Here are my favorite poems about the future categorized:
- Poems about future love
- Poems about life in the future
- Poems about future dreams
- Poems about the unknown future
So if you want the best poems about the future, then you’re in the right place.
Let’s get started!
- 63 Cryptic Poems About the Unknown
- 93 Gripping Poems About Mystery
- 27 Bewildering Poems About Illusion
- 63 Spellbinding Poems About Fate
Motivating Poems About the Future
Explore a handpicked selection of the most exquisite poems about the future, thoughtfully categorized for your browsing pleasure.
From romantic verses that celebrate the promise of future love to contemplative pieces that ponder life in the years to come, our collection showcases a diverse range of works.
With our carefully curated selection, you can find the best poems about the future all in one convenient location.
So take a moment to browse and discover the beauty and wonder that lies ahead!
Keep reading!
My #1 Favorite Poem About the Future
“It’s a Long Way” by William Stanley Braithwaite
It’s a long way the sea-winds blow
Over the sea-plains blue,—
But longer far has my heart to go
Before its dreams come true.
It’s work we must, and love we must,
And do the best we may,
And take the hope of dreams in trust
To keep us day by day.
It’s a long way the sea-winds blow—
But somewhere lies a shore—
Thus down the tide of Time shall flow
My dreams forevermore.
Poems About Future Love
“Golden Eyes” by Rufinus (Andrew Lang, Translator)
Ah, Golden Eyes, to win you yet,
I bring mine April coronet,
The lovely blossoms of the spring,
For you I weave, to you I bring:
These roses with the lilies wet,
The dewy dark-eyed violet,
Narcissus, and the wind-flower wet.
Wilt thou disdain mine offering,
Ah, Golden Eyes?
Crowned with thy lover’s flowers, forget
The pride wherein thy heart is set,
For thou, like these or anything,
Hast but thine hour of blossoming,
Thy spring, and then—the long regret,
Ah, Golden Eyes!
“Finis” by Waring Cuney
Now that our love has drifted
To a quiet close,
Leaving the empty ache
That always follows when beauty goes;
Now that you and I,
Who stood tip-toe on earth
To touch our fingers to the sky,
Have turned away
To allow our little love to die—
Go, dear, seek again the magic touch.
But if you are wise,
As I shall be wise,
You will not again
Love over much.
“For Who?” by Mary Weston Fordham
When the heavens with stars are gleaming
Like a diadem of light,
And the moon’s pale rays are streaming,
Decking earth with radiance bright;
When the autumn’s winds are sighing,
O’er the hill and o’er the lea,
When the summer time is dying,
Wanderer, wilt thou think of me?
When thy life is crowned with gladness,
And thy home with love is blest,
Not one brow o’ercast with sadness,
Not one bosom of unrest—
When at eventide reclining,
At thy hearthstone gay and free,
Think of one whose life is pining,
Breathe thou, love, a prayer for me.
Should dark sorrows make thee languish,
Cause thy cheek to lose its hue,
In the hour of deepest anguish,
Darling, then I’ll grieve with you.
Though the night be dark and dreary,
And it seemeth long to thee,
I would whisper, “be not weary;”
I would pray love, then, for thee.
Well I know that in the future,
I may cherish naught of earth;
Well I know that love needs nurture,
And it is of heavenly birth.
But though ocean waves may sever
I from thee, and thee from me,
Still this constant heart will never,
Never cease to think of thee.
“Dreams” by Alan L. Strang
Away o’er the hills in the valley green
Away from the noise of the busy town;
I dream sweet dreams of the olden days
Of you in your beautiful wedding gown.
I dream that you come and sit by me
And you hold my hand and ruff my hair;
Your eyes shine with a sweet delight
That I used to see so often there.
Then my heart is filled with a hallowed love
And I know t’is but a little way
To the spirit land, and I know that I
Shall meet you there some glad sweet day.
Then our wedding day in the spirit land
Will be filled with love and joy serene;
And the infinite hand will guide us where
The waters are still and the valleys green.
“Plea” by Dorothy Parker
Secrets, you said, would hold us two apart;
You’d have me know of you your least transgression
And so the intimate places of your heart,
Kneeling, you bared to me, as in confession.
Softly you told of loves that went before,—
Of clinging arms, of kisses gladly given;
Luxuriously clean of heart once more,
You rose up, then, and stood before me, shriven.
When this, my day of happiness, is through,
And love, that bloomed so fair, turns brown and brittle,
There is a thing that I shall ask of you—
I, who have given so much, and asked so little.
