Poems About Loneliness
Curated by the Writory editorial team. Updated September 2026.
Quick answer: Read 14 classic poems about loneliness and solitude, from John Clare and Whitman to Dickinson and Poe. Full texts with notes on each.
There is lonely and there is alone, and poetry knows the difference. Some of these poems ache with being cut off; others choose solitude and guard it like a garden.
John Clare writes from an asylum the loneliest and steadiest line in the book. Whitman, alone on a beach at night, feels the thread that ties all far things together. Dickinson goes housebreaking through empty rooms after dark.
Loneliness is easier to bear once you know great writers have sat exactly where you are sitting. These poems are that proof.
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I know some lonely Houses off the Road
Emily Dickinson · American
I know some lonely Houses off the Road
A Robber'd like the look of --
Wooden barred,
And Windows hanging low,
Inviting to --
A Portico,
Where two could creep --
One -- hand the Tools --
The other peep --
To make sure All's Asleep --
Old fashioned eyes --
Not easy to surprise!
How orderly the Kitchen'd look, by night,
With just a Clock --
But they could gag the Tick --
And Mice won't bark --
And so the Walls -- don't tell --
None -- will --
A pair of Spectacles ajar just stir --
An Almanac's aware --
Was it the Mat -- winked,
Or a Nervous Star?
The Moon -- slides down the stair,
To see who's there!
There's plunder -- where --
Tankard, or Spoon --
Earring -- or Stone --
A Watch -- Some Ancient Brooch
To match the Grandmama --
Staid sleeping -- there --
Day -- rattles -- too
Stealth's -- slow --
The Sun has got as far
As the third Sycamore --
Screams Chanticleer
"Who's there"?
And Echoes -- Trains away,
Sneer -- "Where"!
While the old Couple, just astir,
Fancy the Sunrise -- left the door ajar!
A burglar's-eye tour of empty houses after dark. Loneliness told as a small, thrilling crime.
On the Beach at Night, Alone.
Walt Whitman · American
ON the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining - I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of
the future.
A VAST SIMILITUDE interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets, comets, asteroids,
All the substances of the same, and all that is spiritual upon the same,
All distances of place, however wide,
All distances of time - all inanimate forms,
All Souls - all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes - the fishes, the brutes,
All men and women - me also;
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages;
All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe, or any globe;
All lives and deaths - all of the past, present, future;
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann'd, and shall forever span them, and
compactly hold them, and enclose them.
Alone on the sand he feels the thread that ties every far thing together. Solitude turning into company.
This Moment, Yearning and Thoughtful.
Walt Whitman · American
THIS moment yearning and thoughtful, sitting alone,
It seems to me there are other men in other lands, yearning and thoughtful;
It seems to me I can look over and behold them, in Germany, Italy, France, Spain - or far,
far
away,
in China, or in Russia or India - talking other dialects;
And it seems to me if I could know those men, I should become attached to them, as I do to
men
in my
own lands;
O I know we should be brethren and lovers,
I know I should be happy with them.
He wonders if other men in other lands feel exactly this, and decides that they must.
I Am
John Clare · Romantic
I AM: yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And een the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.
I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smiled or wept;
There to abide with my Creator, GOD,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.
Written from the asylum. I am, yet what I am none cares to know. The loneliest and steadiest voice here.
Love and Solitude
John Clare · Romantic
I hate the very noise of troublous man
Who did and does me all the harm he can.
Free from the world I would a prisoner be
And my own shadow all my company;
And lonely see the shooting stars appear,
Worlds rushing into judgment all the year.
O lead me onward to the loneliest shade,
The darkest place that quiet ever made,
Where kingcups grow most beauteous to behold
And shut up green and open into gold.
Farewell to poesy--and leave the will;
Take all the world away--and leave me still
The mirth and music of a woman's voice,
That bids the heart be happy and rejoice.
He hates the noise of troublesome people and keeps only the company of weather and his own heart.
Speak Of The North! A Lonely Moor
Charlotte Bronte · Victorian
Speak of the North! A lonely moor
Silent and dark and tractless swells,
The waves of some wild streamlet pour
Hurriedly through its ferny dells.
Profoundly still the twilight air,
Lifeless the landscape; so we deem
Till like a phantom gliding near
A stag bends down to drink the stream.
And far away a mountain zone,
A cold, white waste of snow-drifts lies,
And one star, large and soft and lone,
Silently lights the unclouded skies.
A single held image of the empty north, cold and grand and unpeopled.
Spirits Of The Dead
Edgar Allan Poe · American
Thy soul shall find itself alone
'Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.
Be silent in that solitude
Which is not loneliness--for then
The spirits of the dead who stood
In life before thee are again
In death around thee--and their will
Shall overshadow thee: be still.
The night--tho' clear--shall frown--
And the stars shall not look down
From their high thrones in the Heaven,
With light like Hope to mortals given--
But their red orbs, without beam,
To thy weariness shall seem
As a burning and a fever
Which would cling to thee forever.
Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish--
Now are visions ne'er to vanish--
From thy spirit shall they pass
No more--like dew-drops from the grass.
The breeze--the breath of God--is still--
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy--shadowy--yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token--
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!
You will be alone, he warns, even in the crowd of the dead. Early Poe at his eeriest.
In a lonely place,
Stephen Crane · American
In a lonely place,
I encountered a sage
Who sat, all still,
Regarding a newspaper.
He accosted me:
"Sir, what is this?"
Then I saw that I was greater,
Aye, greater than this sage.
I answered him at once,
"Old, old man, it is the wisdom of the age."
The sage looked upon me with admiration.
Crane finds a place, and a thought, and a fear, all in eleven bare lines.
Four Trees -- upon a solitary Acre --
Emily Dickinson · American
Four Trees -- upon a solitary Acre --
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action --
Maintain --
The Sun -- upon a Morning meets them --
The Wind --
No nearer Neighbor -- have they --
But God --
The Acre gives them -- Place --
They -- Him -- Attention of Passer by --
Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply --
Or Boy --
What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature --
What Plan
They severally -- retard -- or further --
Unknown --
Four trees in a bare acre, keeping no one's company but the wind's. Loneliness as pure landscape.
Retirement
Anne Bronte · Victorian
O, let me be alone a while,
No human form is nigh.
And may I sing and muse aloud,
No mortal ear is by.
Away! ye dreams of earthly bliss,
Ye earthly cares begone:
Depart! ye restless wandering thoughts,
And let me be alone!
One hour, my spirit, stretch thy wings,
And quit this joyless sod,
Bask in the sunshine of the sky,
And be alone with God!
She withdraws from the world on purpose and finds the quiet is its own kind of ache.
The Night is Darkening Around Me
Emily Bronte · Victorian
The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow ;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
And I cannot, cannot go.
The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow ;
The storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.
Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below ;
But nothing drear can move me :
I will not, cannot go.
Snow closing in, and a will that refuses to move. Solitude chosen and endured.
Hayeswater
Matthew Arnold · Victorian
A region desolate and wild.
Black, chafing water: and afloat,
And lonely as a truant child
In a waste wood, a single boat:
No mast, no sails are set thereon;
It moves, but never moveth on:
And welters like a human thing
Amid the wild waves weltering.
Behind, a buried vale doth sleep,
Far down the torrent cleaves its way:
In front the dumb rock rises steep,
A fretted wall of blue and grey;
Of shooting cliff and crumbled stone
With many a wild weed overgrown:
All else, black water: and afloat,
One rood from shore, that single boat.
A wild, empty tarn up in the hills. Arnold lets the bare landscape carry the loneliness.
Winter: My Secret
Christina Rossetti · Victorian
I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows, and snows,
And you're too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret's mine, and I won't tell.
Or, after all, perhaps there's none:
Suppose there is no secret after all,
But only just my fun.
Today's a nipping day, a biting day;
In which one wants a shawl,
A veil, a cloak, and other wraps:
I cannot ope to every one who taps,
And let the draughts come whistling thro' my hall;
Come bounding and surrounding me,
Come buffeting, astounding me,
Nipping and clipping thro' my wraps and all.
I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows
His nose to Russian snows
To be pecked at by every wind that blows?
You would not peck? I thank you for good will,
Believe, but leave that truth untested still.
Spring's and expansive time: yet I don't trust
March with its peck of dust,
Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers,
Nor even May, whose flowers
One frost may wither thro' the sunless hours.
Perhaps some languid summer day,
When drowsy birds sing less and less,
And golden fruit is ripening to excess,
If there's not too much sun nor too much cloud,
And the warm wind is neither still nor loud,
Perhaps my secret I may say,
Or you may guess.
She teases that she has a secret and will not tell, and the coyness hides a real solitude.
Work Without Hope
Samuel Coleridge · Romantic · Sonnet
All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair -
The bees are stirring - birds are on the wing -
And Winter slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow.
Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may,
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
Work without Hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And Hope without an object cannot live.
(composed 21st February 1825)
All nature is busy, and he alone stands idle. A poem about the loneliness of the empty day.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best poem about loneliness?
John Clare's 'I Am,' written from inside an asylum, is one of the most powerful poems about loneliness ever set down. Whitman's 'On the Beach at Night, Alone' turns solitude into a strange, wide comfort, and both are here in full.
What are short poems about being alone?
Stephen Crane's 'In a lonely place' and Charlotte Bronte's 'Speak of the North! A Lonely Moor' are both very short. Whitman's 'This Moment, Yearning and Thoughtful' is another brief, aching piece.
Is there a difference between loneliness and solitude in these poems?
Yes. John Clare's 'Love and Solitude' and Anne Bronte's 'Retirement' choose to be alone and find peace in it, while Dickinson's and Poe's poems here sit closer to true loneliness. Reading them together shows the whole range.
How to write a poem about loneliness
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