Famous Unrequited Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Unrequited poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous unrequited poems. These examples illustrate what a famous unrequited poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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...year)
A nose drawn sharply yet in delicate lines ;
A close mild mouth, a little soured about
The ends, through speaking unrequited loves
Or peradventure niggardly half-truths ;
Eyes of no colour, -- once they might have smiled,
But never, never have forgot themselves
In smiling ; cheeks, in which was yet a rose
Of perished summers, like a rose in a book,
Kept more for ruth than pleasure, -- if past bloom,
Past fading also.
She had lived, we'll say,
A harmless life, she calle...Read more of this...
by
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
...sad but living cypress glooms,
And withers not, though branch and leaf
Are stamp'd with an eternal grief,
Like early unrequited Love,
One spot exists, which ever blooms,
Ev'n in that deadly grove —
A single rose is shedding there
Its lonely lustre, meek and pale:
It looks as planted by Despair —
So white — so faint — the slightest gale
Might whirl the leaves on high;
And yet, though storms and blight assail,
And hands more rude than wintry sky
May wring it from t...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...I think that the bitterest sorrow or pain
Of love unrequited, or cold death’s woe,
Is sweet, compared to that hour when we know
That some grand passion is on the wane.
When we see that the glory, and glow, and grace
Which lent a splendour to night and day,
Are surely fading, and showing grey
And dull groundwork of the commonplace.
When fond expressions on dull ears fall,
When the hands clasp calmly wit...Read more of this...
by
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these
sights on
the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be
kill’d, to
preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor,...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...mourn,
Ye by whom the sea-toss'd sailor's lighted,
Who with radiant beams the heav'ns adorn,
But by gods and men are unrequited:
For ye love not,--ne'er have learnt to love!
Ceaselessly in endless dance ye move,
In the spacious sky your charms displaying,
What far travels ye have hasten'd through,
Since, within my loved one's arms delaying,
I've forgotten you and midnight too!
1789.*...Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...re's the warm sweet smell of blackberry bushes along
the path and in the late afternoon, quail gather around a dead
unrequited tree that has fallen bridelike across the path. Some-
times I go down there and jump the quail. I just go down there
to get them up off their butts. They're such beautiful birds.
They set their wings and sail on down the hill.
O he was the one who was born to be king! That one, turn-
ing down through the Scotch broom and going over an up...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...ay.
I'm over my longing for far lands-
I wouldn't give that for Cathay.
I'm through with performing the ballet
Of love unrequited and told.
Euterpe, I tender you vale;
Good-by, and take care of that cold.
I'm done with this burning and giving
And reeling the rhymes of my woes.
And how I'll be making my living,
The Lord in His mystery knows....Read more of this...
by
Parker, Dorothy
...or silken stuff,
Climbed up my creaking stair. They had read
All I had rhymed of that monstrous thing
Returned and yet unrequited love.
They stood in the door and stood between
My great wood lectern and the fire
Till I could hear their hearts beating:
One is a harlot, and one a child
That never looked upon man with desire.
And one, it may be, a queen....Read more of this...
by
Yeats, William Butler
...erer that is to be hung next day—how does he sleep?
And the murder’d person—how does he sleep?
The female that loves unrequited sleeps,
And the male that loves unrequited sleeps,
The head of the money-maker that plotted all day sleeps,
And the enraged and treacherous dispositions—all, all sleep.
2
I stand in the dark with drooping eyes by the worst-suffering and the most restless,
I pass my hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them,
The restless sink in thei...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...with watered gules,
To be Love’s heraldry? What were it worth
To live and to find out that life were life
But for an unrequited incubus
Of outlawed shame that would not be thrown down
Till she had thrown down fear and overcome
The woman that was yet so much of her
That she might yet go mad? What were it worth
To live, to linger, and to be condemned
In her submission to a common thought
That clogged itself and made of its first faith
Its last impediment? What augured...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...sad but living cypress glooms,
And withers not, though branch and leaf
Are stamp'd with an eternal grief,
Like early unrequited Love,
One spot exists, which ever blooms,
Ev'n in that deadly grove —
A single rose is shedding there
Its lonely lustre, meek and pale:
It looks as planted by Despair —
So white — so faint — the slightest gale
Might whirl the leaves on high;
And yet, though storms and blight assail,
And hands more rude than wintry sky
May wring it from t...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...
love.
So that when the great blue bell of silence is stilled and
stopped or broken
By the babel and chaos of desire unrequited, irritated and
frustrated,
When the heart has opened and when the heart has spoken
Not of the purity and symmetry of gratification, but action
of insatiable distraction's dissatisfaction,
Then the heart says, in all its blindness and faltering
emptiness:
There is no God. Because I am hope. And hope must be
fed.
And then the great blue bell ...Read more of this...
by
Schwartz, Delmore
...rudence dispossess'd,
And to whose heart I'm driven back once more.
The love of Petrarch, that all-glorious love,
Was unrequited, and, alas, full sad;
One long Good Friday 'twas, one heartache drear
But may my mistress' Advent ever prove,
With its palm-jubilee, so sweet and glad,
One endless Mayday, through the livelong year!
1807....Read more of this...
by
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang
...n her,
Ne'er with kingly smiles to sun her,
Did her blooms unclose.
No,--she went by monarchs slighted
Went unhonored, unrequited,
From high Frederick's throne;
Praise and pride be all the greater,
That man's genius did create her,
From man's worth alone.
Therefore, all from loftier mountains,
Purer wells and richer fountains,
Streams our poet-art;
So no rule to curb its rushing--
All the fuller flows it gushing
From its deep--the heart!...Read more of this...
by
Schiller, Friedrich von
...e the ill Demon of the night,
Stooping his pinions' shadowy sway
Upon the righted pilgrim's way:
But, unrequited Love! thy dart
Plunged deepest its envenomed smart,
And Roderick, with thine anguish stung,
At length the hand of Douglas wrung,
While eyes that mocked at tears before
With bitter drops were running o'er.
The death-pangs of long-cherished hope
Scarce in that ample breast had scope
But, struggling wit...Read more of this...
by
Scott, Sir Walter
...ainst heartbeats
before the winter,
before the winter
buries us
in her usual shroud of ice.
I turn to you
knowing that
unrequited love
is good
for poetry,
knowing that pain
will nudge the muse
as well as anything,
knowing that you
are afraid, fettered
to a life
you do not love,
& so unfree
that freedom seems
more fearful even
than the familiar
business
of being
a grumbling slave.
I lived
that way
once,
& I know
that freedom
is its own reward,
that it propagates
itself
by me...Read more of this...
by
Jong, Erica
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