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Famous Short Sad Poems

Famous Short Sad Poems. Short Sad Poetry by Famous Poets. A collection of the all-time best Sad short poems


by Emily Dickinson
 How happy I was if I could forget
To remember how sad I am
Would be an easy adversity
But the recollecting of Bloom

Keeps making November difficult
Till I who was almost bold
Lose my way like a little Child
And perish of the cold.



by Mark Twain
 Good-bye! a kind good-bye,
I bid you now, my friend,
And though 'tis sad to speak the word,
To destiny I bend

And though it be decreed by Fate
That we ne'er meet again,
Your image, graven on my heart,
Forever shall remain.

Aye, in my heart thoult have a place,
Among the friends held dear,-
Nor shall the hand of Time efface
The memories written there.
Goodbye,
S.L.C.

by James Henry Leigh Hunt
Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and welth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.

by Carol Ann Duffy
 Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say 
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

by William Shakespeare
 URNS and odours bring away! 
 Vapours, sighs, darken the day! 
Our dole more deadly looks than dying; 
 Balms and gums and heavy cheers, 
 Sacred vials fill'd with tears, 
And clamours through the wild air flying! 

 Come, all sad and solemn shows, 
 That are quick-eyed Pleasure's foes! 
 We convent naught else but woes.



by Dorothy Parker
 Never love a simple lad,
Guard against a wise,
Shun a timid youth and sad,
Hide from haunted eyes.

Never hold your heart in pain
For an evil-doer;
Never flip it down the lane
To a gifted wooer.

Never love a loving son,
Nor a sheep astray;
Gather up your skirts and run
From a tender way.

Never give away a tear,
Never toss a pine;
Should you heed my words, my dear,
You're no blood of mine!

by Gabriela Mistral
 Sleep, sleep, my beloved,
without worry, without fear,
although my soul does not sleep,
although I do not rest.

Sleep, sleep, and in the night
may your whispers be softer
than a leaf of grass,
or the silken fleece of lambs.

May my flesh slumber in you,
my worry, my trembling.
In you, may my eyes close
and my heart sleep.

by Robert Frost
 I LEFT you in the morning,
And in the morning glow,
You walked a way beside me
To make me sad to go.
Do you know me in the gloaming,
Gaunt and dusty gray with roaming?
Are you dumb because you know me not,
Or dumb because you know?

All for me And not a question
For the faded flowers gay 
That could take me from beside you
For the ages of a day?
They are yours, and be the measure
Of their worth for you to treasure,
The measure of the little while
That I've been long away.

by James Joyce
 Be not sad because all men 
Prefer a lying clamour before you: 
Sweetheart, be at peace again -- - 
Can they dishonour you? 

They are sadder than all tears; 
Their lives ascend as a continual sigh. 
Proudly answer to their tears: 
As they deny, deny.

by Sarojini Naidu
 Like a joy on the heart of a sorrow,
 The sunset hangs on a cloud;
A golden storm of glittering sheaves,
Of fair and frail and fluttering leaves,
 The wild wind blows in a cloud.

Hark to a voice that is calling
 To my heart in the voice of the wind:
My heart is weary and sad and alone,
For its dreams like the fluttering leaves have gone,
 And why should I stay behind?

by Edgar Allan Poe
 Seraph! thy memory is to me
Like some enchanted far-off isle
In some tumultuous sea -
Some ocean vexed as it may be
With storms; but where, meanwhile,
Serenest skies continually
Just o'er that one bright island smile. 
For 'mid the earnest cares and woes
That crowd around my earthly path,
(Sad path, alas, where grows
Not even one lonely rose!)
My soul at least a solace hath
In dreams of thee; and therein knows
An Eden of bland repose.

by Alexander Pushkin
 My voice that is for you the languid one, and gentle,
Disturbs the velvet of the dark night's mantle,
By my bedside, a candle, my sad guard,
Burns, and my poems ripple and merge in flood --
And run the streams of love, run, full of you alone,
And in the dark, your eyes shine like the precious stones,
And smile to me, and hear I the voice:
My friend, my sweetest friend... I love... I'm yours... I'm yours!

