Grief Poems: How to Write Poems About Grief

Poems about grief are any poems that take loss as their subject, directly or indirectly. That loss can be the death of a person we love, or another form of loss or change.

Grief poems have been written about the end of a marriage or relationship, the loss of a self, a way of life, a dream never realized, or the disappearance of a species or a landscape. Poems about grief can take many forms: some are elegies, others are arguments. But the best grief poems don’t attempt to solve loss. Instead, they stay with it.

In this article, we’ll look at the value of writing poems about grief, what makes grief poems work, explore some of the most powerful poems about grief written by contemporary and canonical poets, and offer practical approaches for writing your own, whether you’ve been writing for decades or are just beginning.

Why Write Poems About Grief

During times of loss and grief, many of us naturally turn to poetry. A friend once told me that grief is essentially gratitude. I’ve carried that idea with me ever since and it frames how I approach writing poems about death and loss.

Though loss is one of the most universal human experiences, it is always unique to the individual. No two grief poems sound the same, because no two losses are the same. Grief exposes the inadequacies of language. Clichés and abstraction feel dishonest. What we reach for instead is something more precise, more strange. The best grief poems hold space for the complex, sometimes conflicting emotions that loss brings. 

The best grief poems hold space for the complex, sometimes conflicting emotions that loss brings. 

Grief poems don’t necessarily provide answers or fix anything. But in my own writing about loss, I’ve found that poems allow me to access emotions I didn’t know I was feeling, including ones that were unexpected or seemed counterintuitive. After my father died in 2015, I wrote several poems that were not only addressed to him, but in argument with him. I was trying to make sense of what was unresolved between us, what I’d never gotten to say to him, and my anger at the fact that he was gone.

Poems about grief can also help us connect with others during a time when ordinary language fails. As poet Kevin Young writes in his introduction to The Art of Losing, an anthology of poems about grief and loss, “grief can provide fellowship with others interested in the experience; it brings out the best in us, and at times the worst, if only because it is utterly human. It can feel inevitable, but it is so personal, so differently pitched for each, that it can reside across a great gulf. Yet poetry, like grief, can be the thing that bridges the gap between us, that brings us together and binds us.”

Grief poems can also serve as a tribute, a record, or a way of keeping someone or something present. I’ve found that returning to a loss across revisions or multiple poems, and over months or years, helps my relationship to it evolve. The poem becomes a place to go back to. Each time I return, the grief has changed shape. When I reread an old grief poem, I encounter not only the person I lost, but the different versions of myself at different distances from that loss. 

Not all grief is private. It can be historical, inherited, or cultural. Poems about grief can also bear witness, not only to one’s own loss but to a collective loss that goes beyond the individual. As Claudia Rankine said in a 2015 interview in The Spectacle, “How people feel, what they feel, what breaks them, how trauma resonates through their lives […] that’s a legitimate space in poetry.”

Grief is always unique and highly personal, and whatever serves you in this time is valid.

Even if you’re not ready to write about a loss yet, reading poems about grief can help. When you are ready, know there are no rules. Grief is always unique and highly personal, and whatever serves you in this time is valid.

What Makes Grief Poems Work

What makes a grief poem work? While every poem about loss is different, grief poetry often relies on certain qualities of tone, structure, and approach that are worth understanding both as a reader and as a writer. These elements appear again and again in some of the most powerful poems about grief.

While every poem about loss is different, grief poetry often relies on certain qualities of tone, structure, and approach that are worth understanding both as a reader and as a writer.

Tone in Grief Poems: The Complexity Beyond Sorrow

Grief poems are not always somber. The best ones allow for the full complexity of loss: anger, dark humor, tenderness, reckoning, gratitude, and even joy. Grief rarely arrives in the form of one clean emotion, and a poem that insists on sorrow alone may ring false. Give yourself permission to write the complicated parts: the anger, the unresolved questions, the thing you never got to say, how you will never be the same after this loss.

As Marie Howe said in a 2011 interview on Fresh Air, “every poem holds the unspeakable inside it, the unsayable […] the thing that you can’t really say because it’s too complicated, it’s too complex for us. Every poem has that silence deep in the center of it.”

The best grief poems allow for the full complexity of loss: anger, dark humor, tenderness, reckoning, gratitude, and even joy.

