Poems that make grown women cry

Donal of by Anonymous / Natascha McElhone

Isn't that something? by Rumi / Elif Shafak

Bani Adam by Sa'adi / Nazanin Boniadi

The angels at the tavern door by Hafiz / Ladan Boroumand

Grief gille the room up from King John by William Shakespeare / Marina Warner

Extract from the duchess of Malfi by John Webster / Janet Suzman

On my first son by Ben Jonson / Katherine Bucknell

Clerk Saunders by Anonymous / Diana Athill

Frost at midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge / Helen Macdonald

I loved the boy... by William Wordsworth / Pam Ayres

So we'll go no more a roving by Lord Byron / Judi Dency and Emily Mortimer

Ode to Nightingale by John Keats / Marina Lewycka

Extract from the masque of anarchy by Pecy Bysshe Shelley / Tena Stivicic

Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson / Erica Jong

About Ben Adhem by Leigh Hunt / Joan Baez

I am by John Clare / Helen Pankhurst

Sonnets from the Portugese: XXVII by Elizabeth Barrett Browning / A. L. Kennedy

Say not the struggle naught availeth by Arthur Hugh Clough / Margaret Drabble

The charge of the light brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson / Wendy Cope

Facing west from California's shores by Walt Whitman / Irma Kurtz

After great pain, a formal feeling comes- by Emily Dickinson / Siri Hustvedt

I took my power in my hand by Emily Dickinson / Elena Ferrante

The world- feels dusty by Emily Dickinson / Joyce Didonato

The walrus and the carpenter by Lewis Carrol / Bella Freud

Life is but a dream by Lewis Carroll / Victoria Coren Mitchell

When you are old by W.B. Yeats / Mariella Frostrup

The song of wandering Aengus by W.B. Yeats / Carol Ann Duffy and Joanne Harris

To a fat lady seen from the train by Frances Cornford / Jacqueline Wilson

Tenebris interlucentem by James Elroy Flecker / Jan Morris

Listen! by Else Lasker-Schuler and No solace here by Gottfried Benn / Catherine Mayer

Adlestrop by Edward Thomas / Lynn Barber and Kate Atkinson

The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot / Bianca Jagger

Papyrus by Ezra Pound / Mary Beard

Fallen by Alice Corbin / Maxine Peake

Anthem for doomed youth by Wilfred Owen / Emma Pooley

Suicide in the trenches by Siegfried Sassoon / Annie Lennox

Does it matter? by Siegfried Sassoon / Allie Esiri

Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen / Vanessa Redgrave

Medusa by Louise Bogan / Karen Joy Fowler

Bells for John Whiteside's daughter by John Crowe Ransom / A. E. Stallings

I explain a few things by Pablo Neruda / Julie Christie

Hurt Hawks by Robinson Jeffers / Ursula K. Le Guin

Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden / Rosie Boycott

In memory of Signund Freud by W. H. Auden / Shami Chakradarti

Requiem by Anna Akhmatova / Anne Applebaum and Kate Allen

Excerpt from Four Quartets: no 4. little gidding by T.S. Eliot / Nell Gifford

The peasants by Alun Lewis / Anne Reid

Excerpt from the lost son: 5. it was beginning winter by Theodore Roethke / Francine Prose

If you forget me by Pablo Neruda / Nicole Farhi

Timothy Winters by Charles Causley / Joan Bakewell

Sestina by Elizabeth Bishop / Ruth Scurr

Of mere being by Wallace Stevens / Rebecca Miller

Waking in the blue by Robert Lowell / Helen Dunmore

Edge by Sylvia Plath / Edna O'Brien

Unknown girl in the maternity ward by Anne Sexton / Jackie Kay

The bean eaters by Gwyendolyn Brooks / Nikki Giovanni

Extract from let us believe in the beginning of a cold season by Forugh Farrokhzad / Sepideh Jodeyri

Those winter Sundays by Robert Hayden / Sharon Olds

Dublinesque by Philip Larkin / Maggie Gee

Walls by Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali / Thokozile Masipa

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight by Galway Kinnell / Michelle Williams

Diving into the wreck by Adrienne Rich / Kate Mosse

One art by Elizabeth Bishop / Claire Bl