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Poetry themes include love, nature, history, religion, and death. Love is the most popular theme, while nature is often used as a metaphor for human experience. History, religion, and death are also common themes explored by poets throughout history.
The theme of a poem refers to the underlying subject that the poem discusses. While there are hundreds of different folk poetry themes, several concepts have proven enduring across ages, forms, and cultural divisions. Love, nature, history, religion and death are some of the most common poetic themes in almost all types of poetry.
Love is perhaps the most popular of all themes in poetry. Almost all poets, from Sappho to Shakespeare, dive into the troubled and tumultuous waters of love from time to time. Love in the poem’s themes has many variations, from describing seeing a new love for the first time to the established contentment of a long-standing love. The darker side of love, such as obsession, forbidden love and feelings of betrayal, is also fodder for poetic discourse. Some of the most popular poets for love-themed poetry include William Shakespeare, Pablo Neruda and ee cummings.
Many poets turn to the natural world for inspiration and philosophy. Nature poems not only discuss the beauty and unpredictability of the natural world, but often make excellent use of nature imagery as metaphors for human experience. Robert Frost and Walt Whitman are two remarkable poets who relied heavily on nature for the themes of poetry. Japanese poetry, especially the gentle form of haiku, often uses nature or natural imagery as the dominant poetic theme.
History is a concept that rests on the shoulders of poets over the centuries. Some early forms of poetry, such as epics and bardic tales, were used to tell historical stories and myths of the gods. Personal history, world history, and cultural history are all used as poetic themes by many different poems. Maya Angelou is a poet often cited for her use of black history themes in much of her poetry.
Religion and spirituality are frequently used poetry themes that appear in both popular poetry and religious texts. The Book of Psalms in the Bible is composed of poems of praise and wonder about God. Religiously themed poems can be about the poet’s spirituality or lack thereof, an interpretation of religion, or a description of a religious or spiritual experience, like a conversion. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is a sweeping and poetic exploration of the Garden of Eden. Khalil Gibran and Robert Browning also often used religious and spiritual poetic themes.
The infinite and ultimate mystery that is death is a heady subject for many poets. Death is an excellent source of poetic themes, as it is universal to all people, yet a mystery to many. War poetry, like the poems of World War I poet Wilfred Owen, often deals with the images of death, murder, and finality that are inevitable on the battlefield. Emily Dickinson, Algernon Swinburne and Dylan Thomas have used poetic themes involving death extensively.
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