Emily Dickinson's "After great pain, a formal feeling comes" (The Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1929) focuses on the acceptance of grief.

"Funeral Blues" by W. H. Auden, published in 1940 in his Another Time, presents a portrait of the suffering experienced after the death of a loved one.

"The Song of Despair" is another poem by Neruda, published with "Tonight I Can Write" in Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, that expresses the speakers memories of a past relationship and pain over its dissolution.

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why" in 1923. In this poem, published in her Collected Poems that same year, the speaker laments the loss of past lovers and the resulting state of emptiness.