note: Some people hosting a Poetry Tea have their children memorize their poems, but we decided to be more low-key about it. Children simply read aloud what they wanted to share, except for a few recitations.

For my own records, I note some of the poems my children selected on their own to read aloud:

John (11):

• "Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Lawrence Thayer
• "The Soldier Addresses His Body" by Edgell Rickword
• "Going Down Hill on a Bicycle" by Henry Charles Beeching
• "Darius Green and his Flying Machine" by John Trobridge
• "The Flag Goes By" by Henry Holcomb Bennett
• "The Village Blacksmith" by Henry Wadworth Longfellow
• "The Alamo" by Bill Simmons
• "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" by Robert Browning (all 12 minutes or so of it!)

Mary (9):

• "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadworth Longfellow
• "My Heart's In the Highlands" by Robert Burns
• "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• "Noble Sisters" by Christina Rossetti
• "The Dead City" by Christina Rossetti
• "Rosalind" by Christina Rossetti
• "Forget Me Not" by Christina Rossetti
• "To Lalla, reading my verses topsy-turby" by Christina Rossetti

Margaret (7):

• "A Boy's Song" by James Hogg
• "Where Go the Boats" by Robert Louis Stevenson

Mama to the younger table:

• "The Duel" by Eugene Field
• "Ooey Gooey" 
• "Celery" by Ogden Nash
• "The Little Man Who Wasn't There" by Hughes Mearns