Famous Eighty Poems by Famous Poets
These are examples of famous Eighty poems written by some of the greatest and most-well-known modern and classical poets. PoetrySoup is a great educational poetry resource of famous eighty poems. These examples illustrate what a famous eighty poem looks like and its form, scheme, or style (where appropriate).
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by
Frost, Robert
...I can find it.
No doubt it's grown up some to woods around it.
The mountain may have shifted since I saw it
In eighty-five."
"As long ago as that?"
"If I remember rightly, it had sprung
A leak and emptied then. And forty years
Can do a good deal to bad masonry.
You won't see any Mormon swimming in it.
But you have said it, and we're off to find it.
Old as I am, I'm going to let myself
Be dragged by you all over everywhere——"
"I thought you were...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...t slope drain’d by the Southern Sea—inseparable with the slopes
drain’d
by the Eastern and Western Seas;
The area the eighty-third year of These States—the three and a half millions of
square
miles;
The eighteen thousand miles of sea-coast and bay-coast on the main—the thirty
thousand
miles of
river navigation,
The seven millions of distinct families, and the same number of dwellings—Always
these,
and
more, branching forth into numberless branches;
Always the fre...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...As nothingness draws near
How I can see
Inexorably clear
My vanity.
My sum of worthiness
Always so small,
Dwindles from less to less
To none at all.
As grisly destiny
Claims me at last,
How grievous seem to me
Sins of my past!
How keen a conscience edge
Can come to be!
How pitiless the dredge
Of memory!
Ye proud ones of the earth
Who cou...Read more of this...
by
Robinson, Edwin Arlington
...sist,
For now, God save the mark, he's growing old;
He's five and forty, and to hear him talk
These days you'd call him eighty; then you'd add
More years to that. He's old enough to be
The father of a world, and so he is.
"Ben, you're a scholar, what's the time of day?"
Says he; and there shines out of him again
An aged light that has no age or station --
The mystery that's his -- a mischievous
Half-mad serenity that laughs at fame
For being won so easy, and at frien...Read more of this...
by
Service, Robert William
...cond youth
When he is
Seventy-and-five.
At four-score years old age begins,
And not till then, I warn my wife;
At eighty I'll recant my sins,
And live a staid and sober life.
But meantime let me whoop it up,
And tell the world that I'm alive:
Fill to the brim the bubbly cup -
Here's health to
Seventy-and-five!...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...d breadth of his manners,
These I used to go and visit him to see—he was wise also;
He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old—his sons were massive, clean,
bearded, tan-faced, handsome;
They and his daughters loved him—all who saw him loved him;
They did not love him by allowance—they loved him with personal love;
He drank water only—the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his
face;
He was a frequent gunner and fisher—he sail’d his boat h...Read more of this...
by
Auden, Wystan Hugh (W H)
...me good,who knew it was never enough buthoped to improve a little by living. Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wishedto think of our life from whose unrulinessso many plausible young futureswith threats or flattery ask obedience, but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyesupon that last picture, common to us all,of problems like relatives gatheredpuzzled and jealous about our dying. For about him till the very end were st...Read more of this...
by
Betjeman, John
...s,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.
Lord, put beneath Thy special care
One-eighty-nine Cadogan Square.
Although dear Lord I am a sinner,
I have done no major crime;
Now I'll come to Evening Service
Whensoever I have the time.
So, Lord, reserve for me a crown,
And do not let my shares go down.
I will labour for Thy Kingdom,
Help our lads to win the war,
Send white feathers to the cowards
Join the Women's Army Corps,
Th...Read more of this...
by
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
...ld?
It is too late! Ah, nothing is too late
Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate.
Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles
Wrote his grand Oedipus, and Simonides
Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers,
When each had numbered more than fourscore years,
And Theophrastus, at fourscore and ten,
Had but begun his "Characters of Men."
Chaucer, at Woodstock with the nightingales,
At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales;
Goethe at Weimar, toiling to the ...Read more of this...
by
Tebb, Barry
...re random thoughts
Besiege his fevered imagination – England’s
Imminent destruction, his own, the world’s…
Sixty to eighty cigarettes a day, unavailing depot injections,
Failed abscondings, failed everything: Eton and Balliol
Hold no sway on ward one, nor even being
‘A six language master,’ on PICU madness is the only qualification.
