Poems to Make You Cry

By Paul Laurence Dunbar, Oscar Wilde and Emily Dickenson

Tears. Sometimes our greatest comfort. Often our darkest fear that we are about to be overwhelmed by sudden and uncontrollable feelings.

From misting of the eyes, through soft drizzles on cheek to cascades that would put Niagara falls to shame the event of tears comes in all shapes and sizes. There is something primordial in their arrival. We may be the only animal to actually cry and scientists in their wish to explain everything cite the simultaneous release of endorphins to help relieve the emotional stress, the physical pain, as vital to restore the sense of calm and well-being. But not everything can be explained and pigeon-holed with certainty.

Our quoted authority is not the people in white coats but those with a quill, a heart and a soul that can take these feelings of love and loss and with the ink of words put to verse feelings and emotions that can be re-lived and shared by all. As they venture through depression, war, slavery to heartache and the loss of loved ones our eyes may mist and tears gently fall at what collectively we have done, have experienced, have witnessed and lost.

From Owen and Dickenson to Wheatly and Hopkins our surrender to tears may not be far away.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Portable Poetry
• Release date: Nov 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781835470718

Book preview

Poems to Make You Cry

An Introduction

Tears.  Sometimes our greatest comfort. Often our darkest fear that we are about to be overwhelmed by sudden and uncontrollable feelings.

From misting of the eyes, through soft drizzles on cheek to cascades that would put Niagara falls to shame the event of tears comes in all shapes and sizes.  There is something primordial in their arrival. We may be the only animal to actually cry and scientists in their wish to explain everything cite the simultaneous release of endorphins to help relieve the emotional stress, the physical pain, as vital to restore the sense of calm and well-being. But not everything can be explained and pigeon-holed with certainty.

Our quoted authority is not the people in white coats but those with a quill, a heart and a soul that can take these feelings of love and loss and with the ink of words put to verse feelings and emotions that can be re-lived and shared by all.  As they venture through depression, war, slavery to heartache and the loss of loved ones our eyes may mist and tears gently fall at what collectively we have done, have experienced, have witnessed and lost.

From Owen and Dickenson to Wheatly and Hopkins our surrender to tears may not be far away.

Index of Contents

Because I Liked You by A E Housman

Sonnet 147 - My Love is as a Fever, Longing Still by William Shakespeare

A Broken Appointment by Thomas Hardy

So We'll Go No More a Roving by Lord Byron

When You Are Old by W B Yeats

Sonnet 90 - Then Hate Me When Thou Wilt; If Ever, Now by William Shakespeare

I Shall Not Care by Sara Teasdale

Goodbye by Alun Lewis

The Wind's Lament by John Morris-Jones

Sad-Eyed and Soft and Grey by William Morris

The Sad Shepherd's Passion of Love by George Peele

How Sweet I Roam'd From Field to Field by William Blake

When I Have Fears by John Keats

The Buried Life by Matthew Arnold

We Wear the Mask by Paul Laurence Dunbar

I Am by John Clare

Solitude by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ode XIV - To Solitude by Joseph Warton

Solitude by Harold Munro

Disappointment by Mary E Tucker

A Thought For a Lonely Death Bed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Alone by Edgar Allan Poe

Piano by D H Lawrence

Infelix by Adah Isaacs Menken

Sonnet 66. Tired With All These, For Restful Death by William Shakespeare

Life's Tragedy by Paul Laurence Dunbar

No Worse There is None. Pitched Past, Pitch of Grief by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Ardelia To Melancholy by Anne Kingsmill-Finch

Melancholia by Robert Seymour Bridges

The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde

The Song of the Shirt by Thomas Hood

Enslaved Poem by Claude McKay

The Hunters of Men by John Greenleaf Whittier

The Lynching by Claude McKay

Poems on the Slave Trade. Sonnet VI by Robert Southey

The Slave's Complaint by George Moses Horton

The Slave Mother by Frances E W Harper

The Slave's Singing at Midnight by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon

Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

On Somme by Ivor Gurney

In Flanders Fields by John McCrae

I Have a Rendezvous with Death by Alan Seeger

Fallen by Alice Corbin

In Memoriam (Easter 1915) by Edward Thomas

Anthem For Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen

My Boy Jack by Rudyard Kipling

Tears Ere Thy Death by Khansa

Bereavement In Their Death To Feel by Emily Dickinson

If Grief For Grief Can Touch These by Emily Bronte

Goodbye by Richard Aldington

Goodbye In Fear Goodbye In Sorrow by Christina Rossetti

A Quoi Bon Dire by Charlotte Mew

To One in Grief by Katharine Tynan

I Measure Every Grief by Emily Dickinson

Tears Idle Tears from The Princess by Alfred Lord Tennyson

Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe

Sir Patrick Spens by Anonymous

John Barleycorn, A Ballad by Robert Burns

A Lament by Katharine Tynan

Remember by Christina Rossetti

Epitaph Upon a Child That Died by Robert Herrick

To a Lady and Her Children on the Death of Her Son and Their Brother by Phyllis Wheatley

On the Death of a Child by Edward Silvera

On My First Son by Ben Jonson

The Death of the First Born by Paul Laurence Dunbar

In Memorium. Alphonse Campbell Fordham by Mary Weston Fordham

POEMS TO MAKE YOU CRY

Because I Liked You by A E Housman

Because I liked you better

     Than suits a man to say,

It irked you, and I promised

     To throw the thought away.

To put the world between us

     We parted, stiff and dry;

'Good-bye,' said you, 'forget me.'

     'I will, no fear', said I.

If