Poems About Grief
Curated by the Writory editorial team. Updated September 2026.
Quick answer: Read 14 classic poems about grief and loss, from Tennyson and Rossetti to Hopkins and Poe. Full texts with notes on each.
Grief does not want to be cheered up; it wants to be understood. The poems here understand it. They know how the second Christmas is worse than the first, and how a loss with no name can be carried for a lifetime.
Tennyson stands at a dead friend's door at dawn. Hopkins tells a weeping child she is really weeping for herself. Christina Rossetti writes from the bottom of a hard winter and reaches, slowly, for the thaw.
If you are grieving now, take these one at a time. They are not in a hurry, and neither should you be.
In Memoriam A. H. H.: 78. Again at Christmas did we weave
Lord Alfred Tennyson · Victorian
Again at Christmas did we weave
The holly round the Christmas hearth;
The silent snow possess'd the earth,
And calmly fell our Christmas-eve:
The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.
As in the winters left behind,
Again our ancient games had place,
The mimic picture's breathing grace,
And dance and song and hoodman-blind.
Who show'd a token of distress?
No single tear, no mark of pain:
O sorrow, then can sorrow wane?
O grief, can grief be changed to less?
O last regret, regret can die!
No--mixt with all this mystic frame,
Her deep relations are the same,
But with long use her tears are dry.
A second Christmas without him. The games go on, the grief goes quiet, and the quiet is worse.
A Better Ressurection
Christina Rossetti · Victorian
I have no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears.
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf:
O Jesus, quicken me.
My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk:
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk;
My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see:
Yet rise it shall--the sap of spring;
O Jesus, rise in me.
My life is like a broken bowl,
A broken bowl that cannot hold
One drop of water for my soul
Or cordial in the searching cold;
Cast in the fire the perished thing;
Melt and remould it, till it be
A royal cup for Him, my King:
O Jesus, drink of me.
Written from the bottom of a hard winter of the spirit, reaching for the first thaw.
Spring & Fall: To A Young Child
Gerard Manley Hopkins · Victorian
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
A child cries at falling leaves, and Hopkins tells her, gently, that she is really crying for herself.
Lenore
Edgar Allan Poe · American
Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!
Let the bell toll!--a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river.
And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?--weep now or never more!
See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!
Come! let the burial rite be read--the funeral song be sung!--
An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young--
A dirge for her, the doubly dead in that she died so young.
"Wretches! ye loved her for her wealth and hated her for her pride,
And when she fell in feeble health, ye blessed her--that she died!
How shall the ritual, then, be read?--the requiem how be sung
By you--by yours, the evil eye,--by yours, the slanderous tongue
That did to death the innocence that died, and died so young?"
Peccavimus; but rave not thus! and let a Sabbath song
Go up to God so solemnly the dead may feel no wrong!
The sweet Lenore hath "gone before," with Hope, that flew beside,
Leaving thee wild for the dear child that should have been thy bride--
For her, the fair and débonnaire, that now so lowly lies,
The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes--
The life still there, upon her hair--the death upon her eyes.
"Avaunt! to-night my heart is light. No dirge will I upraise,
But waft the angel on her flight with a pæan of old days!
Let no bell toll!--lest her sweet soul, amid its hallowed mirth,
Should catch the note, as it doth float up from the damned Earth.
To friends above, from fiends below, the indignant ghost is riven--
From Hell unto a high estate far up within the Heaven--
From grief and groan to a golden throne beside the King of Heaven."
A room full of mourners, and one voice that refuses to sing the sad rites for a girl the world misjudged.
Loss And Gain
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · American
When I compare
What I have lost with what I have gained,
What I have missed with what attained,
Little room do I find for pride.
I am aware
How many days have been idly spent;
How like an arrow the good intent
Has fallen short or been turned aside.
But who shall dare
To measure loss and gain in this wise?
Defeat may be victory in disguise;
The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.
Twelve lines weighing a whole life at its close. Not victory, not defeat, but the honest sum.
Sorrow
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Victorian
SORROW, on wing through the world for ever,
Here and there for awhile would borrow
Rest, if rest might haply deliver
Sorrow.
One thought lies close in her heart gnawn thorough
With pain, a weed in a dried-up river,
A rust-red share in an empty furrow.
Hearts that strain at her chain would sever
The link where yesterday frets to-morrow:
All things pass in the world, but never
Sorrow.
Sorrow given wings, flying the world over, and always coming home to roost in you.
A Mother's Lament for her Son's Death
Robert Burns · Romantic
FATE gave the word, the arrow sped,
And pierc'd my darling's heart;
And with him all the joys are fled
Life can to me impart.
By cruel hands the sapling drops,
In dust dishonour'd laid;
So fell the pride of all my hopes,
My age's future shade.
The mother-linnet in the brake
Bewails her ravish'd young;
So I, for my lost darling's sake,
Lament the live-day long.
Death, oft I've feared thy fatal blow.
Now, fond, I bare my breast;
O, do thou kindly lay me low
With him I love, at rest!
Fate loosed the arrow, and a mother is left to say the rest. Plain grief in plain Scots.
A Lament
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Romantic
O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more--Oh, never more!
Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight;
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more--Oh, never more!
