Theme
A curated collection of poems on heartbreak, grief, yearning and loneliness — from Edith Södergran and Karin Boye to Neruda, Rilke and Auden. For funerals, memorials, and for the moments when silence needs words.
Hjalmar Gullberg · 1942
When you left, you took with you
the brightest hour of the day,
the quietest hour of the night,
and everything in between.
Left behind was I — and a name
that no one answers to anymore.
Gullberg is the great Swedish voice of heartbreak — quiet, dignified and without self-pity.
Pär Lagerkvist · 1916
My thoughts are in disorder.
They fly like leaves before the wind,
they fall like rain across the roof,
they go out like lamps in an empty house.
Since you left there is no direction,
only the long, long road back.
Lagerkvist's early poetry of anguish foreshadowed the whole of 20th-century Swedish modernism.
Edith Södergran · 1919
Not even your shadow do I see now,
not even your step do I hear in the stairwell,
not even your name do I dare say aloud —
it would make the room even emptier.
One of Södergran's shortest and most distilled poems on the loss of a loved one.
Pablo Neruda · 1924
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example: 'The night is starry,
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
From Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair — perhaps the most famous poem of heartbreak in world literature.
Karin Boye · 1927
You passed my door one evening
and lingered a while in the hall.
Since then no room is empty
and no room is full.
You left a darkness behind
that shines in its own silence.
Boye returned again and again to grief's presence as a room one carries through life.
W.H. Auden · 1936
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one.
Auden's poem became world-famous through Four Weddings and a Funeral and is now read at countless services.
Alfred Tennyson · 1847
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
From The Princess — one of English poetry's most quoted lines on the strangeness of yearning.
Erik Axel Karlfeldt · 1901
Now the ground darkens, now the forest sleeps,
now the day sinks into the lake's cold embrace.
And I stand alone at the shore
and whisper a name
that the wind carries away across the water
to nowhere.
Karlfeldt captures the particular melancholy of the Nordic autumn — sorrow as a season.
Edith Södergran · 1916
I must go to the mountains,
where the high loneliness lives,
where silence speaks
in a voice no one else can hear.
Down here there are words, words, words —
but no one who listens,
no one who answers
when the heart cries out.
Södergran's short life was marked by tuberculosis and isolation — her poems of loneliness are among the most moving in Swedish.
Rainer Maria Rilke · 1907
No, my heart shall become a tower,
and I myself shall stand at its edge:
there is nothing else there, only pain
and silence, only the world's great space.
Only one thing grows too large in loneliness,
and that is my longing for you.
Rilke's poems of loneliness were written during his Paris years — the city's solitude became his most productive phase.