Some day, when there’s another in my stead;
Again you’ll feel the need of absolution,
And you will go to her, and bow your head,
And offer her your past, as contribution.
When with your list of loves you overcome her,
For Heaven’s sake, keep this one secret from her!
“If Thou Must Love Me, Let It Be for Naught” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
If thou must love me, let it be for naught
Except for love’s sake only. Do not say
“I love her for her smile … her look … her way
Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought
That falls in well with mine, and certes brought
A sense of pleasant ease on such a day.”
For these things in themselves, belovèd, may
Be changed, or change for thee,—and love so wrought,
May be unwrought so. Neither love me for
Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—
A creature might forget to weep, who bore
Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby.
But love me for love’s sake, that evermore
Thou mayst love on, through love’s eternity.
“Love’s Young Dream” by Thomas Moore
O the days are gone when beauty bright
My heart’s chain wove!
When my dream of life, from morn till night,
Was love, still love!
New hope may bloom,
And days may come,
Of milder, calmer beam,
But there ’s nothing half so sweet in life
As love’s young dream!
O, there ’s nothing half so sweet in life
As love’s young dream!
Though the bard to purer fame may soar,
When wild youth ’s past;
Though he win the wise, who frowned before,
To smile at last;
He ’ll never meet
A joy so sweet
In all his noon of fame
As when first he sung to woman’s ear
His soul-felt flame,
And at every close she blushed to hear
The one loved name!
O, that hallowed form is ne’er forgot,
Which first love traced;
Still it lingering haunts the greenest spot
On memory’s waste!
’T was odor fled
As soon as shed;
’T was morning’s wingèd dream;
’T was a light that ne’er can shine again
On life’s dull stream!
O, ’t was a light that ne’er can shine again
On life’s dull stream!
“Some Future Day When What Is Now Is Not” by Arthur Hugh Clough
Some future day when what is now is not,
When all old faults and follies are forgot,
And thoughts of difference passed like dreams away,
We’ll meet again, upon some future day.
When all that hindered, all that vexed our love,
As tall rank weeds will climb the blade above,
When all but it has yielded to decay,
We’ll meet again upon some future day.
When we have proved, each on his course alone,
The wider world, and learnt what’s now unknown,
Have made life clear, and worked out each a way,
We’ll meet again, we shall have much to say.
With happier mood, and feelings born anew,
Our boyhood’s bygone fancies we’ll review,
Talk o’er old talks, play as we used to play,
And meet again, on many a future day.
Some day, which oft our hearts shall yearn to see,
In some far year, though distant yet to be,
Shall we indeed, ye winds and waters, say!
Meet yet again, upon some future day?
“Past-Present-Future” by Browne
The time when I played with the king-cup flowers,
Those golden gifts of summer hours ;
The time when I danced o’er the purple heath,
And scarcely felt the earth beneath,
And, smiling, looked to the sky above,
That spread o’er me in cloudless love ;
When my step was as light as the roving wind,
That kissed the flowers in my tresses twined ;
When my eyes undimmed by a dark tear shone, –
That blessed time is gone, is gone!
The time when I loved to sit at noon,
And hearken to the wood-bird’s tune;
When the flowers and leaves upon each tree,
Were more than flowers and leaves to me;
When my spirit in fancy floated along,
And around my heart was a dream of song ;
The time when I lay by the river’s side,
That had words for me in its murmuring tide ;
When my life, like the waves of the stream, went on,
Bright, pure, and sparkling, —is gone, is gone!
And the hours of darkness and days of gloom,
That shadow and shut out joy, are come;
And there’s a mist on the laughing sea,
And the flowers and leaves are nought to me;
And on my brow are furrows left,
And my lip of ease and smile is reft ;
And the time of gray hairs and trembling limbs,
And the time when sorrow the bright eye dims,
And the time when death seems nought to fear,
So sad is life, is here, is here!
But the time when the quiet grave shall be
A haven, a resting-place for me;
When the strong ties of earth are wrenched,
And the burning fever of life is quenched ;
When the spirit shall leave its mortal mould,
And face to face its God behold ;
When around it joy and gladness shall flow,
Purer than ever it felt below ;
When heaven shall be for ever its home, –
Oh! this holiest time is still to come!
Poems About Life in the Future
“The Crystal Gazer” by Sara Teasdale
I shall gather myself into myself again,
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one,
Fusing them into a polished crystal ball
Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.
I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent,
Watching the future come and the present go,
And the little shifting pictures of people rushing
In restless self-importance to and fro.
