Poems About Sadness
Curated by the Writory editorial team. Updated September 2026.
Quick answer: Read 14 classic poems about sadness and sorrow, from Poe and Byron to Dickinson and Wilde. Full texts with notes on each one.
Sadness is not the same as grief; it has no single cause, and it does not always lift. The poems here sit with it honestly, from a boy in love with a lonely lake to a goodbye that has to be kept secret.
Byron writes the definitive poem of the hushed, tearful parting. Dickinson feels sense breaking plank by plank until the mind drops through. Emma Lazarus finds the rare comfort of a friend whose sorrow mirrors her own.
There is a strange relief in reading sad poems well made. These are that.
The Lake
Edgar Allan Poe · American
In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less--
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound,
And the tall pines that towered around.
But when the Night had thrown her pall
Upon the spot, as upon all,
And the mystic wind went by
Murmuring in melody--
Then--ah, then, I would awake
To the terror of the lone lake.
Yet that terror was not fright,
But a tremulous delight--
A feeling not the jewelled mine
Could teach or bribe me to define--
Nor Love--although the Love were thine.
Death was in that poisonous wave,
And in its gulf a fitting grave
For him who thence could solace bring
To his lone imagining--
Whose solitary soul could make
An Eden of that dim lake.
A boy in love with a lonely, half-terrifying lake. Poe's early study in the sweetness of gloom.
Only God -- detect the Sorrow --
Emily Dickinson · American
Only God -- detect the Sorrow --
Only God --
The Jehovahs -- are no Babblers --
Unto God --
God the Son -- Confide it --
Still secure --
God the Spirit's Honor --
Just as sure --
God alone, she says, can read the sorrow that no face will admit to.
Sympathy
Emily Bronte · Victorian
There should be no despair for you
While nightly stars are burning,
While evening pours its silent dew
And sunshine gilds the morning.
There should be no despair - though tears
May flow down like a river:
Are not the best beloved of years
Around your heart forever?
They weep - you weep - it must be so;
Winds sigh as you are sighing,
And Winter sheds his grief in snow
Where Autumn's leaves are lying:
Yet these revive, and from their fate
Your fate cannot be parted,
Then journey on, if not elate,
Still, never broken-hearted!
There should be no despair for you while snow is on the hill, she urges. Grief talked steadily back to.
Sympathy
Emma Lazarus · American
Therefore I dare reveal my private woe,
The secret blots of my imperfect heart,
Nor strive to shrink or swell mine own desert,
Nor beautify nor hide. For this I know,
That even as I am, thou also art.
Thou past heroic forms unmoved shalt go,
To pause and bide with me, to whisper low:
"Not I alone am weak, not I apart
Must suffer, struggle, conquer day by day.
Here is my very cross by strangers borne,
Here is my bosom-sin wherefrom I pray
Hourly deliverance--this my rose, my thorn.
This woman my soul's need can understand,
Stretching o'er silent gulfs her sister hand."
The rare comfort of finding your own private grief mirrored in a friend. Sadness halved by company.
On Another's Sorrow
William Blake · Romantic
Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
Can I see a falling tear,
And not feel my sorrow's share?
Can a father see his child
Weep, nor be with sorrow filled?
Can a mother sit and hear
An infant groan, an infant fear?
No, no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
And can He who smiles on all
Hear the wren with sorrows small,
Hear the small bird's grief and care,
Hear the woes that infants bear--
And not sit beside the next,
Pouring pity in their breast,
And not sit the cradle near,
Weeping tear on infant's tear?
And not sit both night and day,
Wiping all our tears away?
Oh no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!
He doth give his joy to all:
He becomes an infant small,
He becomes a man of woe,
He doth feel the sorrow too.
Think not thou canst sigh a sigh,
And thy Maker is not by:
Think not thou canst weep a tear,
And thy Maker is not near.
Oh He gives to us his joy,
That our grief He may destroy:
Till our grief is fled an gone
He doth sit by us and moan.
Can I see another's woe and not be sad as well? Blake makes fellow-feeling the whole argument.
Autumn: A Dirge
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Romantic
The warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.
Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.
