A Literary Prescription for
For wanting something, or someone, with your whole chest.
Yearning is a more honest word than longing, blunter and a little embarrassing, which is probably why we don’t use it more. It is the ache of wanting something you don’t have, can’t quite reach, or have already lost — a person, a place, a version of your life that didn’t happen. The books, poems, and words gathered here take that ache seriously, rather than rushing to talk you out of it.
“Love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.”Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Books
Books that take wanting seriously.
Heathcliff and Catherine’s love is less a romance than a kind of weather system, destructive and inescapable, and the novel never pretends that wanting someone that much is good for either of them. It remains the gold standard for yearning written without a single ounce of restraint.
Aciman writes a single Italian summer of unspoken longing with such precision that the ache of wanting someone you haven’t yet had becomes almost unbearable to read. It is one of the more accurate accounts of desire as its own kind of suffering.
Murakami’s narrator spends much of the novel yearning for a woman who is only ever partly available to him, and the book’s quiet, melancholic tone never resolves that longing into anything tidier than it actually is. Some wanting, it suggests, just has to be carried.
A love story built almost entirely out of separation, in which the two leads spend more time apart, across different points in time, than they ever spend together. It turns yearning into the actual structure of the plot rather than just its emotional backdrop.
Poetry
Poems for wanting that has nowhere to land yet.
“Echo”
Christina Rossetti, 1854
Rossetti calls out to someone she knows will not actually answer, asking only for a dream of them since the reality is unavailable. It is one of the most direct addresses to absence in English poetry, longing written with nowhere left for it to go but the page.
“Bright Star”
John Keats, 1819
Keats wrote this knowing tuberculosis would soon separate him from Fanny Brawne forever, wishing only to prolong one ordinary intimate moment indefinitely. The yearning here is not for something unattained but for something he can already feel slipping away.
“Ae Fond Kiss”
Robert Burns, 1791
Burns wrote this as a farewell to a woman departing for Jamaica, certain he would never see her again, and his closing lines capture the particular cruelty of yearning: it only exists because you loved well enough for the parting to hurt this much.
Quotes & Prose
For wanting, named plainly.
There is no remedy for love but to love more.
Henry David Thoreau
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
Aristotle
We loved with a love that was more than love.
Edgar Allan Poe, Annabel Lee
Yearning is not a flaw in your character. It is proof of how much room your heart still has.
Georgia Clare