Get Your Premium Membership

Famous Set Apart Poems by Famous Poets

These are examples of famous Set 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 set apart poems. These examples illustrate what a famous set apart poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).

See also:

by Moody, William Vaughn
...run? 
Or have we but the talons and the maw, 
And for the abject likeness of our heart 
Shall some less lordly bird be set apart? -- 
Some gross-billed wader where the swamps are fat? 
Some gorger in the sun? Some prowler with the bat? 


IX 

Ah no! 
We have not fallen so. 
We are our fathers' sons: let those who lead us know! 
'T was only yesterday sick Cuba's cry 
Came up the tropic wind, "Now help us, for we die!" 
Then Alabama heard, 
And rising, pale, to Maine and ...Read more of this...



by Lazarus, Emma
...first green sprout, who hears the call 
Of the first robin on the first spring day. 
A voice for all whom Fate hath set apart, 
Who, still misprized, must perish by the way, 
Longing with love, for that they lack the art 
Of their own soul's expression. For all these 
Sing the unspoken hope, the vague, sad reveries. 


IV

Then Nature shaped a poet's heart--a lyre 
From out whose chords the lightest breeze that blows 
Drew trembling music, wakening sweet desire.Read more of this...

by Kilmer, Joyce
...aking aloud, undisciplined and free.
Nay, God be praised, Who fixed thy task for thee!
Austere, ecstatic craftsman, set apart
From all who traffic in Apollo's mart,
On thy phrased paten shall the Splendour be!
Now, carelessly we throw a rhyme to God,
Singing His praise when other songs are done.
But thou, who knewest paths Teresa trod,
Losing thyself, what is it thou hast won?
O bleeding feet, with peace and glory shod!
O happy moth, that flew into the Sun!...Read more of this...

by Yeats, William Butler
...for text
And never could have rested in the tomb
But that, long travelling, he had come
Towards nightfall upon certain set apart
In a most desolate stony place,
Towards nightfall upon a race
passionate and simple like his heart.

 V

And then I think of old George Pollexfen,
In muscular youth well known to Mayo men
For horsemanship at meets or at racecourses,
That could have shown how pure-bred horses
And solid men, for all their passion, live
But as the outrageous stars...Read more of this...

by St Vincent Millay, Edna
...kened tongue
Comes forth; nor has he heart for it.
Beauty in all things—no, we cannot hope for that; but some place set apart for it.
Here it may dwell;
And with your aid, Melpomene
And all thy sister-muses (for ye are, I think, daughters of Memory)
Within the tortured mind as well.

Reaped are those fields with dragon's-teeth so lately sown;
Many the heaped men dying there - so close, hip touches thigh; yet each man dies alone.
Music, what overtone
For the so...Read more of this...



by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...ar me, said he hoped 
I would not stop
All practice, like so many wives who let their 
music drop.
So I resolved to set apart an hour or two each day
To keeping vocal chords and hands in trim to sing and play.

The second morning I had been for half and hour or more
At work on Haydn’s masses, when a tap came at my door.
A nurse, who wore a dainty cap and apron, and a smile, 
Ran down to ask if I would cease my music for awhile.
The lady in the flat above was v...Read more of this...

by Wilcox, Ella Wheeler
...d new ties, that are both sweet and true; 
But that wild rapture, which of old we knew, 
Seems to have been a something set apart
With that lost dream. There is no passion, now, 
Mixed with this later love, which seems, somehow, 
Not quite the same.

Not quite the same am I. My inner being
Reasons and knows that all is for the best.
Yet vague regrets stir always in my breast, 
As my souls eyes turn sadly backward, seeing
The vanished self, that evermore must b...Read more of this...

by Blake, William
...n the tops of his mountains

4. From the depths of dark solitude. From
The eternal abode in my holiness,
Hidden set apart in my stern counsels
Reserv'd for the days of futurity,
I have sought for a joy without pain, 
For a solid without fluctuation
Why will you die O Eternals?
Why live in unquenchable burnings?

5. First I fought with the fire; consum'd
Inwards, into a deep world within: 
A void immense, wild dark & deep,
Where nothing was: Natures wide womb
And s...Read more of this...

by Larkin, Philip
...will be out by lunch, or four;
Others, not knowing it, have come to join
The unseen congregations whose white rows
Lie set apart above - women, men;
Old, young; crude facets of the only coin

This place accepts. All know they are going to die.
Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,
And somewhere like this. That is what it means,
This clean-sliced cliff; a struggle to transcend
The thought of dying, for unless its powers
Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes...Read more of this...

by Morris, William
...ne
And ground it into powder, then turned she,
With cries that folk could hear far out at sea,
And reached the treasure set apart of old,
To brood above the hidden heaps of gold.


Yet was she seen again on many a day
By some half-waking mariner or herd,
Playing amid the ripples of the bay,
Or on the hills making all things afeard,
Or in the wood that did that castle gird,
But never any man again durst go
To seek her woman 's form, and end her woe.


As for the man, w...Read more of this...

by Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...he strangers,
Springing from among the shadows,
Seized upon the choicest portions,
Seized the white fat of the roebuck,
Set apart for Laughing Water,
For the wife of Hiawatha;
Without asking, without thanking,
Eagerly devoured the morsels,
Flitted back among the shadows
In the corner of the wigwam.
Not a word spake Hiawatha,
Not a motion made Nokomis,
Not a gesture Laughing Water;
Not a change came o'er their features;
Only Minnehaha softly
Whispered, saying, "They are fa...Read more of this...

by Service, Robert William
...There will be a singing in your heart,
There will be a rapture in your eyes;
You will be a woman set apart,
You will be so wonderful and wise.
You will sleep, and when from dreams you start,
As of one that wakes in Paradise,
There will be a singing in your heart,
There will be a rapture in your eyes.

There will be a moaning in your heart,
There will be an anguish in your eyes;
You will see your dearest ones depart,
You will hear their quivering...Read more of this...

by Crowley, Aleister
...efore reborn as I am
By a stream profane and foul
In the reign of a Tortured Lamb,
In the realm of a sexless Owl, 
I am set apart from the rest
By meed of the mystic rune
That reads in peril and pest
The ambrosial moon --- the moon!

For under the tawny star
That shines in the Bull above
I can rein the riotous car
Of galloping, galloping Love;
And straight to the steady ray
Of the Lion-heart Lord I career,
Pointing my flaming way
With the spasm of night for a spear!

O moon! ...Read more of this...

by Plath, Sylvia
...n will it be, the second when Time breaks
And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart--
Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.
Waiting lies heavy on my lids. It lies like sleep,
Like a big sea. Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug
Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.
And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach
Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:
I am...Read more of this...

Dont forget to view our wonderful member Set Apart poems.


Book: Shattered Sighs