Sad poetry in English has a long and rich tradition, with many renowned poets exploring themes of sadness, loss, and grief in their work. Some notable examples include Emily Dickinson’s “I Measure Every Grief I meet,” John Keats’ “When I Have Fears That I may cease to be,” and Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” So are you feeling sad and want to share your mind voice with other people who love you? Here are the best 40 sad poetry in English to share with love ones.
40+ Sad Poetry in English to Share
“Hope is the thing with feathers
Emily Dickinson
That perches in the soul”
“In three words I can sum up everything
Robert Frost
I’ve learned about life: it goes on”
“Stop all the clocks
W.H. Auden
cut off the telephone.”
“I shut my eyes and
Sylvia Plath
all the world drops dead.”
“Life is for the living
Langston Hughes
Death is for the dead.”
“Though nothing can bring back
William Wordsworth
the hour of splendor in the grass.”
“We loved with a love
Edgar Allan Poe
that was more than love.”
“There is no greater agony than bearing
Maya Angelou
an untold story inside you.”
“A thing of beauty is a joy forever
John Keats
Its loveliness increases.”
“The tears I feel today
Lord Byron
I’ll wait to shed for tomorrow.”
“How do I love thee?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Let me count the ways.”
“Our sweetest songs are those
Percy Bysshe Shelley
that tell of saddest thought.”
“The heart was made
Oscar Wilde
to be broken.”
“April is the cruellest month
T.S. Eliot
breeding lilacs out of the dead land.”
“Don’t grieve
Rumi
Anything you lose comes round in another form.”
“Water, water, everywhere,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
And all the boards did shrink.”
“Tis better to have loved and
Alfred Lord Tennyson
lost than never to have loved at all.”
“Do I contradict myself?
Walt Whitman
Very well then I contradict myself.”
“Some people never go crazy
Charles Bukowski
What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
“I have not broken your heart
Emily Brontë
you have broken it.”
“My love is like a red, red rose
Robert Burns
that’s newly sprung in June.”
“I carry your heart with me
E.E. Cummings
I carry it in my heart”
“For each ecstatic instant
Anne Sexton
we must an anguish pay.”
“Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
“Believe that a further shore
Seamus Heaney
is reachable from here.”
“They f*ck you up, your mum and dad
Philip Larkin
They may not mean to, but they do.”
“She walks in beauty
George Gordon Byron
like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies.”
“No man is an island
John Donne
entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent.”
“Grow old along with me!
Robert Browning
The best is yet to be.”
“A rose is a rose
Gertrude Stein
is a rose.”
“Lock up your libraries if you like;
Virginia Woolf
but there is no gate, no lock,
no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
“If we could learn to learn from pain
Adrienne Rich
even as it grasps us…”
“We look at the world once,
Louise Glück
in childhood.
The rest is memory.”
“I have stretched ropes from bell tower to bell tower;
Arthur Rimbaud
garlands from window to window;
chains of gold from star to star, and I dance.”
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.”
Allen Ginsberg
“I am nobody!
Sylvia Plath
Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?”
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
William Blake
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.”
“I, too, dislike it.
Marianne Moore
Reading it, however,
with a perfect contempt for
“Remember me when I am gone away,
Christina Rossetti
Gone far away into the silent land.”
“Every heart has its secret sorrows
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
which the world knows not.”
