Quality short poems to memorize

Poetry is a fairly new subject for me. I had pretty much no exposure to it at all until I started reading about Charlotte Mason several years ago. I’m excited about it but need to change gears to keep us going.

I bought IEW’s program “Linguistic Development Through Poetry Memorization” and learned a lot from Andrew Pudewa’s talks about how important memorizing is. I really want to do this.

However, it’s just becoming too challenging for us. The poems in IEW quickly get too long and the children are getting confused, mixing up stanzas, and becoming discouraged about how few new poems they are able to learn now.  (Even some of the short ones are hard: none of us have successful learned “The Wind” by Christina Rossetti. It’s confusing how the first and second stanzas are so similar.)

I’d like to ask for some recommendations of fairly short poems that would be easy for us to memorize, while still containing beautiful language and ideas. We need a confidence boost and need to be able to enjoy poetry more!

Here are some we’ve really liked, to give an idea of the type of poems I’m thinking of.

The Vulture by Hillaire Belloc

How Doth the Little Crocodile by Lewis Carroll

The Eagle by Alfred Tennyson

The Road Goes Ever on by JRR Tolkien, from The Fellowship of the Ring

And one more question: thoughts about having the children memorize just a short section of a longer poem, instead of the whole thing? There are some poems that are nice but much too long for them to be able to learn right now. I feel like I’m cheating them if they don’t learn the whole poem, but on the other hand, maybe giving them a little bit and letting them know that there is more, is better than not attempting it at all?

Thank you for any advice! I really want our family to love poetry and I feel it’s just getting discouraging right now.