That silence often holds more than sorrow. Poet Hanif Abdurraqib shared in a 2023 NPR interview with Rachel Martin that he is “of the belief that one doesn’t move past loss.” His poem “The Prestige” enacts exactly this complexity: “Gratitude, not for love itself, but for the way it can end / without a house on fire.” Sometimes one of grief’s most honest emotions is relief.

Specificity in Poems About Grief

Some of the most powerful grief poems reach for the specific and tangible rather than the feeling itself. Instead of stating “I miss her,” a poem might name the particular object on the nightstand, the smell of her jacket after coming in from the cold, or the way the dog looks for her in the different rooms of the house still.

Sharon Olds does this masterfully in “While He Told Me,” a poem in which the speaker absorbs devastating news through a series of precise, physical observations: what she sees in the room, what she touches. The specific news, exactly what he told the speaker, is not specified for the reader, but the emotion arrives through the speaker’s physical experience and through concrete detail, rather than her naming the feeling.

Some of the most powerful grief poems reach for the specific and tangible rather than the feeling itself.

When writing poems about grief, don’t forget the body itself; what your hands did, what your throat felt like, how you moved through the world, what you could or couldn’t eat. The body holds grief before language does.

Why Grief Poems Resist Resolution

One of the most important things a grief poem can do is resist the consolatory turn, or tying things up with a nice bow. The urge to end with hope, meaning, or acceptance is understandable, but often weakens the poem. The best grief poems don’t necessarily fix. They stay with what is difficult and unresolved. They trust the reader to sit there too.

The urge to end with hope, meaning, or acceptance is understandable, but often weakens the poem.

Patricia Smith’s poem “What Daughters Come Down To” demonstrates this tension without releasing it. The speaker is on the phone with her aging mother, who cannot say “I love you” to her (and perhaps has never been able to). The poem ends not with reconciliation but with the mother’s thought hanging unspoken: “I love you too, she thinks out loud, but can’t.” The grief here is not about death, but about a relationship that has never fully arrived, and likely never will.

Non-Linear Time of Grief Poems

There’s something about the form of a grief poem, its compression, white space, permission to be non-linear, that mirrors how grief actually moves. We don’t grieve in straight lines. Neither does a poem. Grief distorts time. The past keeps erupting into the present, a smell or a song or photo pulls you back without warning. Many poems about grief reflect this, collapsing or layering time rather than moving through it sequentially.

We don’t grieve in straight lines. Neither does a poem.

Jack Gilbert’s “Michiko Dead” does this in a single extended image: a man carrying a box that is too heavy, so he has to shift his grip endlessly, “without ever putting the box down.” The poem has no before or after. It is the perpetual present of grief, where time has not stopped but collapsed into a single unending moment of endurance and suffering. He will be carrying this box forever.

Form and Repetition in Grief Poetry

Structure can also help create order in the chaos of loss, giving shape to what is otherwise formless. Many of the best grief poems use traditional forms. The pantoum and villanelle are particularly well suited to grief poetry. A villanelle is a nineteen-line poem built around two repeating lines that return throughout and come together in the final stanza. Built on repetition and return, the repeated lines mean something new each time they appear. The grief shifts and deepens with each return of the refrain, the way loss does over time.

Structure can also help create order in the chaos of loss, giving shape to what is otherwise formless.

Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” is the clearest example I know of form doing this work. The villanelle’s repeating refrain (“The art of losing isn’t hard to master”) starts as bravado and ends as a truth the speaker can barely convince herself of. Each time the line comes back, it reveals something new. By the final stanza the form is straining under the weight of what it’s trying to hold and the speaker is forced to name the actual loss, a person, a “you.” Bishop wrote seventeen drafts of this poem before arriving at the final stanza. The parenthetical “(Write it!)” didn’t appear until the eleventh draft.

Poems About Grief: A Reading List

These are some of the grief poems I return to most and recommend to students. They span forms, voices, and different kinds of loss. I recommend reading them multiple times.

