Emptiness
The hollow and the open space share one word: your poem decides which it means.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about emptiness: imagery, craft techniques, honest mistakes to avoid, exercises, prompts and revision tips in this free guide by Writory.
What this theme is
Emptiness carries two opposite meanings, and the best poems on this theme know both. In one sense it is lack: the hollowed feeling after loss, the flat where someone's furniture used to be, the self that goes looking for a centre and finds a corridor. In the other sense it is space: the cleared field, the blank page, the pause in music that lets the next note matter. A poem about emptiness is always negotiating between these, hollow and open, wound and window.
Because you cannot describe nothing directly, this theme forces a sideways craft. Poets write around the absence, describing the rim of the cup rather than the missing tea: the second toothbrush gone from the glass, the dent left in a cushion, the hour a phone no longer rings. The emptiness appears in the reader's mind precisely because the poem never points at it, only at its edges.
Why poets return to it
Poets choose emptiness because it sits underneath so many other themes, grief, heartbreak, burnout, faith, and gives them a common floor. It is also the theme where the page itself becomes an instrument: white space, short lines and silence between stanzas can enact the subject in a way no other theme allows so literally. And there is the turn it offers, rare and valuable, from desolation towards possibility, since an emptied room is also, eventually, a room that can hold something new.
Where it comes from
T. S. Eliot gave the twentieth century its defining image of spiritual emptiness in The Hollow Men, figures of straw whispering together, a world ending not with a bang but a whimper, hollowness rendered as both personal and civilisational. But an older tradition treats emptiness very differently. Chinese and Japanese poetry shaped by Buddhist thought, from the hermit poems of Han Shan to the sparest haiku, treats empty space as fullness in disguise: the uncarved block, the useful hollow of the bowl, the silence that completes the temple bell.
Later Western poets learned from both lines. Philip Larkin ended one famous poem on sunlit glass and deep blue air that shows nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless, letting a single image hold desolation and transcendence at once, which is this theme's whole assignment in miniature.
The elements that carry it
- Containers: cups, bowls, drawers, nests, houses, whose whole purpose is what they hold, so their emptiness is instantly legible.
- Traces and outlines, the pale rectangle where a picture hung, a dent in a pillow, evidence that presence has become absence.
- Wide horizontal spaces, plains, low tide, off-season seaside towns, landscapes that externalise the hollow feeling.
- Silence rendered through sound: one clock, one dripping tap, a corridor echo, since a single small noise measures a large quiet.
- Light through windows into unfurnished rooms, the image that lets emptiness tilt towards either sorrow or openness.
Techniques that work
- Describe around the absence: name the container, the outline, the ritual that continues, and never the missing thing itself.
- Use white space structurally, short lines, dropped lines, a stanza break where the reader expects a word, so the page performs the theme.
- Inventory a room or a life by what is not in it; a list of absences accumulates strange, specific weight.
- Stage the turn: begin with emptiness as wound and let one concrete image, late in the poem, reweigh it as space, or the reverse. The re-weighing is the poem.
- Keep the diction plain. Ornate language fills the very hollow you are trying to show; a spare vocabulary lets the reader feel the air in the poem.
Mistakes to avoid
- Abstraction on abstraction: 'a void of nothingness inside my soul.' Empty is invisible until you give it a container; find the cup, the room, the chair.
- Filling the poem with lush imagery and dense music, then wondering why the emptiness does not register. Match the style to the subject.
- Treating emptiness only as misery. The theme's power is its double meaning; a poem that never even glances at the open-space sense wastes half its inheritance.
- Ending on the word 'empty' or 'nothing.' The reader should be left holding an image, an unfilled bowl on a windowsill, not a label.
An exercise
Choose one real container from your life, a drawer, a fridge shelf, a spare room, and describe only what used to be in it and what remains around it, in twelve lines, without using the words empty, nothing, gone or void.
A challenge
Write two poems about the same emptied space: one where the emptiness is grief, one where it is freedom. Use several identical lines in both. Study exactly which small choices flip the meaning, then write a third poem that holds both readings at once.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem set in a home on the first morning after the last box has been moved out, following the light as it crosses each bare room, and let the poem decide only in its final image whether this is an ending or a beginning.
Before you submit
- The absence is shown through containers, traces and outlines, never named more than once.
- Diction is spare enough for the hollow to be felt.
- White space and line length are deliberate instruments, not accidents.
- The poem performs a re-weighing: wound towards space, or space towards wound.
- The final line is an image, not the word 'empty' wearing a hat.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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