A Happy Poem to End Every Day

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The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University.

One of the most famous happy poems to feature on this list, ‘A Birthday’ is about ‘the birthday of my life’ arriving to the speaker, because her ‘love is come to me’.Discover more great poems with these great poems about kissing, these classic poems for daughters, and our pick of the best poems about clothes. If you’re after more classic poems about happiness, we recommend the wonderful anthology, Heaven on Earth: 101 Happy Poems , edited by Wendy Cope, which includes some of the poems listed below. This beautiful bumper collection of 366 perfectly happy poems provides just that: from cosy fireside idylls in winter to outdoor adventures in summer, encounters with the beauty of nature in spring and moments of quiet reflection in autumn.

It features some of the greatest poets ever to put pen to paper, from William Wordsworth on the joy of skating and Emily Brontë enjoying life on the moors to Simon Armitage catching a cricket ball and Wendy Cope sharing an orange, with a good smattering of classic jolly verse such as Edward Lear's The Owl and the Pussycat.Describing the life of the monk in his study with his cat as his happy companion, ‘Pangur Bán’ has everything for the cat-lover and book-lover. This poem by Sir Edward Dyer (1543-1607) might be regarded as the Elizabethan version of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’: the poem extols the virtues of a clean conscience and resisting the temptation to take delight on other people’s misfortune. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.