Poems about loss, longing and sorrow
Sad poems
Classic poems for the days you need something to feel with you.
Sometimes you don’t want to be cheered up. You want something that feels with you. That’s what a sad poem does. It doesn’t fix the feeling. It gives it a shape, and tells you someone else has been here.
“So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.”
Robert Frost, from “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”
Sad poems for every kind of sorrow
- For loss: Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
- For longing: John Keats, Sara Teasdale, Amy Lowell.
- For things ending: Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, A. E. Housman.
- For loneliness: Li Po, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Rainer Maria Rilke.
One line, not the whole poem
Saudade gives you one line a day from poems like these, chosen by a person and quoted word for word. One line is small enough to carry through the day. Then there’s a private page to write what it brings up.
Saudade gives you one line of poetry or literature a day, chosen by a person, from writers who felt it first. Then a private page to write what it brings up. Nobody reads it but you, and over the weeks your pages become a book of your own.
Get Saudade on the App StoreSaudade is a place to read and write. It isn’t therapy or grief counselling. If you’re in crisis, call or text 988 in the US, or reach your local emergency number.