There was the ‘shaving incident’ at school, which
Made him ready to walk out at fifteen, the alcohol
Defences at Oxford which shut ...Read more of this...
by
Brautigan, Richard
...trout stream was piled, I
found the insects. They were inside a prefabricated steel
building that was selling for eighty-cents a square foot. There
was a sign over the door. It said
INSECTS
A HALF-SUNDAY HOMAGE TO A
WHOLE LEONARDO DA VINCI
On this funky winter day in rainy San Francisco I've had a
vision of Leonardo da Vinci. My woman's out slaving away,
no day off, working on Sunday. She left here at eight o'clock
this morning for Powe...Read more of this...
by
Hugo, Victor
...auties gently born,
And some rough coral-divers.
We hardy skimmers of the sea
Are lucky in each sally,
And, eighty strong, we send along
The dreaded Pirate Galley.
A nunnery was spied ashore,
We lowered away the cutter,
And, landing, seized the youngest nun
Ere she a cry could utter;
Beside the creek, deaf to our oars,
She slumbered in green alley,
As, eighty strong, we sent along
The dreaded Pirate Galley.
"Be silent, darling, ...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...out of the long stretch of my life.
O the ripen’d joy of womanhood!
O perfect happiness at last!
I am more than eighty years of age—my hair, too, is pure white—I am the most
venerable mother;
How clear is my mind! how all people draw nigh to me!
What attractions are these, beyond any before? what bloom, more than the bloom of youth?
What beauty is this that descends upon me, and rises out of me?
O the orator’s joys!
To inflate the chest—to roll the thunder of th...Read more of this...
by
Muldoon, Paul
...
Give him his scallop-shell of quiet,
His staff of faith to walk upon,
His scrip of joy, immortal diet—
We are some eighty souls
On whom Raleigh will hoist his sails.
He will return, years afterwards,
To wonder where and why
We might have altogether disappeared,
Only to glimpse us here and there
As one fair strand in her braid,
The blue in an Indian girl's dead eye.
I am stretched out under the lean-to
Of an old tobacco-shed
On a farm in North Carolina,
When som...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...e—speeding through heaven and the stars;
Speeding amid the seven satellites, and the broad ring, and the diameter of
eighty thousand miles;
Speeding with tail’d meteors—throwing fire-balls like the rest;
Carrying the crescent child that carries its own full mother in its belly;
Storming, enjoying, planning, loving, cautioning,
Backing and filling, appearing and disappearing;
I tread day and night such roads.
I visit the orchards of spheres, and look at the...Read more of this...
by
Wordsworth, William
...sp; I've heard he once was tall. Of years he has upon his back, No doubt, a burthen weighty; He says he is three score and ten, But others say he's eighty. A long blue livery-coat has he, That's fair behind, and fair before; Yet, meet him where you will, you see At once that he is poor. Full five and twenty years he lived ...Read more of this...
by
Levine, Philip
...The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island
Eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy."
She remembers trying to eat a banana
without first peeling it and seeing her first orange
in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman
who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her
with a red bandana and taught her the word,
"orange," saying it patiently over and over.
A long autumn voyage, the days dark...Read more of this...
by
Byron, George (Lord)
...pierced the pall;
And when the gorgeous coffin was laid low,
It seamed the mockery of hell to fold
The rottenness of eighty years in gold.
XI
So mix his body with the dust! It might
Return to what it must far sooner, were
The natural compound left alone to fight
Its way back into earth, and fire, and air;
But the unnatural balsams merely blight
What nature made him at his birth, as bare
As the mere million's base unmarried clay —
Yet all his spices but prolo...Read more of this...
by
Whitman, Walt
...be just as eager, and we quite indifferent!
(I see one building the house that serves him a few years, or seventy or eighty years at
most,
I see one building the house that serves him longer than that.)
Slow-moving and black lines creep over the whole earth—they never cease—they are
the
burial lines,
He that was President was buried, and he that is now President shall surely be buried.
4
A reminiscence of the vulgar fate,
A frequent sample of the life and ...Read more of this...
by
Alcott, Louisa May
...'s gold can so refine
And by thy art divine
Change mortal weakness to immortal power!
Bending beneath the weight of eighty years
Spent with the noble strife
of a victorious life
We watched her fading heavenward, through our tears.
But ere the sense of loss our hearts had wrung
A miracle was wrought;
And swift as happy thought
She lived again -- brave, beautiful, and young.
Age, pain, and sorrow dropped the veils they wore
And showed the tender eyes
Of ...Read more of this...
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