Valentine's Day Poetry for Children

Feb 7, 2012
Nicole Fravel

Honey, I Love Book Cover - HarperCollins Publishing

Valentine's Day poetry collections for children include verses that are silly, some that are touching,and ones that look at the holiday in new ways.

Valentine’s Day is known as much for its tradition of romantic verse as for chocolates and hearts, making it the perfect time to introduce children to poetry. Sometimes quite sincere, sometimes humorous, sometimes traditional, and sometimes irreverent, the poems in the following anthologies will challenge and delight elementary readers.

Valentine Poems

By Myra Cohn Livingston

Illustrated by Patience Brewster

Holiday House, 1987

ISBN 0823405877

The mostly short verses in this collection range from the traditional “Roses are Red” to the author’s non-traditional “Angry Valentine” in which she claims, “If you won’t be my Valentine/ I’ll scream, I’ll yell, I’ll bite.” Some famous children’s authors (Jane Yolen, David McCord, Valerie Worth) lend works to the collection, and even Shakespeare contributes with a quote from Hamlet.

Twosomes: Love Poems from the Animal Planet

By Marilyn Singer

Illustrated by Lee Wildish

Knopf, 2010

ISBN 0375867104

A small book [just 5 by 7 inches in hardcover] is a tiny package for equally diminutive poems – just right for small hands and growing minds. Each page features a rhyming couplet imagining how animals might express their love to each other, accompanied by cartoonish and cute illustrations.

The book’s press prepares readers for a “funny (and punny)” experience, and many couplets rely on a play on words for humor. For example, one dolphin declares that another is “the porpoise of my life;” two horses have a “stable relationship;” and a bat asks his love, “may I hang around with you?” The puns are corny, but will be appreciated by a young audience.

The Owl and the Pussycat

By Edward Lear

Illustrated by Jan Brett

Puffin, 1996

ISBN 0698113675

Edward Lear’s famous nonsense rhyme about an owl and a pussycat who elope on the high seas is given the full Jan Brett treatment. As with all of Brett’s books, the setting is extremely detailed and recognizable, and the characters fully realized. In Brett’s interpretation of the poem, the two lovers set sail somewhere in the Caribbean, while adorned in madras and carting a feast of pineapples, bananas, and mangoes.

Though Brett’s familiar side panels are absent, she does sneak a subplot into the under water scenes beneath the boat. The owl and the pussycat bring a goldfish along for the ride. A little yellow fish spies it in the bowl and recruits various sea animals on a mission to free it from its bowl. In the end, even the fish get a happy, Valentine’s Day worthy ending.

Honey, I Love

By Eloise Greenfield

Illustrated by Jan Spivey Gilchrist

HarperCollins, 2002

ISBN 0060091231

Originally published as part of a compilation, HarperCollins released this single poem in picture book format for its 25th anniversary. The poem works great as a read aloud because of the narrator’s distinct voice. The little girl in the illustrations comes across as a confident, joyful, and very realistic child. She celebrates the simple things that adults take for granted but children delight in – like jumping through a sprinkler on a day so hot “the sun sticks to my skin;” laughing with family and friends; and her mother’s embrace that feels “so soft and warm.”

Greenfield’s poem brings a message of gratitude to the traditional Valentine’s Day candy fest. After reading her poem and the others suggested here, children may just be inspired to create odes to all of the simple joys they love in their own lives.