Poetry & Analysis
Selected Poems
Sad PoemsMusic When Soft Voices Die
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
Overview Short Summary
The poem says that love can remain in memory after the beloved is gone, just as music and fragrance linger after their source disappears.
Core Ideas Main Themes
- Memory after loss: What is gone can still remain inside the mind.
- Love that remains: Affection continues beyond absence.
- Beauty and grief: Soft images carry sadness.
Emotional Effect Tone and Mood
The tone is gentle and elegiac. The mood is soft, sad, and reflective.
One Word Is Too Often Profaned
One word is too often profaned
For me to profane it,
One feeling too falsely disdained
For thee to disdain it;
One hope is too like despair
For prudence to smother,
And pity from thee more dear
Than that from another.
I can give not what men call love,
But wilt thou accept not
The worship the heart lifts above
And the Heavens reject not,—
The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow?
Overview Short Summary
The speaker avoids the ordinary word love and describes a yearning that feels distant, worshipful, and impossible.
Core Ideas Main Themes
- Unreachable love: The beloved seems distant like a star.
- Devotion: The feeling becomes almost sacred.
- Desire and despair: Hope is close to pain.
Emotional Effect Tone and Mood
The tone is reverent and sorrowful. The mood fits readers looking for short sad poems about loving someone they cannot have.
Sonnet 87 Farewell Thou Art Too Dear
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgment making.
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
Overview Short Summary
The speaker accepts losing a beloved who seems too valuable to remain his, comparing the relationship to a dream that ends on waking.
Core Ideas Main Themes
- Farewell: The poem directly faces separation.
- Unworthiness: The speaker feels he cannot deserve the beloved.
- Love as a lost dream: Happiness disappears when reality returns.
Emotional Effect Tone and Mood
The tone is formal, sad, and self-effacing. The mood is quietly devastating.
Sonnet 97 How Like a Winter
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer’s time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widowed wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seemed to me
But hope of orphans, and unfathered fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:
Or, if they sing, ’tis with so dull a cheer,
That leaves look pale, dreading the winter’s near.
Overview Short Summary
The poem turns absence from the beloved into emotional winter, even when the outer world is full of summer and harvest.
Core Ideas Main Themes
- Distance: Absence changes the speaker’s whole world.
- Emotional coldness: Winter becomes a metaphor for separation.
- Missing someone: Even beauty feels empty without the beloved.
Emotional Effect Tone and Mood
The tone is lonely and reflective. The mood is bleak because love’s absence changes the entire season.
Since Theres No Help
Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part;
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
That thus so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.
Overview Short Summary
The speaker tries to end a relationship cleanly, but the final couplet admits that love might still be revived.
Core Ideas Main Themes
- Breakup: The poem begins with a decision to part.
- Last hope: The ending leaves one door open.
- Love near death: Love is imagined as a dying person.
Emotional Effect Tone and Mood
The tone begins firm and bitter, then turns vulnerable. The mood is dramatic and unresolved.
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