Famous Division Poems by Famous Poets

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

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A Crazed Girl

...That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No ...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler


Ash Wednesday

...hemselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.



III 

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left t...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

Ave atque Vale (In memory of Charles Baudelaire)

...pale Titan-woman like a lover, 
 Such as thy vision here solicited, 
 Under the shadow of her fair vast head, 
The deep division of prodigious breasts, 
 The solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep, 
 The weight of awful tresses that still keep 
The savour and shade of old-world pine-forests 
 Where the wet hill-winds weep? 

Hast thou found any likeness for thy vision? 
 O gardener of strange flowers, what bud, what bloom, 
 Hast thou found sown, what gather'd in the gloom? 
Wha...Read more of this...
by Swinburne, Algernon Charles

Bride of Abydos The

...— peace! 
I like the rest must use my skill or strength, 
But ask no land beyond my sabre's length: 
Power sways but by division — her resource 
The blest alternative of fraud or force! 
Ours be the last; in time deceit may come 
When cities cage us in a social home: 
There ev'n thy soul might err — how oft the heart 
Corruption shakes which peril could not part! 
And woman, more than man, when death or woe, 
Or even disgrace, would lay her lover low, 
Sunk in the lap of luxu...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

Emblems of Love

...e except light,—
The dreadful burning of the lonely God’s
Unutter’d joy. And then, past telling, came
Shuddering and division in the light:
Therein, like trembling, was desire to know
Its own perfect beauty; and it became
A cloven fire, a double flaming, each
Adorable to each; against itself
Waging a burning love, which was the world;—
A moment satisfied in that love-strife
I knew the world!—And when I fell from there,
Then knew I also what this life would do
In b...Read more of this...
by Abercrombie, Lascelles


Hymn to Demeter by Homer

...ild, being our own brother and born of the same stock: also, for honour, he has that third share which he received when division was made at the first and is appointed lord of those among whom he dwells."

So he spake, and called to his horses: and at his chiding they quickly whirled the swift chariot along, like long-winged birds.

[Line 90] But grief yet more terrible and savage came into the heart of Demeter, and thereafter she was so angered with the dark-clouded Son ...Read more of this...
by Homer,

Locksley Hall

...such length of years should come
As the many-winter'd crow that leads the clanging rookery home. 

Where is comfort? in division of the records of the mind?
Can I part her from herself, and love her, as I knew her, kind? 

I remember one that perish'd; sweetly did she speak and move;
Such a one do I remember, whom to look at was to love. 

Can I think of her as dead, and love her for the love she bore?
No--she never loved me truly; love is love for evermore. 

Comfort? comfor...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Macavity: The Mystery Cat

...he's a mile away.
You'll be sure to find him resting, or a-licking of his thumbs,
Or engaged in doing complicated long division sums.

Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macacity,
There never was a Cat of such deceitfulness and suavity.
He always has an alibit, or one or two to spare:
And whatever time the deed took place--MACAVITY WASN'T THERE!
And they say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known
(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone)
...Read more of this...
by Eliot, T S (Thomas Stearns)

Rosalind and Helen: a Modern Eclogue

...s upon earth to be--
Its express image; but thou art
More wretched. Sweet, we will not part
Henceforth, if death be not division;
If so, the dead feel no contrition.
But wilt thou hear, since last we parted, 
All that has left me broken-hearted?

ROSALIND
Yes, speak. The faintest stars are scarcely shorn
Of their thin beams by that delusive morn
Which sinks again in darkness, like the light
Of early love, soon lost in total night.

HELEN
Alas! Italian winds are mild,
But my b...Read more of this...
by Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Samson Agonistes

...ial to the Poem, and
therefore not material; or being divided into Stanza's or Pauses
they may be call'd Allaeostropha. Division into Act and Scene
referring chiefly to the Stage (to which this work never was
intended) is here omitted.

 It suffices if the whole Drama be found not produc't beyond the
fift Act, of the style and uniformitie, and that commonly call'd the
Plot, whether intricate or explicit, which is nothing indeed but such
oeconomy, or disposition of the fable a...Read more of this...
by Milton, John

The Break Away

...y room:
Judge, lawyer, witness
and me and invisible Skeezix,
and all the other torn
enduring the bewilderments
of their division.

Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce.
They arrive like round yellow fish,
sucking with love at the coral of our love.
Yet they wait,
in their short time,
like little utero half-borns,
half killed, thin and bone soft.
They breathe the air that stands
for twenty-five illicit days,
the sun crawling inside the sheets,
the moon spinning like...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

The Bride of Abydos

...— peace! 
I like the rest must use my skill or strength, 
But ask no land beyond my sabre's length: 
Power sways but by division — her resource 
The blest alternative of fraud or force! 
Ours be the last; in time deceit may come 
When cities cage us in a social home: 
There ev'n thy soul might err — how oft the heart 
Corruption shakes which peril could not part! 
And woman, more than man, when death or woe, 
Or even disgrace, would lay her lover low, 
Sunk in the lap of luxu...Read more of this...
by Byron, George (Lord)

The Division Of Parts

...ary Gray,
once resident of Gloucester
and Essex County,
a photostat of your will
arrived in the mail today.
This is the division of money.
I am one third
of your daughters counting my bounty
or I am a queen alone
in the parlor still,
eating the bread and honey.
It is Good Friday.
Black birds pick at my window sill.
Your coat in my closet,
your bright stones on my hand,
the gaudy fur animals
I do not know how to use,
settle on me like a debt.
A week ago, while the hard March g...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne

The Hill We Climb

...forever be tied together, victorious
Not because we will never again know defeat
but because we will never again sow division
Scripture tells us to envision
that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
And no one shall make them afraid
If we're to live up to our own time
Then victory won't lie in the blade
But in all the bridges we've made
That is the promise to glade
The hill we climb
If only we dare
It's because being American is more than a pride ...Read more of this...
by Gorman, Amanda

The Knights Tale

...man *unpitying
That will maintaine what he first began.
That lord hath little of discretion,
That in such case *can no division*: *can make no distinction*
But weigheth pride and humbless *after one*." *alike*
And shortly, when his ire is thus agone,
He gan to look on them with eyen light*, *gentle, lenient*
And spake these same wordes *all on height.* *aloud*

"The god of love, ah! benedicite*, *bless ye him
How mighty and how great a lord is he!
Against his might there gai...Read more of this...
by Chaucer, Geoffrey

The Old Issue

...
He shall peep and mutter; and the night shall bring
Watchers 'neath our window, lest we mock the King --

Hate and all division; hosts of hurrying spies;
Money poured in secret, carrion breeding flies.

Strangers of his counsel, hirelings of his pay,
These shall deal our Justice: sell-deny-delay.

We shall drink dishonour, we shall eat abuse
For the Land we look to--for the Tongue we use.

We shall take our station, dirt beneath his feet,
While his hired captains jeer us in ...Read more of this...
by Kipling, Rudyard

The Phoenix and the Turtle

...e turtle fled
In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov'd, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Twixt the turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.

So between them love did shine,
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight:
Either was the other's mine.

Property was thus appall'd,
That the self was not the same;
S...Read more of this...
by Shakespeare, William

The Princess (part 3)

...Tell us,' Florian asked, 
'How grew this feud betwixt the right and left.' 
'O long ago,' she said, 'betwixt these two 
Division smoulders hidden; 'tis my mother, 
Too jealous, often fretful as the wind 
Pent in a crevice: much I bear with her: 
I never knew my father, but she says 
(God help her) she was wedded to a fool; 
And still she railed against the state of things. 
She had the care of Lady Ida's youth, 
And from the Queen's decease she brought her up. 
But when your ...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord

Tortoise Shell

...n his back,
The kicking little beetle,
And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching belly,
The long cleavage of division, upright of the eternal cross
And on either side count five,
On each side, two above, on each side, two below
The dark bar horizontal.

The Cross!
It goes right through him, the sprottling insect,
Through his cross-wise cloven psyche,
Through his five-fold complex-nature.

So turn him over on his toes again;
Four pin-point toes, and a problematical ...Read more of this...
by Lawrence, D. H.

Twelfth Night

...e operating model of a nineteenth-century factory.
On the other hand, women's lot was no worse then
Than it is now. The division of labor made sense
In theories developed by college boys in jeans
Who grasped the logic their fathers had used
To seduce women and deceive themselves.
The pattern repeats itself, the same events
In a different order obeying the conventions of
A popular genre. Winter on a desolate beach. Spring
While there's snow still on the balcony and,
In the win...Read more of this...
by Lehman, David

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