Poems About Friendship
Curated by the Writory editorial team. Updated September 2026.
Which friendship poem could I share with a friend?
Emily Brontë’s “Love and Friendship” compares lasting friendship to evergreen holly. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30 finds comfort in remembering a dear friend. Whitman’s short “I Dream’d in a Dream” imagines a whole city held together by friendship.
Friendship gets fewer poems than love, which seems unfair, since it usually lasts longer. The ones here make the case for it: steady, unshowy, and worth more than the world tends to admit.
Shakespeare, alone and out of luck, remembers a single friend and stops envying kings. Tennyson mourns his closest companion for years. Whitman dreams a whole city held together by nothing but affection.
Send one of these to someone. It will say what a text cannot.
Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
William Shakespeare · Elizabethan · Sonnet
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.
He totals up every loss he has ever suffered, then thinks of one friend and the whole ledger clears.
Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old
William Shakespeare · Elizabethan · Sonnet
To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey'd,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd,
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceiv'd;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceiv'd:
For fear of which, hear this thou age unbred:
Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.
Three winters, three springs, and the friend still looks unchanged. Love refusing to notice time.
Sonnet 29: When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
William Shakespeare · Elizabethan · Sonnet
When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,-- and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
Alone and envying everyone, until he remembers one person and would not change places with a king.
Sonnet 25: Let those who are in favour with their stars
William Shakespeare · Elizabethan · Sonnet
Let those who are in favour with their stars
Of public honour and proud titles boast,
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumph bars
Unlook'd for joy in that I honour most.
Great princes' favourites their fair leaves spread
But as the marigold at the sun's eye,
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die.
The painful warrior famoused for fight,
After a thousand victories once foil'd,
Is from the book of honour razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toil'd:
Then happy I, that love and am belov'd,
Where I may not remove nor be remov'd.
Princes lose their glory overnight; he counts himself rich simply in loving and being loved.
Love and Friendship
Emily Bronte · Victorian
Love is like the wild rose-briar,
Friendship like the holly-tree --
The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms
But which will bloom most contantly?
The wild-rose briar is sweet in the spring,
Its summer blossoms scent the air;
Yet wait till winter comes again
And who wil call the wild-briar fair?
Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now
And deck thee with the holly's sheen,
That when December blights thy brow
He may still leave thy garland green.
Love the rose that blooms and drops, friendship the holly that holds its green through the snow.
The Lost Friend
Amy Levy · Victorian
The people take the thing of course,
They marvel not to see
This strange, unnatural divorce
Betwixt delight and me.
I know the face of sorrow, and I know
Her voice with all its varied cadences;
Which way she turns and treads; how at her ease
Things fit her dreary largess to bestow.
Where sorrow long abides, some be that grow
To hold her dear, but I am not of these;
Joy is my friend, not sorrow; by strange seas,
In some far land we wandered, long ago.
O faith, long tried, that knows no faltering!
O vanished treasure of her hands and face!--
Beloved--to whose memory I cling,
Unmoved within my heart she holds her place.
And never shall I hail that other "friend,"
Who yet shall dog my footsteps to the end.
The world shrugs at the loss. She cannot. A quiet poem about a grief nobody else counts.
To A Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses
John Keats · Romantic · Sonnet
As late I rambled in the happy fields,
What time the skylark shakes the tremulous dew
From his lush clover covert; - when anew
Adventurous knights take up their dinted shields;
I saw the sweetest flower wild nature yields,
A fresh-blown musk-rose; 'twas the first that threw
Its sweets upon the summer: graceful it grew
As is the wand that Queen Titania wields.
And, as I feasted on its fragrancy,
I thought the garden-rose it far excelled;
But when, O Wells! thy roses came to me,
My sense with their deliciousness was spelled:
Soft voices had they, that with tender plea
Whispered of peace, and truth, and friendliness unquelled.
A small gift of roses opens out into a whole meditation on gentleness between friends.
In Memoriam A. H. H.: 7. Dark house, by which once more I s
Lord Alfred Tennyson · Victorian
Dark house, by which once more I stand
Here in the long unlovely street,
Doors, where my heart was used to beat
So quickly, waiting for a hand,
A hand that can be clasp'd no more--
Behold me, for I cannot sleep,
And like a guilty thing I creep
At earliest morning to the door.
He is not here; but far away
The noise of life begins again,
And ghastly thro' the drizzling rain
On the bald street breaks the blank day.
He stands at his dead friend's door at dawn, and the sheer plainness of the grief is what undoes you.
In Memoriam A. H. H.: 121. Sad Hesper o'er the buried sun
Lord Alfred Tennyson · Victorian
Sad Hesper o'er the buried sun
And ready, thou, to die with him,
Thou watchest all things ever dim
And dimmer, and a glory done:
The team is loosen'd from the wain,
The boat is drawn upon the shore;
Thou listenest to the closing door,
And life is darken'd in the brain.
