Poems about Suffering

The Versery gathers 3 poems that take up the theme of suffering by 3 different poets, spanning the years between 1895 and 1964. Each entry below links to the full text (or, for in-copyright work, a fair-use excerpt with a link to an authoritative source), along with a short curator's note placing the poem in context.

Theme pages are one of several ways to move through the collection. Poets rarely write to a single subject — most of the work below sits at the intersection of suffering and several related ideas at once. The list of related themes further down on this page is built from co-occurrence: if a poem about suffering also takes up another theme, that theme rises in the ranking. Following those links is a good way to discover poems you might otherwise not have found.