1. Marie Howe, “What the Living Do”: This is a letter to someone who has passed that is built from the small details of daily life: spilled coffee on a sleeve, a clogged drain, the return of winter. The poem ends in one of the most powerful lines about grief that I know of.
2. Sharon Olds, “While He Told Me”: In this poem, the speaker chronicles the physical details around her (“I looked from small thing / to small thing in our room”) while hearing devastating news. This poem is about the grief of a relationship ending before the person has even left.
3. Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art”: A celebrated villanelle that shows how small losses accumulate and signal a deeper greater loss that cannot be mastered. This poem is one of the most instructive examples of what constraint can do in grief poetry because the form holds together just long enough for the speaker to say what she’s been avoiding.
4. Jack Gilbert, “Michiko Dead”: This poem, written after the death of his wife Michiko Nogami, is structured by one extended image that captures the paradox of grief: a man carrying a box that is both too heavy and can never be put down.
5. Patricia Smith, “What Daughters Come Down To”: A grief poem about a loss experienced with someone who is still alive. In this case, a mother who cannot say I love you to the speaker. Some of the most painful grief poems are about people we haven’t lost yet, or those we never truly had. 
6. Hanif Abdurraqib, “The Prestige”: This is a complicated poem that understands the scope of grief (“Some wounds cannot be hushed / no matter the way one writes of blood”), but reminds us that poems about grief don’t have to insist on just sorrow. The cognitive dissonance of feeling relief after a loss is real and grief poetry gives us permission to name it.
7. Claudia Rankine, from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely [There was a time]: This prose poetry excerpt shows how death goes from distant and strange to something inside the self. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely is part lyric, part essay, part cultural criticism and worth reading in its entirety.
8. Kevin Young, “Ledge”: This quiet and spare poem presents loss as a language you can only learn by living inside of it. The white space between each section contains as much as the words do in the poem.
9. Mary Oliver, “In Blackwater Woods”: This poem offers clear instructions: love what is mortal and, when the time comes, let it go. Oliver was a master of finding grief inside the natural world and making it accessible.

How to Write Poems About Grief

There is no single way to write a grief poem. What follows are entry points, not a process or formula, and they can be tried in any order. Take what serves you and leave the rest.

1. Don’t start with the poem. Journal first. Write down sensory memories, objects, fragments of conversations, or draft a letter to who or what you lost. Let the material accumulate and percolate before you try to shape it into something.
2. Start small. Try a haiku, a tanka, or a single image. Make this low stakes and low pressure. You don’t have to write the whole thing at once, and you don’t have to write it well the first time. 
3. Go outside. Try a sit spot, which is when you go into nature and observe one place slowly for a period of time. I usually sit in one place for 5-10 minutes and then begin writing whatever comes to me. I’ve found that the natural world demonstrates and understands loss in ways that we, as humans, can be students of.
4. Imitate or embody a poet you love. Take the tone or form of a poem that moves you and bring your own subjects and themes to it. Let another poet’s structure or style help you while you find your footing.
5. Write a list. These could be things you want to remember, things you’re grateful for, or things left unsaid. List poems are low pressure and often surprising in where they end up and how objects can accumulate into feeling.
6. Try a form. You might try an elegy, pantoum, villanelle, or Jericho Brown’s duplex form. Fixed forms can give you something to push against, and the constraints can be a relief and an opening. You might also try an anti-elegy, a poem that argues against loss rather than accepts it.
7. Write what you’re most afraid to write. When you’re ready, try to write the thing you’ve been circling but are afraid to face. This is often where a real poem is waiting.
8. Don’t write alone. Share your drafts in a trusted space, whether that is a workshop, a writing group, or with a single reader you trust. Grief poetry written in community can go deeper than grief poetry written in isolation.
9. Allow poetry to not be the medium. If the poem isn’t working, that’s okay. Sometimes grief needs a different form entirely, such as a conversation, a walk, a long silence, or simply more time.

I’ll close with a poem. In the days after my older sister died suddenly, a close friend sent me Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods.” I’ve returned to it many times since. Reading it today brings me back to gratitude, for the years I had with her, and for what her joy taught me to see in my own life.

Oliver writes: “To live in this world / you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it / against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.”

Write Poems About Grief at Writers.com

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About Caitlin:

Originally from Southside Virginia, Caitlin Scarano (she/they) is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. They hold a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her second full length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize. Caitlin is a member of the Washington Wolf Advisory Group. Find them at caitlinscarano.com