Have you ever loved someone you knew you could never have?
The ache of unrequited love is a universal experience that can leave us feeling hollow and yearning.
These 10 poems are the perfect recipe to taste the heart-wrenching agony of loving someone out of reach through poetry.
Dive into these poignant poems and let their words comfort and heal your aching heart.
My favorite poems about loving someone you can’t have
#1 “Buried Love” by Sara Teasdale
I have come to bury Love
Beneath a tree,
In the forest tall and black
Where none can see.
I shall put no flowers at his head,
Nor stone at his feet,
For the mouth I loved so much
Was bittersweet.
I shall go no more to his grave,
For the woods are cold.
I shall gather as much of joy
As my hands can hold.
I shall stay all day in the sun
Where the wide winds blow,—
But oh, I shall cry at night
When none will know.
I chose this as my favorite poem as this resonates with how it feels like when you love someone intensely yet you know that love must remain hidden.
The silent pain and longing that you have to endure without anyone knowing can quite be a universal feeling.
This touching and relatable read is a great way to express the pain one is feeling, especially when no one is there to offer comfort.
9 more poems about loving someone you can’t have
#2 “Indifference” by Madison Cawein
She is so dear the wildflowers near
Each path she passes by,
Are over fain to kiss again
Her feet and then to die.
She is so fair the wild birds there
That sing upon the bough,
Have learned the staff of her sweet laugh,
And sing no other now.
Alas! that she should never see,
Should never care to know,
The wildflower’s love, the bird’s above,
And his, who loves her so.
#3 “The Unattainable” by Harry Romaine
Tom’s album was filled with the pictures of belles
Who had captured his manly heart,
From the fairy who danced for the front-row swells
To the maiden who tooled her cart;
But one face as fair as a cloudless dawn
Caught my eye, and I said, “Who’s this?”
“Oh, that,” he replied, with a skilful yawn,
“Is the girl I couldn’t kiss.”
Her face was the best in the book, no doubt,
But I hastily turned the leaf,
For my friend had let his cigar go out,
And I knew I had bared his grief:
For caresses we win and smiles we gain
Yield only a transient bliss,
And we’re all of us prone to sigh in vain
For “the girl we couldn’t kiss.”
#4 “The Hidden Love” by Arthur Hugh Clough
O let me love my love unto myself alone,
And know my knowledge to the world unknown;
No witness to my vision call,
Beholding, unbeheld of all;
And worship Thee, with Thee withdrawn apart,
Whoe’er, Whate’er Thou art,
Within the closest veil of mine own inmost heart.
What is it then to me
If others are inquisitive to see?
Why should I quit my place to go and ask
If other men are working at their task?
Leave my own buried roots to go
And see that brother plants shall grow;
And turn away from Thee, O Thou most Holy Light,
To look if other orbs their orbits keep aright,
Around their proper sun,
Deserting Thee, and being undone.
O let me love my love unto myself alone,
And know my knowledge to the world unknown;
And worship Thee, O hid One, O much sought,
As but man can or ought,
Within the abstracted’st shrine of my least breathed-on thought.
Better it were, thou sayest, to consent;
Feast while we may, and live ere life be spent;
Close up clear eyes, and call the unstable sure,
The unlovely lovely, and the filthy pure;
In self-belyings, self-deceivings roll,
And lose in Action, Passion, Talk, the soul.
Nay, better far to mark off thus much air,
And call it Heaven: place bliss and glory there;
Fix perfect homes in the unsubstantial sky,
And say, what is not, will be by-and-bye.
#5 “Secret Love” by John Clare
I hid my love when young till I
Couldn’t bear the buzzing of a fly;
I hid my love to my despite
Till I could not bear to look at light:
I dare not gaze upon her face
But left her memory in each place;
Where’er I saw a wild flower lie
I kissed and bade my love good-bye.
I met her in the greenest dells,
Where dewdrops pearl the wood bluebells;
The lost breeze kissed her bright blue eye,
The bee kissed and went singing by,
A sunbeam found a passage there,
A gold chain round her neck so fair;
As secret as the wild bee’s song
She lay there all the summer long.
I hid my love in field and town
Till e’en the breeze would knock me down;
The bees seemed singing ballads o’er,
The fly’s bass turned a lion’s roar;
And even silence found a tongue,
To haunt me all the summer long;
The riddle nature could not prove
Was nothing else but secret love.
#6 “Sonnet 87” by William Shakespeare
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 gravest, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gavest it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprison growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
#7 “Never Seek To Tell Thy Love” by William Blake
Never seek to tell thy love
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.
I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears
Ah, she doth depart.
Soon as she was gone from me
A traveller came by
Silently, invisibly
O, was no deny.
#8 “The Secret” by Félix Arvers (Thomas Ashe, Translator)
My life its secret and its mystery has,
A love eternal in a moment born;
There is no hope to help my evil case,
And she knows naught who makes me thus forlorn.
And I unmark’d shall ever by her pass
Aye at her side, and yet for aye alone;
And I shall waste my bitter days, alas!
And never dare to claim my love my own!
And she whom God has made so sweet and dear,
Will go her way, distraught, and never hear
This murmur round her of my love and pain;
To austere duty true, will go her way,
And read these verses full of her, and say,
“Who is this woman that he sings of then?”
#9 “Evasion” by Madison Cawein
I
Why do I love you, who have never given
My heart encouragement or any cause?
Is it because, as earth is held of heaven,
Your soul holds mine by some mysterious laws?
Perhaps, unseen of me, within your eyes
The answer lies.
II
From your sweet lips no word hath ever fallen
To tell my heart its love is not in vain—
The bee that woos the flow’r hath honey and pollen
To cheer him on and bring him back again:
But what have I, your other friends above,
To feed my love?
III
Still, still you are my dream and my desire;
Your love is an allurement and a dare
Set for attainment, like a shining spire,
Far, far above me in the starry air:
And gazing upward, ’gainst the hope of hope,
I breast the slope.
#10 “Sonnet XXXVI” by George Santayana
We were together, and I longed to tell
How drop by silent drop my bosom bled.
I took some verses full of you, and read,
Waiting for God to work some miracle.
They told how love had plunged in burning hell
One half my soul, while the other half had fled
Upon love’s wings to heaven; and you said:
“I like the verses; they are written well.”
If I had knelt confessing “It is you,
You are my torment and my rapture too,”
I should have seen you rise in flushed disdain:
“For shame to say so, be it false or true!”
And the sharp sword that ran me through and through,
On your white bosom too had left a stain.