“The New Year” by Carrie Williams Clifford
The New Year comes—fling wide, fling wide the door
Of Opportunity! the spirit free
To scale the utmost heights of hopes to be,
To rest on peaks ne’er reached by man before!
The boundless infinite let us explore,
To search out undiscovered mystery,
Undreamed of in our poor philosophy!
The bounty of the gods upon us pour!
Nay, in the New Year we shall be as gods:
No longer apish puppets or dull clods
Of clay; but poised, empowered to command,
Upon the Etna of New Worlds we’ll stand—
This scant earth-raiment to the winds will cast—
Full richly robed as supermen at last!
“A Distant Song” by John Gould Fletcher
Whether awake or sleeping,
I cannot rest for long:
By my casement comes creeping
A distant song.
A song like the chiming of silver
Bells which the breezes play,
Seeming to float for ever
Towards an unseen day:
A song that is weary with sorrow,
Yet knows not any defeat:
Through the past, through to-day, through to-morrow,
It echoes on life’s long street.
Could I but make words of its power,
Bring it from the future here,
Men’s souls would be waking, that hour,
To the victory against fear.
But the vague sweet stanza befools me
With its calm joy, time after time,
And no failure here ever schools me
To cease from an idle rhyme.
That music afar, unspoken,
’Tis I have done it wrong:
I caught, and I have broken,
A distant song.
“Song of Myself, 51” by Walt Whitman
The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
“Assurance” by James Oppenheim
Yea, there are as many stars under the Earth as over the Earth…
Plenty of room to roll around in has our planet…
And I, at the edge of the porch,
Hearing the crickets shrill in the star-thick armies of grass,
And beholding over the spread of Earth the spread of the heavens…
Drink this deep moment in my pilgrimage,
With a sense of how forever I have been alive,
With a conviction that I shall go on, ever safe, ever growing,
The stars to be included in my travels,
And the future sure before me.
Poems About Future Dreams
“Youth” by Langston Hughes
We have to-morrow
Bright before us
Like a flame
Yesterday, a night-gone thing
A sun-down name
And dawn to-day
Broad arch above the road we came,
We march.
“Dreams” by Walter de la Mare
Be gentle, O hands of a child;
Be true: like a shadowy sea
In the starry darkness of night
Are your eyes to me.
But words are shallow, and soon
Dreams fade that the heart once knew;
And youth fades out in the mind,
In the dark eyes too.
What can a tired heart say,
Which the wise of the world have made dumb?
Save to the lonely dreams of a child,
‘Return again, come!’
“Promise” by Georgia Douglas Johnson
Through the moil and the gloom they have issued
To the steps of the upwinding hill,
Where the sweet, dulcet pipes of tomorrow
In their preluding rhapsodies trill.
With a thud comes a stir in the bosom,
As there steals on the sight from afar,
Through a break of a cloud’s coiling shadow
The gleam of a bright morning star!
“I Am Bound, I Am Bound, for a Distant Shore” by Henry David Thoreau
I am bound, I am bound, for a distant shore,
By a lonely isle, by a far Azore,
There it is, there it is, the treasure I seek,
On the barren sands of a desolate creek
“When My Soul Findeth Wings” by Libbie C. Baer
Like roses the bright dream did pass,
On swift, noiseless footsteps away;
Like glistening dew on the grass,
Dissolving beneath the sun’s ray.
Like voice of the lark that doth soar,
Through the golden haze of the dawn;
You hear it and bend to adore,
Just hear it and then it is gone.
The lark on his swift, flashing wings,
Keeps pace with the flowers in their flight;
And that’s why when soaring he sings,
And passes so swiftly from sight.
I slept, and a vision did see,
Of eyes that were tender and blue;
I awoke to know that for me
The vision may never come true.
The lark soars no more in the skies,
He’s gone with the roses and dew;
The face with the soft tender eyes,
Comes never to gladden my view.
My memory holds images fair,
Of all these beautiful things;
Which I will be seeking somewhere,
When my soul, as lark, findeth wings.
“Dreams” by Madison Julius Cawein
They mock the present and they haunt the past,
And in the future there is naught agleam
With hope, the soul desires, that at last
The heart pursuing does not find a dream.
“A Psyche of Spring” by George Marion McClellan
Thou gaily painted butterfly, exquisite thing,
A child of light and blending rainbow hues,
In loveliness a Psyche of the Spring,
Companion for the rose and diamond dews;
‘Tis thine, in sportive joy, from hour to hour,
To ride the breeze from flower to flower.
