5 Unforgettable Love Poems for Every Mood

Loss

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead….

For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always, —
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

As you might guess, Aiken was a man on intimate terms with tragedy. When Conrad Aiken was a child, his father killed his mother and committed suicide himself. Aiken grew up to be a sensitive soul; according to the Academy of American Poets, “he avoided military service during World War I by claiming that, as a poet, he was part of an ‘essential industry.’” Aiken married three times but as we can see from the lines above, he never fully recovered from his childhood trauma.