How to Read and Enjoy Sad Poems

How to Read and Enjoy Sad Poems

Love is a universal denominator, one that can bring everyone together or tear them apart. Sadness is equally universal (and with love on the line, inevitable), making it all that much more powerful. Of course, even with the kind of eerie power sadness has over us, why is it that sad poems are so compelling, bringing an awkward sense of joy at the same time as they evoke images of pain and longing?

Why Sad Poems?

Everyone has a different answer and though the scientific community will likely not be agreeing with the poets and writers of those sad poems any time soon, they can come to a consensus on one thing – sad poems are very popular. However, for the budding poetry fan, sad poems happen to be some of the best poems ever written and can surely serve to make for enjoyable reading, if only you take the right approach to them from the start.

Enjoying a Sad Poem

The first step to enjoying a sad poem is to recognize that it is a sad poem. Everyone feels sadness, despair and weakness at some time or another and handles it in their own way. For the poet, it is best expressed in words. Thus, the sad poem is a diary of sorts, relaying the kind of emotions that have plagued a poet for some time.

Sad poems also offer people a chance to connect with each other on a much more personal level and share an emotional closeness. A sad poem is often best read when you are either in a retrospective or down mood of your own. They allow a certain amount of reflection on a topic that has been bothersome of late. That sad poem might offer just the right amount of vicarious relief to forget the unfortunate (yet unforgettable) incident with your spouse’s parents or the explosive and yet somehow dull daily grind of a job going poorly.

The Best Sad Poems Around

The next step is to find a few truly magnificent sad poems to wallow with, and there are none better than those written by Emily Dickinson. Suffering a bit from depression as is the wont of many poets, her sad poems have become famous for their clever wordplay and short, direct expression. “I had been hungry all the years” is a great example of this style:

I had been hungry all the years;
My noon had come, to dine;
I, trembling, drew the table near,
And touched the curious wine.

‘Twas this on table I had seen,
When turning, hungry, lone,
I looked in windows, for the wealth
I could not hope to own.

While Dickinson was largely ignored during her own lifetime, other poets at the same time such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow were living giants, celebrities of their time. Even Longfellow wrote the occasional sad poem though as an expression of his personal anxieties. “The Day is Done” is a famously introspective sad poem, describing his own desire to read poems of sadness – an ironically appropriate topic.