William Faulkner’sPoetry If there be grief, then let it be but rain,
And this but silver grief for grieving's sake,
If these green woods be dreaming here to wake
Within my heart, if I should rouse again.

But I shall sleep, for where is any death
While in these blue hills slumbrous overhead
I'm rooted like a tree? Though I be dead,
This earth that holds me fast will find me breath.

Before he turned his hand to fiction, Faulkner’s literary career was mostly as a poet, fashioning poems modeled rather conscientiously upon such poets as Swinburne and Housman. Essentially a Romantic, Faulkner’s poems frequently reveled in melancholy, unrequited love, and love of nature. Both his first nationally published work — the poem “L’Apres-Midi d’un faune” — and his first published book, The Marble Faun, were poetry.
Later, after turning primarily to fiction as an outlet for his creativity, Faulkner would call himself a “failed poet.”