Top 10 Best Loneliness and Solitude Poems

Loneliness is a complex human emotion. In our modern, city driven societies, we are often surrounded by people. And we have the means to connect with each other across continents in an instant. Yet all of us experience loneliness.

Even the brightest, most seemingly connected of people, will feel at some point like they are drifting in a disparate space. Wandering, lonely as a cloud. Floating above a busy world, unable to reach down towards it. Loneliness can occur when people fail to understand how we feel, or why we react in a certain way to events.

Throughout time, poets have captured the complexity, and depth of this emotion in beautiful passages of solitude. And in reading their words, we can perhaps find some solace. This emotion, though it feels like an all-consuming vacuum, is being felt by millions of others in the moments you experience it.

And being alone doesn’t necessarily mean you feel lonely. There’s a freedom to being disconnected. To take time to tend to one’s thoughts, and enjoy our activities in peace. There are plenty of poems about this as well.

You’ll find below a collection of some of the best loneliness poems ever written. We hope they help you to feel a little less alone, if for a short while.

Alone

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.

Edgar Allan Poe
19 January 1809 - 7 October 1849

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

William Wordsworth
7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850

Solitude

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
5 November 1850 - 30 October 1919

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

Robert Frost
March 26, 1874 - January 29, 1963

Evening Waterfall

What is the name you called me?–
And why did you go so soon?
The crows lift their caws on the wind,
And the wind changed and was lonely.

Carl Sandburg
6 January 1878 - 22 July 1967

To Solitude

O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep, –
Nature’s observatory – whence the dell

John Keats
31 October 1795 - 23 February 1821

Loneliness

Being apart and lonely is like rain.
It climbs toward evening from the ocean plains;
from flat places, rolling and remote, it climbs
to heaven, which is its old abode.
And only when leaving heaven drops upon the city.

Rainer Maria Rilke
4 December 1875 - 29 December 1926

The Loneliness One Dare Not Sound

The Loneliness One dare not sound –
And would as soon surmise
As in its Grave go plumbing
To ascertain the size

Emily Dickinson
10 December 1830 - 15 May 1886

The Evening Was Lonely

The evening was lonely for me, and I was reading a book till my
heart became dry, and it seemed to me that beauty was a thing
fashioned by the traders in words. Tired I shut the book and
snuffed the candle. In a moment the room was flooded with
moonlight.