The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling;
Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black, and gray;
Let your light sisters play--
Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.
The year dying and the bare woods wailing. Shelley scoring the plain sadness of November.
To My Wife - With A Copy Of My Poems
Oscar Wilde · Victorian
I can write no stately proem
As a prelude to my lay;
From a poet to a poem
I would dare to say.
For if of these fallen petals
One to you seem fair,
Love will waft it till it settles
On your hair.
And when wind and winter harden
All the loveless land,
It will whisper of the garden,
You will understand.
Wilde handing over his poems the way you hand over a season's fallen leaves. Tender and low.
To F--
Edgar Allan Poe · American
Beloved! amid the earnest woes
That crowd around my earthly path--
(Drear path, alas! where grows
Not even one lonely rose)--
My soul at least a solace hath
In dreams of thee, and therein knows
An Eden of bland repose.
And thus thy memory is to me
Like some enchanted far-off isle
In some tumultuous sea--
Some ocean throbbing far and free
With storm--but where meanwhile
Serenest skies continually
Just o'er that one bright inland smile.
In a whole world of sorrow, one calm face is his single green island. Sadness with one exception.
Human Life
Samuel Coleridge · Romantic
If dead, we cease to be ; if total gloom
Swallow up life's brief flash for aye, we fare
As summer-gusts, of sudden birth and doom,
Whose sound and motion not alone declare,
But are their whole of being ! If the breath
Be Life itself, and not its task and tent,
If even a soul like Milton's can know death ;
O Man ! thou vessel purposeless, unmeant,
Yet drone-hive strange of phantom purposes !
Surplus of Nature's dread activity,
Which, as she gazed on some nigh-finished vase,
Retreating slow, with meditative pause,
She formed with restless hands unconsciously.
Blank accident ! nothing's anomaly !
If rootless thus, thus substanceless thy state,
Go, weigh thy dreams, and be thy hopes, thy fears,
The counter-weights !--Thy laughter and thy tears
Mean but themselves, each fittest to create
And to repay the other ! Why rejoices
Thy heart with hollow joy for hollow good ?
Why cowl thy face beneath the mourner's hood ?
Why waste thy sighs, and thy lamenting voices,
Image of Image, Ghost of Ghostly Elf,
That such a thing as thou feel'st warm or cold ?
Yet what and whence thy gain, if thou withhold
These costless shadows of thy shadowy self ?
Be sad ! be glad ! be neither ! seek, or shun !
Thou hast no reason why ! Thou canst have none ;
Thy being's being is contradiction.
If we are only froth on a passing wave, he asks, why does the grief weigh so much? A dark, honest poem.
Monday Night May 11th 1846 / Domestic Peace
Anne Bronte · Victorian
Why should such gloomy silence reign;
And why is all the house so drear,
When neither danger, sickness, pain,
Nor death, nor want have entered here?
We are as many as we were
That other night, when all were gay,
And full of hope, and free from care;
Yet, is there something gone away.
The moon without as pure and calm
Is shining as that night she shone;
but now, to us she brings no balm,
For something from our hearts is gone.
Something whose absence leaves a void,
A cheerless want in every heart.
Each feels the bliss of all destroyed
And mourns the change - but each apart.
The fire is burning in the grate
As redly as it used to burn,
But still the hearth is desolate
Till Mirth and Love with Peace return.
'Twas Peace that flowed from heart to heart
With looks and smiles that spoke of Heaven,
And gave us language to impart
The blissful thoughts itself had given.
Sweet child of Heaven, and joy of earth!
O, when will Man thy value learn?
We rudely drove thee from our hearth,
And vainly sigh for thy return.
She remembers a house that once held together, and mourns the calm that left it. Quiet, grown-up sadness.
The Death of the Flowers
William Cullen Bryant · American
The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere.
Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn leaves lie dead;
They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread;
The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,
And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.
Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood
In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?
Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race of flowers
Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours.
The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain
Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.
The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago,
And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;
But on the hills the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,
And the yellow sun-flower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,
Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,
And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.
And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,
To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;
When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,
And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill,
The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,
And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.
And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,
The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side.