by Pablo Neruda
 O tower of light, sad beauty
that magnified necklaces and statues in the sea,
calcareous eye, insignia of the vast waters, cry
of the mourning petrel, tooth of the sea, wife
of the Oceanian wind, O separate rose
from the long stem of the trampled bush
that the depths, converted into archipelago,
O natural star, green diadem,
alone in your lonesome dynasty,
still unattainable, elusive, desolate
like one drop, like one grape, like the sea.

by James Henry Leigh Hunt
 Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and welth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.

by Spike Milligan
 I was thinking of letters,
We all have a lot in our life
A few good - a few sad
But mostly run of the mill-
I suppose that's my fault
For writing to run of the mill people.
I've never had a letter
I really wanted
It might come one day
But then, it will be just too late,
And that's when I don't want it.

by William Allingham
 A sunset's mounded cloud; 
A diamond evening-star; 
Sad blue hills afar; 
Love in his shroud. 

Scarcely a tear to shed; 
Hardly a word to say; 
The end of a summer day; 
Sweet Love dead.

Art  Create an image from this poem
by Herman Melville
 In placid hours well-pleased we dream 
Of many a brave unbodied scheme. 
But form to lend, pulsed life create, 
What unlike things must meet and mate: 
A flame to melt--a wind to freeze; 
Sad patience--joyous energies; 
Humility--yet pride and scorn; 
Instinct and study; love and hate; 
Audacity--reverence. These must mate, 
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart, 
To wrestle with the angel--Art.

by Gregory Corso
 I am watching them churn the last milk they'll ever get
from me.
They are waiting for me to die;
They want to make buttons out of my bones.
Where are my sisters and brothers?
That tall monk there, loading my uncle, he has a new cap.
And that idiot student of his--
I never saw that muffler before.
Poor uncle, he lets them load him.
How sad he is, how tired!
I wonder what they'll do with his bones?
And that beautiful tail!
How many shoelaces will they make of that!

by George Herbert
 O that I could a sin once see! 
We paint the devil foul, yet he
Hath some good in him, all agree.
Sin is flat opposite to th' Almighty, seeing
It wants the good of virtue, and of being.

But God more care of us hath had: 
If apparitions make us sad, 
By sight of sin we should grow mad.
Yet as in sleep we see foul death, and live: 
So devils are our sins in perspective.

by Dorothy Parker
 And let her loves, when she is dead,
Write this above her bones:
"No more she lives to give us bread
Who asked her only stones."

by Li Po
 I met Tu Fu on a mountaintop
in August when the sun was hot.

Under the shade of his big straw hat
his face was sad--

in the years since we last parted,
he'd grown wan, exhausted.

Poor old Tu Fu, I thought then,
he must be agonizing over poetry again.

Echoes  Create an image from this poem
by Emma Lazarus
 THE MIGHT that shaped itself through storm and stress
In chaos, here is lulled in breathing sweet;
Under the long brown ridge in gentleness
 Its fierce old pulses beat.


Quiet and sad we go at eve; the fire
That woke exultant in an earlier day
Is dead; the memories of old desire
 Only in shadows play.


We liken love to this and that; our thought
The echo of a deeper being seems:
We kiss, because God once for beauty sought
 Within a world of dreams.

by Allen Ginsberg
 The air is dark, the night is sad,
I lie sleepless and I groan.
Nobody cares when a man goes mad:
He is sorry, God is glad.
Shadow changes into bone.

Every shadow has a name;
When I think of mine I moan,
I hear rumors of such fame.
Not for pride, but only shame,
Shadow changes into bone.

When I blush I weep for joy,
And laughter drops from me like a stone:
The aging laughter of the boy
To see the ageless dead so coy.
Shadow changes into bone.

by Dorothy Parker
 Once, when I was young and true,
Someone left me sad-
Broke my brittle heart in two;
And that is very bad.

Love is for unlucky folk,
Love is but a curse.
Once there was a heart I broke;
And that, I think, is worse.

by Allen Ginsberg
 O dear sweet rosy 
 unattainable desire 
...how sad, no way 
 to change the mad 
cultivated asphodel, the 
 visible reality... 

and skin's appalling 
 petals--how inspired 
to be so Iying in the living 
 room drunk naked 
and dreaming, in the absence 
 of electricity... 
over and over eating the low root 
 of the asphodel, 
gray fate... 

 rolling in generation 
on the flowery couch 
 as on a bank in Arden-- 
my only rose tonite's the treat 
 of my own nudity. 

 Fall, 1953


Book: Reflection on the Important Things