Penguin's Poems for Life

A nice sprinkle of poems for each of Shakespeare's seven ages of a life—that's the inspiration for this book. Everything you'd expect to be here is here. William Wordsworth's Ode (Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood). Kipling's If. Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. Keats' To Autumn. Eliot's Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Auden's Funeral Blues. But there are light poems, too, like Jenny Joseph's Warning (“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple”) and Ogden Nash (“Candy is dandy”) and A. A. Milne (“When I was One, I had just begun.”

It's a good collection, but I think I'd have liked it better if it hadn't felt quite so heavy-handed, especially with old age. All in all, though, a very good collection.