Famous Come Apart Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Come Apart poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous come apart poems. These examples illustrate what a famous come apart poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

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The Tale of the Tiger-Tree

by Vachel Lindsay
 A Fantasy, dedicated to the little poet Alice Oliver Henderson, ten years old. 

The Fantasy shows how tiger-hearts are the cause of war in all ages. It shows how the mammoth forces may be either friends or enemies of the struggle for peace. It shows how the dream of peace is unconquerable and eternal.


I

Peace-of-the-Heart, my own for long,
Whose shining...Read more of this...

Long Years apart -- can make no

by Emily Dickinson
 Long Years apart -- can make no
Breach a second cannot fill --
The absence of the Witch does not
Invalidate the spell --

The embers of a Thousand Years
Uncovered by the Hand
That fondled them when they were Fire
Will stir and understand --...Read more of this...

Rainy Season Love Song

by Gladys May Casely Hayford
Out of the tense awed darkness, my Frangepani comes;
Whilst the blades of Heaven flash round her, and the roll of thunder drums
My young heart leaps and dances, with exquisite joy and pain,
As storms within and storms without I meet my love in the rain.

“The rain is in love with you darling; it’s kissing you everywhere,
Rain pattering over your small brown...Read more of this...

The Goblet of Life

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 Filled is Life's goblet to the brim;
And though my eyes with tears are dim,
I see its sparkling bubbles swim,
And chant a melancholy hymn
With solemn voice and slow.

No purple flowers,--no garlands green,
Conceal the goblet's shade or sheen,
Nor maddening draughts of Hippocrene,
Like gleams of sunshine, flash between
Thick leaves of mistletoe.

This goblet, wrought with curious art,
Is filled with waters, that upstart,
When the...Read more of this...

Tar

by C K Williams
 The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain, 
mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof
off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I've been wandering out to 
watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble 
the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening...Read more of this...

Florentine Pilgrim

by Robert William Service
 "I'll do the old dump in a day,"
He told me in his brittle way.
"Two more, I guess, I'll give to Rome
Before I hit the trail for home;
But while I'm there I kindo' hope
To have an audience with the Pope."

We stood upon the terraced height
With sunny Florence in our sight.
I gazed and gazed, too moved to speak
Until he queried: "What's...Read more of this...

U R Ripping Us Apart!

by Tupac Shakur
Before u came the triangle never broke
we were bonded and melded as one
but as the 2 pushed u away
the one got weak and embraced u
and now u are ripping us apart..

The worst feeling of helplessness
the greatest pain has rested in my heart
the vision of heaven fades
and the nightmare of loneliness has started..

My hero has been defeated by u
and now what...Read more of this...

Mutability

by Rupert Brooke
 They say there's a high windless world and strange,
Out of the wash of days and temporal tide,
Where Faith and Good, Wisdom and Truth abide,
`Aeterna corpora', subject to no change.
There the sure suns of these pale shadows move;
There stand the immortal ensigns of our war;
Our melting flesh fixed Beauty there, a star,
And perishing hearts, imperishable Love. . . .

Dear, we...Read more of this...

A Birthday

by Aleister Crowley
 "Aug." 10, 1911.

Full moon to-night; and six and twenty years
Since my full moon first broke from angel spheres!
A year of infinite love unwearying ---
No circling seasons, but perennial spring!
A year of triumph trampling through defeat,
The first made holy and the last made sweet
By this same love; a year of wealth and woe,
Joy, poverty, health, sickness --- all one glow
In...Read more of this...

Advice

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
 I must do as you do? Your way I own
Is a very good way, and still,
There are sometimes two straight roads to a town,
One over, one under the hill.

You are treading the safe and the well-worn way,
That the prudent choose each time;
And you think me reckless and rash to-day
Because I prefer to climb.

Your path is the right one, and...Read more of this...

That Distance Apart

by Jackie Kay
 I am only nineteen
My whole life is changing

Tonight I see her
Shuttered eyes in my dreams

I cannot pretend she's never been
My stitches pull and threaten to snap

My own body a witness
Leaking blood to sheets milk to shirts

My stretch marks
Record that birth

Though I feel like somebody is dying

I stand up in my bed
And wail like a banshee

II
On the second night
I shall...Read more of this...

Rome: The Vatican-Sala Delle Muse

by Thomas Hardy
 I sat in the Muses' Hall at the mid of the day, 
And it seemed to grow still, and the people to pass away, 
And the chiselled shapes to combine in a haze of sun, 
Till beside a Carrara column there gleamed forth One. 

She was nor this nor that of those beings divine, 
But each and the whole--an...Read more of this...

Sonnet XXI

by Francesco Petrarch
[Pg 25] SONNET XXI. Amor piangeva, ed io con lui talvolta. HE CONGRATULATES BOCCACCIO ON HIS RETURN TO THE RIGHT PATH.  Love grieved, and I with him at times, to seeBy what strange practices and cunning art,You still continued from his fetters free,From whom my feet were never far...Read more of this...

