This is a heartbreak poem about losing somebody and the devastating effect it can have on us. ![]() It’s best to keep a little passion back: ‘He that made this knows all the cost, / For he gave all his heart and lost.’ ![]() Yeats, ‘ Never Give All the Heart’.Īs the title of this short Yeats poem makes clear, Yeats offers the would-be lover some advice: don’t dive headlong into love or infatuation, for your beloved won’t thank you for it. We could have chosen any number of Housman poems to include here, but we’ve opted for this short four-line poem, reproduced in full above.ħ. Housman (1859-1936), who never married because he harboured a decades-long love for another man, Moses Jackson. No list of heartbreak poems would be complete without something from the laureate of the broken heart, A. I shook his hand, and tore my heart in sunder,Īnd went with half my life about my ways. He would not stay for me to stand and gaze. He would not stay for me, and who can wonder? Housman, ‘He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?’. ![]() The recurring refrain, ‘He cometh not’, and ‘He will not come’, highlights Mariana’s status as a victim of unrequited love.Ħ. It is perhaps Tennyson’s first great success as a poet, written when he was only just into his twenties. The imagery of the poem is vivid and memorable, from the ‘mouse’ that ‘behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d’ or the ‘blue fly’ that ‘sung in the pane’. So begins this early poem, published in 1830, which ‘arose to the music of Shakespeare’s words’ (according to Tennyson) – the words in question being taken from Measure for Measure, in which ‘the dejected Mariana’ dwells ‘at the moated grange’, having been forsaken by Angelo, who promised to marry her but then broke his promise.
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