Powerful examples of themes of love and loss in poetry: examples for writers

Imagine this: it’s 2 a.m., you’re scrolling through old messages from someone you shouldn’t miss anymore, and a random poem pops up in your feed that somehow says exactly what you’re feeling. That moment—that jolt of recognition—is why poets keep returning to love and loss.

Before talking theory, it helps to sit with a few of the best examples of themes of love and loss in poetry. Notice how different they are in tone and style, but how they circle the same emotional core.

• William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?") – A love poem obsessed with loss. Shakespeare praises the beloved’s beauty, but the real theme is fear of time and death. Love is framed as something that can outlast physical loss through art.
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “How Do I Love Thee?” – On the surface, a celebration of devotion; underneath, a quiet awareness of mortality: "if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death." Love and loss are braided together in one promise.
• W.H. Auden, “Funeral Blues” – A raw portrait of grief after a lover’s death. The speaker wants the world to stop because love has ended. It’s one of the clearest examples of a theme of love shattered by irreversible loss.
• Pablo Neruda, “Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)” – Romantic love plus breakup plus memory. The relationship is over, but the speaker keeps circling back, proving that loss doesn’t end a love story; it just moves it into the mind.
• Carol Ann Duffy, “Anne Hathaway” – Shakespeare’s wife speaks from beyond the grave. The poem turns marital love into metaphor and shows how memory transforms loss into a kind of ongoing presence.
• Ocean Vuong, “Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong” – Self-love and generational trauma meet. Romantic and familial losses echo through the poem, but the core is a promise of future love for the self, after surviving those losses.

All of these are powerful examples of themes of love and loss in poetry: examples that show how flexible the theme can be. It’s not just “I love you” and “you left.” It’s time, death, distance, trauma, and transformation.

Classic examples of themes of love and loss in poetry: examples from the canon

When people say “love poetry,” they often picture roses and sonnets. But if you look closely at the canon, the best examples of themes of love and loss in poetry are often darker and more complicated than the greeting-card version.

Take Shakespeare’s sonnets. In Sonnet 73 ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold"), the speaker compares himself to late autumn, twilight, and dying embers. This is a love poem, but the engine of its emotion is the awareness of coming loss. The beloved is urged to love more intensely because time is running out. Love is sharpened by mortality.

In John Donne’s work, love and loss often appear as arguments with God, time, and distance. In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” Donne’s speaker tells his wife not to grieve when they are separated. He uses the famous compass metaphor—two legs joined at the center—to show that true love can survive physical distance. Here, the theme of loss is not death but separation, and the poem insists that deep love transforms loss into a spiritual test rather than an ending.

The Romantic poets, writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, offer more examples. In John Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” a knight falls in love with a mysterious woman who abandons him. The poem reads like a fever dream, but it’s really about desire, illusion, and the emptiness that follows when love was never what it seemed. Love and loss become inseparable: the more intense the passion, the more devastating the aftermath.

These classic poems are some of the best examples of themes of love and loss in poetry because they show how loss doesn’t just mean “breakup” or “death.” It can mean aging, distance, disillusionment, or the loss of an ideal.

Modern and contemporary examples of love and loss in poetry

Fast-forward to the 20th and 21st centuries, and you’ll see poets expanding what counts as love—and what counts as loss.

In Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” the speaker questions whether the lover ever existed at all: "I think I made you up inside my head." This is a powerful example of how mental health and imagination complicate love. The loss here is not just of a person, but of certainty, stability, and trust in one’s own mind. (For context on how depression and mood affect perception and relationships, see resources from the National Institute of Mental Health.)

Langston Hughes, in poems like “Love Song for Lucinda,” treats love as something dangerous and consuming. Love feels like fire, like a steep hill, like deep water. The implied loss is of safety and control. These poems give us examples of themes of love and loss in poetry where the “loss” is personal freedom or innocence.

More recently, poets such as Ada Limón and Jericho Brown thread love and loss through family histories, racial trauma, and queer identity. In Limón’s work, love often appears alongside the potential loss of the body through illness, climate anxiety, or violence. Brown’s poems show how romantic love is shaped by the risk of social rejection and physical danger. The theme of loss widens from “I lost you” to “I could lose my life, my safety, my right to love openly.”

Online, in 2024 and 2025, you see love-and-loss poetry everywhere—from Instagram micro-poems to spoken-word videos on YouTube and TikTok. Short, shareable lines about breakups, ghosting, and situationships dominate social feeds. These might not always be formally complex, but they are very real examples of themes of love and loss in poetry: examples drawn straight from how people actually date and separate now.

How poets combine romantic love with grief and death

One of the strongest through-lines in the history of poetry is the combination of romantic love with literal grief and death.

Auden’s “Funeral Blues” is the classic modern example. The speaker has lost a lover and demands that the entire universe respond—stop the clocks, silence the pianos, pack up the moon and dismantle the sun. The exaggeration is the point: when you lose your great love, the world should stop, even if it doesn’t.

Another example is Seamus Heaney’s “The Strand,” where a quiet scene with his wife on a beach becomes charged with the knowledge that time is limited. The poem never shouts about death, but the awareness of eventual loss makes the ordinary moment feel sacred.

