About Poems

Poems is a free collection of short poems to read, send and recite, in English, Hindi (Devanagari) and Punjabi (Gurmukhi).

Our own poems

Every poem signed "ShareYourGroup" is original writing made for this site. These poems are not copied from books, films, songs or other websites. You may recite them, send them to people you know and write them in cards. Please do not republish the collection.

Classic poems and their sources

The classics are complete texts by poets who died before 1955, so the poems are in the public domain. Each poem names the poet and the year:

• William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 (1609); William Blake, The Tyger (1794); William Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud and My Heart Leaps Up (1807); Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias (1818); Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Arrow and the Song (1845); Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Eagle (1851); Emily Dickinson, two poems published in 1891; W. E. Henley, Invictus (1888); W. B. Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1890); Rudyard Kipling, If (1910); W. H. Davies, Leisure (1911); Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali 35 (1912).
• Jane Taylor, The Star (1806); Christina Rossetti, Who Has Seen the Wind? (1872); Robert Louis Stevenson, three poems from A Child's Garden of Verses (1885).
• Rabindranath Tagore, Jana Gana Mana (1911), the National Anthem of India; Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Vande Mataram (1882), the National Song; Muhammad Iqbal, Saare Jahan Se Achha (1904) and Bachche Ki Dua (1902), shown in Devanagari; Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, the first stanza of Jhansi Ki Rani.

Spelling follows common modern editions, and long dashes are shown as commas or colons. Full texts can be compared on Project Gutenberg and Wikisource. If you find a wrong word, please tell us and we will correct it.

What is not here

No poems by living or recent poets, and no film songs or lyrics. Their words belong to their authors and publishers.

Who makes it

This site is part of ShareYourGroup, a family of free sites about the things people share, send and do together. It is free to use and needs no login. Advertisements pay for the hosting and the work.

Found a mistake?

Please tell us the page and what is wrong. We check and fix it.