A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year

by Jane McMorland Hunter

365 poems celebrating nature and the changing seasons.

This is the perfect bedside companion for any nature or poetry fan, featuring famous odes from big-name poets alongside unsung poems from less-well-known writers.

Each poem is chosen to chime with the natural world through the seasons. Spring is a time of hope, a season of new life with William Wordsworth's daffodils, John Clare's lambs and Christina Rossetti's birdsong. Summer shifts into a time of leisure with long idyllic holidays in the countryside. According to Henry James, the two most beautiful words in the English language were 'summer afternoon', a sentiment echoed by Edward Thomas and Emily Dickinson. John Keats, William Blake and W. H. Auden are the poets we associate with autumn and this is possibly the most poetic season. The natural world, and the human one, hold onto the last lingering memories of summer before they turn to face the oncoming hardships of winter. Amy Lowell and George Meredith perfectly frame this time of year with their silver-fringed leaves and crimson berries. Winter can be savoured in poetry, rather than endured; bleak grey days are transformed into a world of glittering frost and snow-blanketed landscapes. Even in the darkest days life continues and soon we can turn our attention to the rebirth of spring.

A wonderful collection of poems that help mark the daily turn of the seasons and all the rituals marking the significant moments of the year, from Candlemas to Christmas.

Genres: Poetry, Nature, Nonfiction, Anthologies

496 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 4, 2018

Reviews

[Sophie Crane · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Very Beautifully printed book, I'm looking forward to starting a poem a day in the new year.

[elin | winterrainreads · Rating 4 out of 5]

"but miles of barren sand,
with never a son or daughter,
not a lily on the land,
or lily on the water"

★★★★.5

I read this through last year and absolutely loved it. I really wanted to get into poetry during the year and I feel that this collection was a big help. I've always been intimidated by poetry because it felt like such a big commitment to start reading it and finding out your preferences especially since there aren't any genres to help you navigate the space like with fiction and nonfiction. it's also thoroughly gatekept and ingrained in our brains from a young age as something way to intelligent and inaccessible for us to enjoy but that's a rant for another day. most poems in this collection are by classic poets which I feel helped me lay out a good base and the groundwork for my start in poetry. I actually have this collection to thank for helping me find my favorite poet, christina rossetti, and my favorite poem, winter rain by her. It also helped me realize what I don't like (*cough* shakespeare *cough*).

I really enjoyed having little ritual that took max two minutes every day to help me towards my goal and to follow along how the poems changed with the seasons. overall it was a great experience that I highly recommend. I'm actually reading a nature poem for every night of the year this year and I'm excited to see the difference. I sadly haven't had time to start it yet though.

ig: @winterrainreads

[Carrie Brownell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really loved the process of this book. I'm not a big poetry reader; it has never made sense to me. I do love getting out into nature and enjoying the beauty of it and I love the bite sized chunks of poetry on a subject that I can more easily relate to. I decided to read through this book in 2021 and give it a go and discovered I very much liked Robert Burns and Christina Rossetti which is interesting because both had poems set to music.

A friend once told me that if you read enough poetry, you'll find something you like and learn "your thing." I guess that's true. If I can sing it, I like it. If I can't, I'm bewildered.

But it was a great experience nonetheless!

[Isabella Leake · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only a beautifully designed book, but a beautifully selected cornucopia of poems—some very familiar and predictable, some entirely off the beaten path. The chronology stretches from Chaucer to the present, but these are all what I might call "orthodox" poems, solidly within a lofty, reverent tradition of English poetry that would be recognizable to Tennyson or even Donne. The formlessness and flippancy sometimes encountered in more recent poetry (or, if we're talking about flippancy, even in the 18th century) is not represented here.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading through (most of) the collection in 2025, enjoying old friends in their exact seasonal context and discovering just as many new gems in theirs.

[Dona's Books]

The description of this book claims that it includes modern poetry, but I made it through the first hundred pages and didn't find even one modern poet (unless you include the one poet who died during the Clinton administration, but I don't). I like classic poetry, but I didn't think I was buying a whole five hundred pages of it.

The printing is also poor quality--my book came with a big chunk of pages mangled and fused together. I had to awkwardly cut them apart to open the book all the way.

DNF 15%, 100 pp
Closed March 2022
I can't recommend this book, unfortunately.

[Gijs Grob · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice collection of English language nature poems, mostly British and most of the sixteenth to nineteenth century, with very few modern entries, indeed. There's a lot of John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Percy Shelley and William Wodsworth, not always up to my taste. Some sixteenth century poems are left in the original spelling, rendering them almost unreadable. The poetry itself is wide-ranging, but as it concentrates on (British) nature, some poems remain dull and shallow, while others are deep and profound, and of course there are many beautiful phrases ready for quotation.

[Hayley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am already rating this poetry anthology 5 stars. Poetry can be hit or miss and more often or not there is only a selection of poems that I like. Generally anthologies work better than just one poet unless it is a poet that I know I like.

This collection is wonderful. All the poems are nature based and I have discovered recently that I am really enjoying themes of nature in both my fiction, non fiction and poetry.