In many cultures, love and loss are linked through rituals around mourning. Elegies—poems of lament for the dead—often talk about the dead through the language of love. Consider Mary Oliver’s poems about animals, nature, and partners; love is expressed through attention, and loss is expressed through continued attention after death. Grief becomes a way of loving what’s gone.

Psychologists and medical researchers have long noted that grief has real physical effects—sleep changes, appetite shifts, even increased health risks, particularly after the loss of a spouse or long-term partner. The National Institutes of Health and Mayo Clinic both discuss how bereavement can affect the body and mind. Poets were mapping those symptoms centuries earlier, describing insomnia, exhaustion, and numbness long before we had clinical terms.

These are some of the best examples of themes of love and loss in poetry: examples where romantic love cannot be separated from the reality of mortality.

Non-romantic love and loss: family, friendship, and self

Love poems are not just about couples. Some of the most moving examples of themes of love and loss in poetry are about parents, children, siblings, and friends.

Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” describes a young boy coming home from school to find that his little brother has died. The poem is restrained, almost quiet—but that restraint makes the loss feel even sharper. It’s a poem about family love and the shattering of a household.

In Natasha Trethewey’s work, especially in collections like Native Guard, love and loss appear in the relationship between mother and daughter, and between Black Americans and a country that has harmed them. The death of a parent becomes tied to historical erasure and racism. Love and loss stretch beyond the personal into the political.

Friendship, too, is a rich site for this theme. Tennyson’s long poem In Memoriam A.H.H. mourns a close friend, Arthur Hallam. Throughout, Tennyson wrestles with faith, doubt, and the meaning of suffering. This is a classic example of how the loss of a beloved friend can raise questions about the nature of love itself.

Then there’s self-love, which is a major trend in 2020s poetry. Many contemporary poets write about leaving toxic relationships and learning to love themselves afterward. The “loss” is the relationship; the “gain” is a better relationship with the self. Poems about healing from emotional abuse, for example, often echo concepts discussed in mental health resources from organizations like MentalHealth.gov, but through metaphor and narrative rather than clinical language.

These real examples show that when we talk about examples of themes of love and loss in poetry, examples are not limited to romance. Any deep attachment can become the center of a love-and-loss poem.

Using these examples of themes of love and loss in poetry in your own writing

So how do you move from reading to writing? Studying examples of themes of love and loss in poetry: examples from different eras gives you a kind of toolbox.

You might notice that:

• Some poets focus on one moment—the breakup text, the funeral, the goodbye at the airport—and zoom in so closely that time almost stops.
• Others braid timelines, moving between the first kiss and the last argument, the hospital room and the childhood memory.
• Some poems argue with loss, insisting that love survives in memory, art, or faith.
• Others accept loss and show how a person begins to rebuild afterward.

If you want to write your own love-and-loss poem, you can:

• Start with a specific scene. Instead of “you left me,” try “you left your coffee half-finished on the table.”
• Choose a type of loss: time, distance, death, betrayal, disillusionment, or even the loss of an imagined future.
• Decide how your speaker talks to loss: Do they rage? Bargain? Joke? Go quiet?

Looking back at the best examples of themes of love and loss in poetry, examples include playful poems that still hurt, angry poems that secretly want reconciliation, and quiet poems that never say “love” but make you feel it in every line.

The goal is not to copy Shakespeare or Neruda or a 2025 Instagram poet. It’s to notice how they organize feeling—what they focus on, what they leave out, how they use imagery—and then make your own choices.

FAQ: examples of themes of love and loss in poetry

Q: What are some famous examples of themes of love and loss in poetry?
Some of the most famous examples include Shakespeare’s sonnets (especially Sonnets 18 and 73), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee?”, W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” Pablo Neruda’s “Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines),” Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” and Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break.” Each offers a different angle on how love and loss collide.

Q: Can you give an example of a poem that shows both romantic love and grief?
A strong example of this is Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” which portrays a lover’s death and the surviving partner’s devastation. Another is Carol Ann Duffy’s “Anne Hathaway,” which imagines Shakespeare’s widow remembering their marriage from beyond the grave.

Q: Are there examples of love and loss in poetry that aren’t about couples?
Yes. Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” focuses on a brother’s death, Tennyson’s In Memoriam mourns a close friend, and many contemporary poets write about the loss of parents, children, or communities. These are all examples of themes of love and loss in poetry: examples that expand the idea of what “love poem” means.

Q: How are poets in 2024–2025 writing about love and loss differently?
Many current poets weave in technology (texting, ghosting, long-distance video calls), global crises, and mental health. You’ll see poems about losing someone you only knew online, or about trying to date while anxious or grieving. The core emotions are ancient, but the contexts—apps, pandemics, political unrest—are very current.

Q: How can I use these examples of love and loss to improve my own poetry?
Read widely and pay attention to specific choices: where the poem starts, what images carry the emotion, how the ending feels. Then write from your own experiences, using concrete details instead of abstractions. Let love and loss show up through scenes, objects, and voices, rather than just stating “I am sad” or “I miss you.” That’s what ties your work into the long tradition of poets wrestling with the same theme.