Missing someone you love is one of the most profound emotions we experience. Whether it’s due to distance, separation, or the loss of a loved one, poetry has long served as a way to express this pain. The feelings of longing, remembrance, sorrow, and hope often come alive in verse, giving voice to what words alone cannot fully express.
This article explores 12 moving poems about missing someone you love. Each poem captures a unique facet of yearning. Some speak to grief, others to romantic separation, and some to the ache of memory. Where full text is too long, excerpts are provided. Each entry includes the poet’s name and the source of the poem. Together, they form a powerful portrait of human connection and absence.
12 Poems About Missing Someone You Love
1. “I Measure Every Grief I Meet” by Emily Dickinson
Source: The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (Poem #561)
Emily Dickinson explores universal grief by comparing her own pain with that of others. In this poem, she captures the quiet ache of loss that follows someone everywhere.
“I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing Eyes –
I wonder if It weighs like Mine –
Or has an Easier size.”
Dickinson does not name the source of her grief. That omission allows readers to project their own loss onto the poem. The act of measuring grief suggests the way we try to understand our sorrow by observing others. The tone is calm but introspective, as if she is always carrying a silent question: “Do you miss someone too?”
2. “Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden
Source: Another Time (1940)
Auden’s famous elegy became even more widely known after being featured in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. It speaks directly to the heartbreak of losing someone who was the center of your world.
“He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest…”
The poem uses strong imagery and finality—stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone—to show how deeply the speaker’s life has changed. When someone dies, the world seems to pause, yet cruelly keeps turning. The missing person was everything, and now that person is gone. This poem is both personal and universal.
3. “Time Does Not Bring Relief” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Source: Collected Poems (1950)
In this sonnet, Millay pushes back against the cliché that time heals all wounds.
“There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.”
Rather than getting better, the speaker’s grief lingers. Familiar places become painful because of the memories they hold. The poem captures how presence turns into absence, and how that absence echoes in daily life. Millay uses the formal structure of a sonnet to frame chaotic emotions.
4. “When You Are Old” by W. B. Yeats
Source: The Rose (1893)
This poem is a romantic reflection from a man who loved deeply and was not loved back.
“But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.”
Yeats imagines the woman he loved growing old, reading the poem, and remembering him. The phrase “pilgrim soul” suggests a journey—the emotional and spiritual journey of a person over time. There is sadness in his voice, but also a quiet pride. He misses the love he never fully received.
5. “Come, And Be My Baby” by Maya Angelou
Source: Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women (1995)
Though not explicitly about missing someone who is gone, this poem evokes the emotional exhaustion of the modern world—and the deep human need for intimacy.
“The highway is full of big cars
going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that’ll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass…”
Angelou presents a world that is rushed, lonely, and unstable. The refrain—“Come, and be my baby”—is a simple, powerful call for closeness. It suggests longing for someone who might be near or far. It shows how the absence of love or understanding can feel like a void.
6. “Love and a Question” by Robert Frost
Source: A Boy’s Will (1913)
In this poem, a bridegroom is asked for shelter by a stranger on his wedding night.
“A stranger came to the door at eve,
And he spoke the bridegroom fair.”
The bridegroom faces a choice: compassion for the traveler, or intimacy with his new wife. The poem subtly evokes emotional distance even on a night of supposed closeness. What is left unsaid carries as much weight as what is spoken. In a way, it speaks to a deeper kind of missing—the gap between people who are physically close but emotionally far.
7. “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
Source: Geography III (1976)
Bishop’s villanelle begins by suggesting that loss is manageable. But as the poem progresses, the losses become more personal.
“I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.”
By the end, the poem is about losing someone the speaker deeply loved.
“—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied.”
The tone tries to stay controlled, but cracks appear. The poem mirrors the experience of missing someone—you try to be brave, to stay composed, but the feelings still surface.
8. “To His Lost Lover” by Simon Armitage
Source: Kid (1992)
This contemporary poem offers a raw and honest take on romantic separation.
“Now they are no longer you, the clothes
are not the clothes you wore…”
Armitage focuses on everyday objects that have changed meaning now that the person is gone. The shift is subtle but powerful. The lover’s absence alters the entire landscape of the speaker’s life. Memory distorts reality, and what remains are ghosts in physical form—shirts, letters, traces of scent.
9. “She Is Far From Land” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Source: Poems and Prose (1918, posthumously published)
This poem uses maritime imagery to show the emotional experience of separation.
“She is far from land,
She is near the sea;
With no one to understand
What her life may be.”
Hopkins uses rhythm and internal rhyme to convey loneliness. The sea represents both freedom and danger. The woman is isolated—not just physically but emotionally. The poem evokes a subtle sense of missing someone who is emotionally adrift.
10. “Separation” by W. S. Merwin
Source: The Second Four Books of Poems (1993)
A minimalist poem, “Separation” expresses the pain of absence in just a few lines.
“Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”
This poem captures the omnipresence of grief and longing. The metaphor of stitching suggests permanence. Even mundane tasks are colored by loss. The brevity of the poem reflects the sharp, simple truth: some absences are inescapable.
11. “The Voice” by Thomas Hardy
Source: Poems of 1912–13 (written after his wife’s death)
After the death of his wife Emma, Hardy wrote a series of poems full of regret and longing.
“Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were“…
Hardy imagines hearing her voice on the wind. There’s a ghostly quality to the lines. He wants to believe she’s still present, still calling out. The sadness in this poem comes from both grief and guilt. It is a masterful exploration of love after death.
12. “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne
Source: Poems (1633)
Donne’s metaphysical poem redefines separation. Rather than mourning absence, it praises a spiritual connection that transcends distance.
“Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion…”
The comparison of love to a compass—one leg moving while the other stays rooted—is famous:
“Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.”
Donne transforms missing into devotion. Absence becomes proof of enduring love, rather than loss. It offers comfort rather than pain.
Conclusion
Poetry has the power to explore emotions that are difficult to name. When we miss someone, our thoughts swirl with memories, regrets, and hopes. The poets above—from Dickinson to Donne, from Bishop to Armitage—show how language can reach across the gap of absence and offer comfort.
Whether you are mourning a death, navigating a breakup, or coping with long-distance love, these poems provide words for your experience. They remind us that we are not alone. Across time and space, others have felt what we feel. And their words, like echoes, still speak.
These 12 poems are not a cure, but a companion. They invite you to sit with sorrow—and maybe even find beauty in it.
