Going Away by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
"Going Away" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox is a lyric meditation on the emotional weight carried by the simple phrase "I am going away," exploring how those words trigger an involuntary grief that transcends personal connection. The poem opens with the speaker overhearing a stranger on the Common announce his imminent departure to a companion. Though she has no relationship with either man, the words strike her with immediate and inexplicable sorrow. She knows instinctively that some heart will ache at his absence, that the world will feel hollowed out for those left behind. This establishes the poem's central argument: the pain of parting is not exclusive to the people directly involved — it is a universally resonant human ache, triggered by the mere sound of departure being named aloud. Wilcox then deepens this idea through a series of natural images. The phrase "going away" carries the weight of dead leaves rustling to the ground — a sound associated with decay, ending, and the stripping away of warmth and life. The naked branches left behind after the last leaf falls serve as a visual emblem of the bereft, those who remain after someone has gone. The autumn setting is not incidental; it functions as an extended metaphor for all leave-takings, reinforcing the seasonal inevitability of loss. The poem moves outward from the personal encounter on the Common to the broader natural world. Migrating birds winging southward in the grey, wet autumn seem to the speaker to be repeating the same two words with every beat of their wings. Departure, in Wilcox's vision, is encoded into the very rhythms of the natural order — it is something that happens constantly, everywhere, and always with the same accompaniment of sobs and sighs and heartache. The final stanza pivots to theological consolation. The speaker addresses God directly, taking comfort in the belief that in Heaven no one ever speaks those words, and no one ever hears them. In the divine kingdom, souls never tire of one another's company, saints never wander from the golden land, and the perpetual community of the blessed is never fractured by departure. This closing vision of eternity without parting reframes the entire poem: every earthly leave-taking is painful precisely because it is a condition of mortal life, one that the afterlife promises to abolish entirely. The poem's power lies in its insistence that grief over parting does not require personal investment. The phrase itself is the wound. Wilcox treats language as having autonomous emotional force — words that carry loss inside them, activated by being spoken regardless of context or listener. The poem is structured as a gradual amplification: one stranger, then the season, then all migrating birds, then the whole of mortal existence, before the final release into the eternal where such words are never needed.
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox · First published 1873 · Genre: Lyric Poetry, Elegiac Poetry, Spiritual Poetry · 397 words
First lines
Walking to-day on the Common, / I heard a stranger say / To a friend who was standing near him, / "Do you know I am going away? " / I had never seen their faces: / May never see them again, / But the words the stranger uttered, / Stirred me with nameless pain.
For I knew some heart would miss him, / Would ache at his "going away," / And the earth would seem all cheerless, / For many and many a day. / No matter how glad my spirit, / No matter how light my heart, / If I hear these two words uttered, / The tear drops always start.
What this Textopian page supports
Going Away is listed on Textopian as a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, dated 1873 CE.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Poem
- Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox
- Date: 1873 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Lyric Poetry, Elegiac Poetry, Spiritual Poetry, Romantic Poetry, Meditative Poetry
- Length: 397 words
- Structure: 1 section, 5 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)
Good citation fit
- Work identity for Going Away by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
- Readability and classroom-planning context
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Genres
- Lyric Poetry — The poem is a personal, emotional expression of the speaker's internal feelings and reactions to the phrase 'going away,' characterized by musicality, subjectivity, and introspection.
- Elegiac Poetry — Though not mourning a specific death, the poem shares elegiac qualities: it meditates on loss, transience, and separation, evoking sympathy for human suffering and the sadness of departure.
- Spiritual Poetry — The concluding stanza explicitly invokes God and heaven, seeking spiritual consolation for earthly separations and offering religious perspective on reunion in the afterlife.
- Romantic Poetry — Exhibits hallmark Romantic features: intense personal emotion, subjective perspective, nature imagery as mirror of feeling, and celebration of emotional depth and sensitivity.
Tags
poetry · romantic · inspirational · departure · travel · emotional · sentimental · Victorian era · American literature · life transitions · longing · nostalgia