Innocence is a theme that looms large in English poetry, especially since the age of Romanticism. However, poems about innocence can be found before the 1790s and the arrival of Romanticism into English poetry, so below we’ve ranged far and wide in English verse to collect some of the greatest poems about being innocence, about states of innocence, and related themes.
Anonymous, Pearl. We begin this selection of classic poems about innocence with a long dream-vision poem from the fourteenth century, composed by an unknown poet (although probably the same person who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight). The speaker laments the death of his daughter, a ‘precious pearl without a spot’, an innocent child who, through baptism, can be saved: