When you’re separated from someone you care about, touching missing someone poems become the heart’s voice, sharing the longing, the love, and the sweet memories.
Whether you’re missing a friend, a family member, or a lover, these famous poems will touch your soul and remind you that missing someone is a beautiful testament to the connections we share in our lives.
Table of Contents
Famous Poems about Missing Someone
A Memory – Lola Ridge
I remember
The crackle of the palm trees
Over the mooned white roofs of the town…
The shining town…
And the tender fumbling of the surf
On the sulphur-yellow beaches
As we sat…a little apart…in the close-pressing night.
The moon hung above us like a golden mango,
And the moist air clung to our faces,
Warm and fragrant as the open mouth of a child
And we watched the out-flung sea
Rolling to the purple edge of the world,
Yet ever back upon itself…
As we…
Inadequate night…
And mooned white memory
Of a tropic sea…
How softly it comes up
Like an ungathered lily.
The Sea of Glass – Ezra Pound
I looked and saw a sea
roofed over with rainbows,
In the midst of each
two lovers met and departed;
Then the sky was full of faces
with gold glories behind them.
Dove, Interrupted – Lucie Brock-Broido
Don’t do that when you are dead like this, I said,
Arguably still squabbling about the word inarguably.
I haunt Versailles, poring through the markets of the medieval.
Mostly meat to be sold there; mutton hangs
Like laundry pinkened on its line.
And gold!—a chalice with a cure for living in it.
We step over the skirt of an Elizabeth.
Red grapes, a delicacy, each peeled for us—
The vestments of a miniature priest, disrobed.
A sister is an old world sparrow placed in a satin shoe.
The weakling’s saddle is worn down from just too much sad attitude.
No one wants to face the “opaque reality” of herself.
For the life of me.
I was made American. You must consider this.
Whatever suffering is insufferable is punishable by perishable.
In Vienne, the rabbit Maurice is at home in the family cage.
I ache for him, his boredom and his solitude.
On suffering and animals, inarguably, they do.
I miss your heart, my heart.
The Wife’s Lament
I sing this song, full of sadness,
this song which is myself. I will tell, what I am able,
about what hardships I have faced—since I grew up,
recently or long ago, never more than now.
Always I suffer my misery of exile.
First my lord departed from my people,
over waves rolling; I had grief before dawn
thinking of the lands which held him, my people’s lord.
Then I set out, a friendless stranger, searching
for his retinue, because of my grievous need.
Relatives of this man began to plan
through secret thought that they would separate us,
that we as far apart as possible in the kingdom of the world
would live, wretchedly, and me longing.
My lord commanded me to take a grove for a house:
little of what is beloved to me did I possess in this country,
no loyal friends; for that is my mind’s sadness.
When I found the man who was my complete match,
he was unfortunate, sad of mind and heart,
with thoughts concealed, planning his crime
behind a joyful demeanor. Very often we vowed
that we would never be separated, not by death
or anything else; what was before is now changed,
is now as if it never were, that friendship
between us. Must I who desires you nearby
suffer, my dearly loved, this feud?
Commanded was I to dwell in a forest grove.
Under an oak tree, in a cave—the earth’s chest.
Old is this earth hall and I am filled with longing.
Here is a gloomy valley, treacherous hills,
bitter hedges, briars waxing, overgrown
in this house without joy. Very often my cruel departure
takes hold of me. Friends live on earth
lying in bed with their beloveds
while I in the time before dawn alone walk
under oak tree. In the earth’s chest
I sit many long summer days
weeping for the misery of exile
my many hardships; there I am never able
to rest from my mind’s grief
nor from all the longing that in this life takes hold of me.
It may be that he is always sorrowful,
his heart’s thoughts stern; perhaps he has
a joyful demeanor next to his grief,
its constant sorrowful tumult. Whether he is dependent on himself
for all of his worldly joy, or whether he is an outcast, very far
from his distant country, sitting
under stone cliffs frost-rimmed from storms,
friendless, water flowing before
his echoing home, my lover suffers
much grief of the mind. Too often he remembers
a house full of joy. Woe to those that must
of longing in life abide.
Bei Hennef – D. H. Lawrence
The little river twittering in the twilight,
The wan, wondering look of the pale sky,
This is almost bliss.
And everything shut up and gone to sleep,
All the troubles and anxieties and pain
Gone under the twilight.
Only the twilight now, and the soft “Sh!” of the river
That will last forever.
And at last I know my love for you is here,
I can see it all, it is whole like the twilight,
It is large, so large, I could not see it before
Because of the little lights and flickers and interruptions,
Troubles, anxieties, and pains.
You are the call and I am the answer,
You are the wish, and I the fulfillment,
You are the night, and I the day.
What else—it is perfect enough,
It is perfectly complete,
You and I.
Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied – Edna St. Vincent Millay
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.
Sonnet 106 – Sir Philip Sidney
O absent presence, Stella is not here;
False flattering hope, that with so fair a face
Bare me in hand, that in this orphan place
Stella, I say my Stella, should appear.
What say’st thou now? Where is that dainty cheer
Thou told’st mine eyes should help their famished case?
But thou art gone, now that self-felt disgrace
Doth make me most to wish thy comfort near.
But here I do store of fair ladies meet,
Who may with charm of conversation sweet
Make in my heavy mould new thoughts to grow:
Sure they prevail as much with me, as he
That bade his friend, but then new maimed, to be
Merry with him, and not think of his woe.
Sonnet 33 – William Shakespeare
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.
Absence – Mary Robinson
When from the craggy mountain’s pathless steep,
Whose flinty brow hangs o’er the raging sea,
My wand’ring eye beholds the foamy deep,
I mark the restless surge – and think of THEE.
The curling waves, the passing breezes move,
Changing and treach’rous as the breath of LOVE;
The ‘sad similitude’ awakes my smart,
And thy dear image twines about my heart …
Get ready to embrace your emotions and discover I am sorry poems that perfectly capture your feelings.
Beautiful Missing Someone Poems
Are You Going to Stay? – Thomas Meyer
What was it I was going to say?
Slipped away probably because
it needn’t be said. At that edge
almost not knowing but second
guessing the gain, loss, or effect
of an otherwise hesitant remark.
Slant of light on a brass box. The way
a passing thought knots the heart.
There’s nothing, nothing to say.
In Tongues – Tonya M. Foster
1.
Because you haven’t spoken
in so long, the tongue stumbles and stutters,
sticks to the roof and floor as if the mouth were just
a house in which it could stagger like a body unto itself.
You once loved a man so tall
sometimes you stood on a chair to kiss him.
2.
What to say when one says,
“You’re sooo musical,” takes your stuttering for scatting,
takes your stagger for strutting,
takes your try and tried again for willful/playful deviation?
It makes you wanna not holla
silence to miss perception’s face.
3.
It ain’t even morning or early,
though the sun-up says “day,” and you been
staggering lange Zeit gegen a certain
breathless stillness that we can’t but call death.
Though stillness suggests a possibility
of less than dead, of move, of still be.
4.
How that one calling your tryin’
music, calling you sayin’ entertaining, thinks
there’s no then that we, (who den dat we?), remember/
trace in our permutations of say?
What mastadonic presumptions precede and
follow each word, each be, each bitter being?
5.
These yawns into which we enter as into a harbor—
Come. Go. Don’t. says the vocal oceans which usher
each us, so unlike any ship steered or steering into.
A habit of place and placing a body.
Which choruses of limbs and wanting, of limp
linger in each syllabic foot tapping its chronic codes?
A Book of Music – Jack Spicer
Coming at an end, the lovers
Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where
Did it end? There is no telling. No love is
Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves’ boundaries
From which two can emerge exhausted, nor long goodbye
Like death.
Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length
Of coiled rope
Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths
Its endings.
But, you will say, we loved
And some parts of us loved
And the rest of us will remain
Two persons. Yes,
Poetry ends like a rope.
Absence – Charlotte Mew
Sometimes I know the way
You walk, up over the bay;
It is a wind from that far sea
That blows the fragrance of your hair to me.
Or in this garden when the breeze
Touches my trees
To stir their dreaming shadows on the grass
I see you pass.
In sheltered beds, the heart of every rose
Serenely sleeps to-night. As shut as those
Your garded heart; as safe as they fomr the beat, beat
Of hooves that tread dropped roses in the street.
Turn never again
On these eyes blind with a wild rain
Your eyes; they were stars to me.—
There are things stars may not see.
But call, call, and though Christ stands
Still with scarred hands
Over my mouth, I must answer. So
I will come—He shall let me go!
The Wind is Blowin’ – Charles Badger Clark
My tired hawse nickers for his own home bars;
A hoof clicks out a spark.
The dim creek flickers to the lonesome stars;
The trail twists down the dark.
The ridge pines whimper to the pines below.
The wind is blowin’ and I want you so.
The birch has yellowed since I saw you last,
The Fall haze blued the creeks,
The big pine bellowed as the snow swished past,
But still, above the peaks,
The same stars twinkle that we used to know.
The wind is blowin’ and I want you so.
The stars up yonder wait the end of time
But earth fires soon go black.
I trip and wander on the trail I climb—
A fool who will look back
To glimpse a fire dead a year ago.
The wind is blowin’ and I want you so.
Who says the lover kills the man in me?
Beneath the day’s hot blue
This thing hunts cover and my heart fights free
To laugh an hour or two.
But now it wavers like a wounded doe.
The wind is blowin’ and I want you so.
When You Go – Jessie Belle Rittenhouse
When you go, a hush falls
Over all my heart,
And in a trance of my own dreams
I move apart.
When you go, the street grows
Like a vacant place—
What if a million faces pass
If not your face?
When you go, my life stops
Like ships becalmed at sea,
And waits the breath from heaven that blows
You back to me.
Every Moment
As each star comes out to shine
As the wind rustles across the land
As the moonlight sweeps across the room
I’m thinking of you.
When the sun burns its morning greeting
When the birds chirp and swoop through the sky
When the leaves of the trees dance through the air
I’m thinking of you.
During the haze of late afternoon sun
During the smooth swirl and flow of the clouds across the sky
During the fade of the bustling day
I’m thinking of you.
While the twilight shadows begin to fall
While the evening air begins to chill
While the crickets begin their sweet evening chorus
I’m thinking of you.
Just as the darkest hour of the night falls
Just as the world is hushed and silent
Just as dreamland beckons,
I’m thinking of you
Every day
Every hour
Every moment
I’m thinking of you through the miles
and loving you.
Heart Song
Until our final kiss goodbye
I didn’t know that hearts could fly
But mine flew away
With you that day.
Distance, so few thoughts I gave,
Until you had to leave that day.
But in that moment I could feel
That distance is heavy, hard, and real.
I didn’t know that heartstrings tied
And tangled up so much inside.
Until the last smile you sent my way
When you had to go that day.
I never thought that time could seem
So cold and cruel that I could scream.
Until the long hours after you’d gone,
As my heart cried until the dawn.
Now I am just holding on
For the moment our love’s sweet song
Together loud and true will ring
As so in love our hearts will sing.
Best heartbreak poems express the emotions we sometimes struggle to put into sentences.