Bright Phosphor, fresher for the night,
By thee the world's great work is heard
Beginning, and the wakeful bird;
Behind thee comes the greater light:
The market boat is on the stream,
And voices hail it from the brink;
Thou hear'st the village hammer clink,
And see'st the moving of the team.
Sweet Hesper-Phosphor, double name
For what is one, the first, the last,
Thou, like my present and my past,
Thy place is changed; thou art the same.
The same star that set on their evenings rises again on the morning. Friendship outlasting the friend.
Celestial Music
John Donne · Metaphysical
I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.
She thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth she's unusually competent.
Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.
We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I'm always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality
But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
According to nature. For my sake she intervened
Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down
Across the road.
My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains
My aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who
Buries her head in the pillow
So as not to see, the child who tells herself
That light causes sadness-
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
To wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person-
In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking
On the same road, except it's winter now;
She's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
Look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
Like brides leaping to a great height-
Then I'm afraid for her; I see her
Caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth-
In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
From time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It's this moment we're trying to explain, the fact
That we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
Capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, The composition
Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering-
It's this stillness we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.
Donne teasing a friend who is always in love, and half-envying him for it.
These, I, Singing in Spring.
Walt Whitman · American
THESE, I, singing in spring, collect for lovers,
(For who but I should understand lovers, and all their sorrow and joy?
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)
Collecting, I traverse the garden, the world - but soon I pass the gates,
Now along the pond-side - now wading in a little, fearing not the wet,
Now by the post-and-rail fences, where the old stones thrown there, pick'd from the
fields,
have accumulated,
(Wild-flowers and vines and weeds come up through the stones, and partly cover
them - Beyond
these I pass,)
Far, far in the forest, before I think where I go,
Solitary, smelling the earthy smell, stopping now and then in the silence,
Alone I had thought - yet soon a troop gathers around me,
Some walk by my side, and some behind, and some embrace my arms or neck,
They, the spirits of dear friends, dead or alive - thicker they come, a great crowd,
and I
in the
middle,
Collecting, dispensing, singing in spring, there I wander with them,
Plucking something for tokens - tossing toward whoever is near me;
Here! lilac, with a branch of pine,
Here, out of my pocket, some moss which I pull'd off a live-oak in Florida, as it
hung
trailing
down,
Here, some pinks and laurel leaves, and a handful of sage,
And here what I now draw from the water, wading in the pondside,
(O here I last saw him that tenderly loves me - and returns again, never to separate
from
me,
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades - this Calamus-root shall,
Interchange it, youths, with each other! Let none render it back!)
And twigs of maple, and a bunch of wild orange, and chestnut,
And stems of currants, and plum-blows, and the aromatic cedar:
These, I, compass'd around by a thick cloud of spirits,
Wandering, point to, or touch as I pass, or throw them loosely from me,
Indicating to each one what he shall have - giving something to each;
But what I drew from the water by the pond-side, that I reserve,
I will give of it - but only to them that love, as I myself am capable of loving.
Whitman walks out in spring handing tokens to his friends, the living and the dead alike.
Song - Love in the Guise of Friendship
Robert Burns · Romantic
YOUR friendship much can make me blest,
O why that bliss destroy!
Why urge the only, one request
You know I will deny!
Your thought, if Love must harbour there,
Conceal it in that thought;
Nor cause me from my bosom tear
The very friend I sought.
Burns catching the exact moment friendship quietly turns into something warmer.
From Sunset to Star Rise
Christina Rossetti · Victorian · Sonnet
Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not:
I am no summer friend, but wintry cold,
A silly sheep benighted from the fold,
A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot.
Take counsel, sever from my lot your lot,
Dwell in your pleasant places, hoard your gold;
Lest you with me should shiver on the wold,
Athirst and hungering on a barren spot.
For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge,
I live alone, I look to die alone:
Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge,
Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back,
My heart goes sighing after swallows flown
On sometime summer's unreturning track.
She tells her summer friends to go: a poem about the friendships that do not survive hard weather.
I Dream'd in a Dream.
Walt Whitman · American
I DREAM'D in a dream, I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of
the
earth;
I dream'd that was the new City of Friends;
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love - it led the rest;
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words. 5
He dreams a city that nothing could overthrow, held together by nothing but the love of friends.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best poem about friendship?
Shakespeare's Sonnet 30, which ends by saying that thinking of a dear friend restores every loss, is among the finest. Emily Bronte's 'Love and Friendship,' comparing friendship to evergreen holly, is another favourite, and both are here in full.
What are short poems about friendship?
Emily Bronte's 'Love and Friendship' and Robert Burns's 'Love in the Guise of Friendship' are both short. Whitman's 'I Dream'd in a Dream,' about a city of friends, fits in just seven lines.
Which poets wrote about friendship?
Shakespeare returns to it across several sonnets, and Tennyson's 'In Memoriam' is one long elegy for a lost friend. Walt Whitman, Amy Levy and Christina Rossetti each add a very different take in this collection.
How to write a poem about friendship
More Collections
Browse every poem collection