O world, O life, O time. Three cries, and the certainty that spring will never feel the same.
Bereavement in their death to feel
Emily Dickinson · American
Bereavement in their death to feel
Whom We have never seen --
A Vital Kinsmanship import
Our Soul and theirs -- between --
For Stranger -- Strangers do not mourn --
There be Immortal friends
Whom Death see first -- 'tis news of this
That paralyze Ourselves --
Who, vital only to Our Thought --
Such Presence bear away
In dying -- 'tis as if Our Souls
Absconded -- suddenly --
Dickinson measuring the strange envy of those who at least get to grieve openly.
A loss of something ever felt I --
Emily Dickinson · American
A loss of something ever felt I --
The first that I could recollect
Bereft I was -- of what I knew not
Too young that any should suspect
A Mourner walked among the children
I notwithstanding went about
As one bemoaning a Dominion
Itself the only Prince cast out --
Elder, Today, a session wiser
And fainter, too, as Wiseness is --
I find myself still softly searching
For my Delinguent Palaces --
And a Suspicion, like a Finger
Touches my Forehead now and then
That I am looking oppositely
For the site of the Kingdom of Heaven --
A grief with no clear cause, carried since childhood. She calls herself the mourner and cannot name the dead.
An Epitaph On A Child Of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel
Ben Jonson · Renaissance
Weep with me, all you that read
This little story;
And know, for whom a tear you shed
Death's self is sorry.
'Twas a child that so did thrive
In grace and feature,
As heaven and nature seemed to strive
Which owned the creature.
Years he numbered scarce thirteen
When fates turned cruel,
Yet three filled zodiacs had be been
The stage's jewel;
And did act what now we moan,
Old men so duly,
As, sooth, the parcae thought him one,
He played so truly.
So by error, so his fate
They all consented;
But viewing him since, alas too late,
They have repented,
And have sought to give new birth,
In baths to steep him;
But being so much too good for earth,
Heaven vows to keep him.
Jonson burying a boy of the children's playhouse, half in tears and half in wonder at so small a life.
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind
Stephen Crane · American
Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because the lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
Little souls who thirst for fight,
These men were born to drill and die.
The unexplained glory flies above them,
Great is the Battle-God, great, and his Kingdom -
A field wher a thousand corpses lie.
Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
Eagle with crest of red and gold,
These men were born to drill and die.
Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
Make plain to them the excellence of killing
And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.
Crane's savage lullaby. He keeps saying war is kind while showing you exactly why it is not.
Footsteps of Angels
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow · American
When the hours of Day are numbered,
And the voices of the Night
Wake the better soul, that slumbered,
To a holy, calm delight;
Ere the evening lamps are lighted,
And, like phantoms grim and tall,
Shadows from the fitful firelight
Dance upon the parlor wall;
Then the forms of the departed
Enter at the open door;
The beloved, the true-hearted,
Come to visit me once more;
He, the young and strong, who cherished
Noble longings for the strife,
By the roadside fell and perished,
Weary with the march of life!
They, the holy ones and weakly,
Who the cross of suffering bore,
Folded their pale hands so meekly,
Spake with us on earth no more!
And with them the Being Beauteous,
Who unto my youth was given,
More than all things else to love me,
And is now a saint in heaven.
With a slow and noiseless footstep
Comes that messenger divine,
Takes the vacant chair beside me,
Lays her gentle hand in mine.
And she sits and gazes at me
With those deep and tender eyes,
Like the stars, so still and saint-like,
Looking downward from the skies.
Uttered not, yet comprehended,
Is the spirit's voiceless prayer,
Soft rebukes, in blessings ended,
Breathing from her lips of air.
Oh, though oft depressed and lonely,
All my fears are laid aside,
If I but remember only
Such as these have lived and died!
The dead come back at dusk as company, not ghosts. Longfellow's gentlest comfort.
In Memoriam A. H. H. Obiit MDCCCXXXIII: 3. O Sorrow, cruel
Lord Alfred Tennyson · Victorian
O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,
O Priestess in the vaults of Death,
O sweet and bitter in a breath,
What whispers from thy lying lip?
"The stars," she whispers, "blindly run;
A web is wov'n across the sky;
From out waste places comes a cry,
And murmurs from the dying sun:
"And all the phantom, Nature, stands--
With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,--
A hollow form with empty hands."
And shall I take a thing so blind,
Embrace her as my natural good;
Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?
He asks whether Sorrow is a liar or a friend, and cannot yet decide which.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best poem about grief?
Tennyson's 'In Memoriam,' written over years for his friend Arthur Hallam, is the great long poem of grief in English, and several of its sections are here. Gerard Manley Hopkins's 'Spring and Fall' says almost as much in fifteen lines.
What are short poems about grief and loss?
Percy Shelley's 'A Lament' ('O world! O life! O time!') and Swinburne's 'Sorrow' are both very short. Longfellow's 'Loss and Gain' weighs a whole life in twelve plain lines.
What poems help with mourning someone?
Longfellow's 'Footsteps of Angels,' which pictures the dead returning gently at dusk, offers real comfort. Christina Rossetti's 'A Better Resurrection' speaks honestly to anyone in the numb early stage of loss.
How to write a poem about grief
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