I prefer physical copies of poetry books rather than on my kindle as I can flip back and forth through the pages and the physical book with poetry is just part of the experience. This edition is heavy, with a beautiful cover and nice thick white pages with easy typeface to read. I am only half way through a library copy but love it so much that I have ordered my own copy plus the matching compendium-A Nature Poem For Every Night Of The Year.

Update: I actually reread the first half so I could annotate all the poems I liked and then continued on.

A fantastic book of poetry.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the idea of this book-you can read a seasonally appropriate poem every day of the year! I will confess I missed days, but that’s something I like, I can start all over again, or just pick it up and find the date and read the poem. Some poems were hard to slog through, especially the ones from the 1600s, but most I enjoyed.
One disappointment was that it’s all British authors. Many poems were by the same authors. Nothing wrong with that, but I feel there could be much more variety with authors from around the world.

[Lady · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant poetry book I loved every minute of it. It was beautifully layed out, printed in green writing I loved it so much I resent taking it back to the library, I wish I could keep it.

[Devon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book of poetry, I got this book from my local library and now I think I might buy this book to fully enjoy it.

[Judith Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A weighty tome which my husband gave me last Christmas - I've enjoyed a number of these poems but they are predominantly by dead white male poets (not that some of these aren't wonderful) - I would have liked more by poets of colour, female poets, and a greater representation of contemporary writers - there's plenty to choose from!

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like nature; poetry not so much. If you like both. Enjoy this book. For me it was a trial in perseverance.

[Steph Carpenter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Starting mornings with a selection from this book is so pleasurable. I enjoy learning with and discovering of new poets.

[CathyMW · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was hoping for more variety--both in the poets and the poems. I like the "classical " poets like Wordsworth or Rossetti, but would have liked to see more modern poets as well.

Many of the poems were simply descriptive. I wished that there were meatier poems with deeper meanings--there were some but I would have liked more.

[Kaye · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this as it was intended - a poem a day. I really liked some of them, but others did not appeal to me. My favorite was on March 29th, "The Donkey" by G. K. Chesterton.
'

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful way to add poetry to your everyday reading. I love this book so much!

[Nick Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book that my wife and I read together throughout the year. We would take it in turns to read a poem to each other and would mark the poems we enjoyed. It was a fun thing to do throughout the year and it was lovely to see the themes changing from winter to spring to summer to autumn and back to winter again.

I'm afraid I'm a bit of a philistine when it comes to poetry as I tend to like simple and bouncy rhyming schemes. However, I seemed to enjoy Alfred, Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth, Edward Lear and W.H. Davies. However, my favourites will always be The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, The Sheepdog by U.A. Fanthorpe, and Ducks' Ditty from Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.

My wife quickly became a fan of A.E. Housman, William Morris, Christina Rossetti, Thomas Hardy, Emily Bronte, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

[Willow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully printed and aesthetically pleasing, this anthology contains many lovely verses. There were sixty-four that stood out most to me and which I deeply enjoyed (not a great percentage out of 366 total, but still worth it) and I enjoyed developing the practice of reading a poem every day (though it took me more like a year and a half to finish this so that tells you how faithful I was in reality).

Rated for beauty, concept, and the introduction of poems that were new to me and stretched my comfort zone. Selection, for my taste, is more of a 3-star rating (I'm not great at loving anthologies).

[Saphira Bloom-Quinn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this anthology August '20 thru August '21. It has carried me through the gold and red Autumn and the long, blue, lonely Winter in Uppsala, and then through the Spring and Summer in Munich. Gorgeous poems, though through quite a white lense.

[Victoria Sigsworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this poetry book much more than the last one I read. This is poetry as described in the title. Lots of poetry about nature and seasons. There were some I struggled with being written in old English and one poet who I don't like but that is personal preference.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a mix of ports contained within. The poems do all relate at least to the month they're included in (and sometimes the specific day). I found some new ports I'd like to read more of... And some that aren't quite my rhythm.

[Liza B · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read a poem every morning for a year! I thought poetry was way out of my comfort zone but this was very enjoyable. It feels like an accomplishment and I loved this book. It has made me want to keep up this ritual. It’s a beautiful way to start the day!

[Nightshade · Rating 3 out of 5]

Better than its companion "A Nature Poem for Every Night of the Year, but still mid. There are very few modern poems. I have no interest in reading Chaucer and Spenser, and find it rather sad that there is a huge lack of diversity in the poets chosen for both collections.

[Leaflet · Rating 5 out of 5]

As beautiful to look at as it is to read.

[Dayna Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful and well edited selection of magnificent poetry. Perfect to read one poem each day.

[Kris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading a poem a day. Really reminded me that I love poetry.

[Sarah ~الدنيارة~ · Rating 4 out of 5]

A refreshing collection of nature poems for those wanderlust souls out there. You'll be taken on a journey through the meadows, rivers and woodlands of mother nature so sit tight and enjoy the ride.

[Cassandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was difficult but I did it! Some were really nice, some were hard to understand. For others, I would’ve rearranged the order of what day, or even month, they were. Definitely a read again.

[caroline hawkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

such a beautiful way to start the day!

[M_ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just not the book of poetry I wanted it to be. I started to dread reading a poem a day. For the record, I love poetry.