Growing Apart
No quarrel, no betrayal, just two people slowly becoming strangers. The quietest loss in poetry.
Quick answer: Learn to write poems about growing apart: drift and distance imagery, craft techniques, mistakes to avoid, plus exercises and prompts, a guide by Writory.
What this theme is
Growing apart is loss without an event. Nothing happened, which is precisely the problem: the calls spaced out, the visits became annual, the friend who once knew your passwords now needs your news explained with footnotes. A poem on this theme has almost no plot to lean on, so it must work with texture instead, the lengthening intervals, the conversations that stay pleasant and shallow, the moment you realize you are being polite to someone you used to be honest with.
The theme is not confined to friendship. Couples grow apart under the same roof, siblings drift across continents, a person can grow apart from a town, a faith, or an earlier self. What unites every version is the absence of a villain and the presence of time. Nobody chose this, or rather, both people chose it in increments too small to notice, and the poem's job is to make those increments visible at last.
Why poets return to it
Poets are drawn to this theme because it resists drama, and resisting drama is where subtle craft gets built. There is no confrontation scene to write, so the poem must find its charge in a changed greeting, a shorter reply, a birthday remembered a day late. That discipline of smallness transfers to everything else you write. It is also a theme judges tend to reward when it is done honestly: Writory scores entries on creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme, and a drift poem that trusts quiet detail over announced sorrow reliably reads as more mature than louder work.
Where it comes from
Charles Lamb caught the theme two centuries ago in The Old Familiar Faces, with its grieving refrain, “All, all are gone, the old familiar faces,” a poem less about death than about the ordinary evaporation of companions. Thomas Hardy made a career of revisiting places where a closeness used to live, measuring the present against the ghost of it, and his poems show how landscape can hold the drift when the people will not discuss it.
The Chinese classical tradition is full of parting poems between friends posted to distant provinces, poems that understand what modern readers know by other means: that most friendships end not in fire but in distance, and that the honest response is neither blame nor pretence but attention.
The elements that carry it
- Lengthening intervals made visible, the last message dated months ago, the annual call, the reply that takes a week.
- Changed vocabulary, the slang you no longer share, the names in their stories you have to ask about.
- Maps and distance, motorways, time zones, the town one person left, geography as the visible half of the drift.
- Objects from the close years, a festival wristband, a jointly owned tent, holding a friendship the calendar has outgrown.
- Season imagery used with restraint, a long autumn, a tide going out, motion too slow to watch but impossible to stop.
Techniques that work
- Structure the poem as intervals: three meetings years apart, told in three stanzas, letting what shrinks between them carry the meaning.
- Write the pleasant conversation and let the reader hear what is missing; surface small talk with an undertow is the theme's native music.
- Use the second person carefully, addressing the person you drifted from can make the poem an act of reaching, which complicates it beautifully.
- Anchor the drift in one repeated event, the same pub, the same birthday call, so change shows against a fixed background.
- Avoid assigning blame anywhere in the poem, then notice the one place you still want to, and put that admission in instead.
Mistakes to avoid
- Manufacturing a quarrel to give the poem a plot. The plotlessness is the subject; trust it.
- Announcing the theme, we grew apart, in the opening lines. Show the week-late reply instead and let the reader diagnose it.
- Blaming busyness alone. Everyone is busy; the poem should risk the harder truth that closeness stopped being chosen.
- Ending with a vow to reconnect that the poem does not believe. If the honest ending is an unsent message, end there.
An exercise
Find the last substantial conversation you had with someone you have drifted from, in messages or memory. Write a poem that quotes or paraphrases three small lines from it, and let the gaps between the lines do the grieving.
A challenge
Write a poem describing the same friendship at three dates five years apart, giving each date exactly the same number of lines. Keep the diction cooler each time, and see how little you need to say by the final stanza.
A prompt to start from
Write a poem about meeting a once-close friend by accident, in a supermarket or a station, and the fifteen seconds in which you both decide how much to pretend.
Before you submit
- No manufactured quarrel or villain appears anywhere in the poem.
- The drift is shown through at least one measurable change, frequency, vocabulary, distance.
- The close years are vivid enough that the reader feels what thinned.
- The speaker's own part in the distance is somewhere on the record.
- The final line matches the true state of things, open, faded or quietly finished.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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