In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forests cast the leaf,
And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:
Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young friend of ours,
So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.
The bright year gone to brown, and one young death he cannot keep out of the frost. Autumn as elegy.
When We Two Parted
George Gordon, Lord Byron · Romantic
When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this.
The dew of the morning
Sunk chill on my brow--
It felt like the warning
Of what I feel now.
Thy vows are all broken,
And light is thy fame:
I hear thy name spoken,
And share in its shame.
They name thee before me,
A knell to mine ear;
A shudder comes o'er me--
Why wert thou so dear?
They know not I knew thee,
Who knew thee too well:--
Long, long shall I rue thee,
Too deeply to tell.
In secret we met--
In silence I grieve.
That thy heart could forget,
Thy spirit deceive.
If I should meet thee
After long years,
How should I greet thee?--
With silence and tears.
I cannot talk of Love to thee,
Though thou art young and free and fair!
There is a spell thou dost not see,
That bids a genuine love despair.
And yet that spell invites each youth,
For thee to sigh, or seem to sigh;
Makes falsehood wear the garb of truth,
And Truth itself appear a lie.
If ever Doubt a place possest
In woman's heart, 'twere wise in thine:
Admit not Love into thy breast,
Doubt others' love, nor trust in mine.
Perchance 'tis feigned, perchance sincere,
But false or true thou canst not tell;
So much hast thou from all to fear,
In that unconquerable spell.
Of all the herd that throng around,
Thy simpering or thy sighing train,
Come tell me who to thee is bound
By Love's or Plutus' heavier chain.
In some 'tis Nature, some 'tis Art
That bids them worship at thy shrine;
But thou deserv'st a better heart,
Than they or I can give for thine.
For thee, and such as thee, behold,
Is Fortune painted truly--blind!
Who doomed thee to be bought or sold,
Has proved too bounteous to be kind.
Each day some tempter's crafty suit
Would woo thee to a loveless bed:
I see thee to the altar's foot
A decorated victim led.
Adieu, dear maid! I must not speak
Whate'er my secret thoughts may be;
Though thou art all that man can reck
I dare not talk of Love to thee.
Silence and tears, and a grief he has to keep secret. The definitive poem of the sad, hushed goodbye.
From Spring Days To Winter (For Music)
Oscar Wilde · Victorian
In the glad springtime when leaves were green,
O merrily the throstle sings!
I sought, amid the tangled sheen,
Love whom mine eyes had never seen,
O the glad dove has golden wings!
Between the blossoms red and white,
O merrily the throstle sings!
My love first came into my sight,
O perfect vision of delight,
O the glad dove has golden wings!
The yellow apples glowed like fire,
O merrily the throstle sings!
O Love too great for lip or lyre,
Blown rose of love and of desire,
O the glad dove has golden wings!
But now with snow the tree is grey,
Ah, sadly now the throstle sings!
My love is dead: ah! well-a-day,
See at her silent feet I lay
A dove with broken wings!
Ah, Love! ah, Love! that thou wert slain -
Fond Dove, fond Dove return again!
A love that faded exactly as the year did. Wilde watching the warmth go out of both at once.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
Emily Dickinson · American
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading -- treading -- till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through --
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum --
Kept beating -- beating -- till I thought
My Mind was going numb --
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space -- began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here --
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down --
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing -- then --
Sense breaking plank by plank, until the mind drops through. The most physical despair she ever wrote.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the saddest poem ever written?
Byron's 'When We Two Parted,' about a secret grief kept hidden for years, is often called the saddest short poem in English. Emily Dickinson's 'I felt a Funeral, in my Brain' is another that captures despair almost physically, and both are here.
What are short poems about sadness?
Emily Dickinson's 'Only God detect the Sorrow' is only eight lines. Oscar Wilde's 'To My Wife' and Poe's 'To F' are both short and quietly sad.
Why read sad poems when you feel low?
Well-made sad poems offer company rather than a cure. Reading Emily Bronte's 'Sympathy' or Emma Lazarus's poem of the same name can make a low mood feel shared instead of solitary, which is often what helps most.
More Collections
Browse every poem collection