In The Foam

by Sidney Lanier
 Life swelleth in a whitening wave,
And dasheth thee and me apart.
I sweep out seaward: -- be thou brave.
And reach the shore, Sweetheart.

Beat back the backward-thrusting sea.
Thy weak white arm his blows may thwart,
Christ buffet the wild surge for thee
Till thou'rt ashore, Sweetheart.

Ah, now thy face grows dim apace,
And seems of yon white foam a part.
Canst hear me through the...Read more of this...

A Summer Night

by George William Russell
 HER mist of primroses within her breast
Twilight hath folded up, and o’er the west,
Seeking remoter valleys long hath gone,
Not yet hath come her sister of the dawn.
Silence and coolness now the earth enfold,
Jewels of glittering green, long mists of gold,
Hazes of nebulous silver veil the height,
And shake in tremors through the shadowy night.
Heard through the stillness, as in whispered...Read more of this...

The Mother

by Robert William Service
 Your children grow from you apart,
 Afar and still afar;
And yet it should rejoice your heart
 To see how glad they are;
In school and sport, in work and play,
 And last, in wedded bliss
How others claim with joy to-day
 The lips you used to kiss.

Your children distant will become,
 And wide the gulf will grow;
The lips of loving will...Read more of this...

Jada

by Tupac Shakur
u r the omega of my heart
the foundation of my conception of love
when i think of what a black woman should be
its u that i first think of

u will never fully understand
how deeply my heart feels 4 u
i worry that we'll grow apart
and i'll end up losing u


u bring me 2 climax without sex
and u do it all with regal...Read more of this...

Discipline

by D. H. Lawrence
 It is stormy, and raindrops cling like silver bees to the pane, 
The thin sycamores in the playground are swinging with flattened leaves; 
The heads of the boys move dimly through a yellow gloom that stains 
The class; over them all the dark net of my discipline weaves. 

It is no good, dear, gentleness and forbearance, I endured too...Read more of this...

Then

by Philip Levine
 A solitary apartment house, the last one 
before the boulevard ends and a dusty road 
winds its slow way out of town. On the third floor 
through the dusty windows Karen beholds 
the elegant couples walking arm in arm 
in the public park. It is Saturday afternoon, 
and she is waiting for a particular young man 
whose name I...Read more of this...

Clementes Images

by Robert Creeley
 1)

Sleeping birds, lead me,
soft birds, be me

inside this black room,
back of the white moon.

In the dark night
sight frightens me.


2)

Who is it nuzzles there
with furred, round headed stare?

Who, perched on the skin,
body's float, is holding on?

What other one stares still,
plays still, on and on?


3)

Stand upright, prehensile,
squat, determined,

small guardians of the painful
outside coming in --

in stuck in vials with needles,
bleeding life...Read more of this...

The Science Of The Night

by Stanley Kunitz
 I touch you in the night, whose gift was you,
My careless sprawler,
And I touch you cold, unstirring, star-bemused,
That have become the land of your self-strangeness.
What long seduction of the bone has led you
Down the imploring roads I cannot take
Into the arms of ghosts I never knew,
Leaving my manhood on a rumpled field
To guard you where you lie so deep
In...Read more of this...

Past and Future

by Sarojini Naidu
 The new hath come and now the old retires: 
And so the past becomes a mountain-cell, 
Where lone, apart, old hermit-memories dwell 
In consecrated calm, forgotten yet 
Of the keen heart that hastens to forget 
Old longings in fulfilling new desires. 


And now the Soul stands in a vague, intense 
Expectancy and anguish of suspense, 
On the dim chamber-threshold...Read more of this...

From Far From Eve and Morning

by A E Housman
 From far, from eve and morning 
And yon twelve-winded sky, 
The stuff of life to knit me 
Blew hither: here am I. 

Now-- for a breath I tarry 
Nor yet disperse apart-- 
Take my hand quick and tell me, 
What have you in your heart. 

Speak now, and I will answer; 
How shall I help you, say; 
Ere to...Read more of this...

They put Us far apart

by Emily Dickinson
 They put Us far apart --
As separate as Sea
And Her unsown Peninsula --
We signified "These see" --

They took away our Eyes --
They thwarted Us with Guns --
"I see Thee" each responded straight
Through Telegraphic Signs --

With Dungeons -- They devised --
But through their thickest skill --
And their opaquest Adamant --
Our Souls saw -- just as well --

They summoned Us to...Read more of this...

Virginity

by Robert William Service
 My mother she had children five and four are dead and gone;
While I, least worthy to survive, persist in living on.
She looks at me, I must confess, sometimes with spite and bitterness.

My mother is three-score and ten, while I am forty-three,
You don't know how it hurts me when we go somewhere to tea,
And people tell her on the sly...Read more of this...

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