But thou wast once a worm of hueless dye.
Now, seeing thee, gay thing, afloat in bliss,
I take new hope in thoughts of bye and bye,
When I, as thou, have shed my chrysalis.
I dream now of eternal springs of light
In which, as thou, I too may have my flight.
“Dreams” by Paul Laurence Dunbar
What dreams we have and how they fly
Like rosy clouds across the sky;
Of wealth, of fame, of sure success,
Of love that comes to cheer and bless;
And how they wither, how they fade,
The waning wealth, the jilting jade —
The fame that for a moment gleams,
Then flies forever, —dreams, ah —dreams!
O burning doubt and long regret
O tears with which our eyes are wet,
Heart-throbs, heart-aches, the glut of pain,
The somber cloud, the bitter rain,
You were not of those dreams — ah! well,
Your full fruition who can tell?
Wealth, fame, and love, ah! love that beams
Upon our souls, all dreams — ah! dreams.
Poems About the Unknown Future
“The Future Life” by William Cullen Bryant
How shall I know thee in the sphere which keeps
The disembodied spirits of the dead,
When all of thee that time could wither sleeps
And perishes among the dust we tread?
For I shall feel the sting of ceaseless pain
If there I meet thy gentle presence not;
Nor hear the voice I love, nor read again
In thy serenest eyes the tender thought.
Will not thy own meek heart demand me there?
That heart whose fondest throbs to me were given;
My name on earth was ever in thy prayer,
And wilt thou never utter it in heaven?
In meadows fanned by heaven’s life-breathing wind,
In the resplendence of that glorious sphere,
And larger movements of the unfettered mind,
Wilt thou forget the love that joined us here?
The love that lived through all the stormy past,
And meekly with my harsher nature bore,
And deeper grew, and tenderer to the last.
Shall it expire with life, and be no more?
A happier lot than mine, and larger light,
Await thee there; for thou hast bowed thy will
In cheerful homage to the rule of right,
And lovest all, and renderest good for ill.
For me, the sordid cares in which I dwell,
Shrink and consume my heart, as heat the scroll;
And wrath has left its scar—that fire of hell
Has left its frightful scar upon my soul.
Yet though thou wear’st the glory of the sky,
Wilt thou not keep the same belovèd name,
The same fair thoughtful brow, and gentle eye,
Lovelier in heaven’s sweet climate, yet the same?
Shalt thou not teach me, in that calmer home,
The wisdom that I learned so ill in this—
The wisdom which is love—till I become
Thy fit companion in that land of bliss?
“Sonnet 17” by William Shakespeare
Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretched metre of an antique song:
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice, in it, and in my rhyme.
“Life’s Leaders” by Elsa Gidlow
Their clouded wine, their whited bread,
We cannot take and call it good;
Yet sorrier fare Life grudges us
Who have no taste for common food.
We must go hungry long life through,
Aching and hungry to the end;
Betrayed by pity into chains
Reason tries vainly to transcend.
Are we not sadly prodigal?
We spend ourselves without restraint;
Yea, we let Beauty break our hearts
And bleed for love until we faint.
Yet it is not the thorns, the shame,
Not the hurt body’s weak distress:
Our bitterest crucifixion lies
In man’s abject unworthiness.
From Life’s rough cloth and flying threads,
From dust, from passion, dreams and pain,
From the dear madness men call love,
From faith that lies beyond the brain,
We shape the only deathless soul
That mortal man will ever know.
Behold his gratitude, these stones.
They say ‘t is by the heart we grow.
Still we build quietly and wait.
The heart may break; the heart is frail;
But a stern, strange ecstasy
Befriends us; and we dare not fail.
The Hand that points the solemn way
May be a wanton hand at best;
The great Word echoing in our souls
May be a bored God’s casual jest.
We cannot guess. We only know
‘T is written by some awful Pen
We must be torches sacrificed
To light the way for lesser men.
“To One Who Said Me Nay” by Countee Cullen
This much the gods vouchsafe today:
That we two lie in the clover,
Watching the heavens dip and sway,
With galleons sailing over.
This much is granted for an hour:
That we are young and tender,
That I am bee and you are flower,
Honey-mouthed and swaying slender.
This sweet of sweets is ours now:
To wander through the land,
Plucking an apple from its bough
To toss from hand to hand.
No thing is certain, joy nor sorrow,
Except the hour we know it;
Oh, wear my heart today; tomorrow
Who knows where the winds will blow it?