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Famous Ninety Poems by Famous Poets

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

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Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry
...should ha' done this way, don't you know!' -- 
I could lay a bait for a man like that. 

"The grasshoppers struck us in ninety-one 
And what they leave -- well, it ain't de luxe. 
But a growlin' fault-findin' son of a gun 
Who'd lent some money to stock our run -- 
I said they'd eaten what grass we had -- 
Says he, 'Your management's very bad; 
You had a right to have kept some ducks!' 

"To have kept some ducks! And the place was white! 
Wherever you went you had to tread 
O...Read more of this...
by Paterson, Andrew Barton



...e wrong. 
Who wants to cut your number fourteen throat! 
Let's have a show down as an evidence 
Of good faith. There is ninety dollars. 
Come, if you're not afraid." 
"I'm not afraid. 
There's five: that's all I carry." 
"I can search you? 
Where are you moving over to? Stay still. 
You'd better tuck your money under you 
And sleep on it the way I always do 
When I'm with people I don't trust at night." 
"Will you believe me if I put it there 
Right on the counterpane--that I...Read more of this...
by Frost, Robert
...Scandinavian legend.

{29d} The chronology of this epic, as scholars have worked it out, would make Beowulf well over ninety years of age when he fights the dragon. But the fifty years of his reign need not be taken as historical fact.

{29e} The text is here hopelessly illegible, and only the general drift of the meaning can be rescued. For one thing, we have the old myth of a dragon who guards hidden treasure. But with this runs the story of some noble, last of his race...Read more of this...
by Anonymous,
...ace,
her eyes burnt by cigarettes
as she eats betrayal like a slice of meat.

I must not sleep
for while I'm asleep I'm ninety
and think I'm dying.
Death rattles in my throat
like a marble.
I wear tubes like earrings.
I lie as still as a bar of iron.
You can stick a needle
through my kneecap and I won't flinch.
I'm all shot up with Novocain.
This trance girl
is yours to do with.
You could lay her in a grave,
an awful package,
and shovel dirt on her face
and she'd never call b...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne
...t where the magnolia
We planted as a stem divides the path
The others lie, too young, at Silver Hill,
Except my mother. Ninety-five, she lives
Three thousand miles away, beside the bare
Pacific, in rooms that overlook the Mission,
The Riviera, and the silver range 
La Cumbre east. Magnolia grandiflora
And one druidic live oak guard the view. 
Proudly around the walls, she shows her paintings
Of twenty years ago: the great oak’s arm
Extended, Zeuslike, straight and strong, wis...Read more of this...
by Bowers, Edgar



...ultiply out 
By One Thousand diminished by Eight. 


"The result we proceed to divide, as you see, 
By Nine Hundred and Ninety Two: 
Then subtract Seventeen, and the answer must be 
Exactly and perfectly true. 

"The method employed I would gladly explain, 
While I have it so clear in my head, 
If I had but the time and you had but the brain-- 
But much yet remains to be said. 

"In one moment I've seen what has hitherto been 
Enveloped in absolute mystery, 
And without extra...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis
...he wants a year, will you compound?
And shall we deem him ancient, right and sound,
Or damn to all eternity at once,
At ninety-nine, a modern and a dunce?

"We shall not quarrel for a year or two;
By courtesy of England, he may do."

Then by the rule that made the horsetail bare,
I pluck out year by year, as hair by hair,
And melt down ancients like a heap of snow:
While you, to measure merits, look in Stowe,
And estimating authors by the year,
Bestow a garland only on a bier...Read more of this...
by Pope, Alexander
...In fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
Someone sailed the ocean blue.
Somebody borrowed the fare in Spain
For a business trip on the bounding main,
And to prove to the people, by actual test,
You could get to the East by sailing West.
Somebody said, Sail on! Sail on!
And studied China and China's lingo,
And cried from the bow, There's China now!
And promptly bumped into San Domingo.
S...Read more of this...
by Nash, Ogden
...m Hegel to Lacan and how the colloquium

At Bonneval changed analytic history, a mystery

I’ll not unravel if I live to ninety.

Ignorance isn’t bliss, I know enough to talk the piss

From jumped-up SHO’s and locums who’d miss vital side effects

And think all’s needed is a mother’s kiss.



I’ll wait till the heather’s purple and bring nail scissors

To cut and suture neatly and renew my stocks

Of moor momentoes vased in unsunny Surrey.

Can you believe it? Some arseholes l...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry
...as insomnia.
The fierce bubbles of chalk,
the little white lesions
settle on the street outside.
It is snowing and the ninety
year old woman who was combing
out her long white wraith hair
is gone, embalmed even now,
even tonight her arms are smooth
muskets at her side and nothing
issues from her but her last word - "Oh." Surprised by death.

It is snowing. Paper spots
are falling from the punch.
Hello? Mrs. Death is here!
She suffers according to the digits
of my hate. I hea...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne
...goes for gold in
The Olympic games this year,
She’ll laugh at her competitors
And make them quake with fear.
She’s ninety-nine years old
But, in athletics, she’s been blessed.
The trouble is she can’t decide
Which sport she plays the best.
She’s such an ace at archery.
She’s queen of the canoe.
She’s tough to top at taekwondo
And table tennis too.
She dominates the diving board.
She tromps the trampoline.
At lifting weights and wrestling
She’s the best you’ve ...Read more of this...
by Nesbitt, Kenn
...thought, and

ground his wheat and tended his kale and caught a trout or

two when they were in the creek.

 He looked ninety years old for thirty years and then he

got the notion that he would die, and did so. The year he died

the trout didn't come up Hayman Creek, and never went up

the creek again. With the old man dead, the trout figured it

was better to stay where they were.

 The mortar and pestle fell off the shelf and broke.

 The shack rotted away.

 And the weed...Read more of this...
by Brautigan, Richard
...ove: I abstain for love's sake.
``---What, my soul? see thus far and no farther? when doors great and small,
``Nine-and-ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hundredth appal?
``In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest of all?
``Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift,
``That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift?
``Here, the creature surpass the Creator,---the end, what Began?
``Would I fain in my impotent year...Read more of this...
by Browning, Robert
...gn postmarks were meant for me.
You posted them first in London, wearing furs
and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety.
I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day,
where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes
of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way
to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones.
This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will
go to a bazaar at Bismarck's house. And I
see you as a young girl in a good world still,
writing three g...Read more of this...
by Sexton, Anne
...what I do.
Mark and digest my tale, carry it afar
To those that never saw this tonsured head
Nor heard this voice that ninety years have cracked.
Of Baile and Aillinn you need not speak,
All know their tale, all know what leaf and twig,
What juncture of the apple and the yew,
Surmount their bones; but speak what none have heard.

The miracle that gave them such a death
Transfigured to pure substance what had once
Been bone and sinew; when such bodies join
There is no touchin...Read more of this...
by Yeats, William Butler
...multiply out
 By One Thousand diminished by Eight.

"The result we proceed to divide, as you see,
 By Nine Hundred and Ninety and Two:
Then subtract Seventeen, and the answer must be
 Exactly and perfectly true.

"The method employed I would gladly explain,
 While I have it so clear in my head,
If I had but the time and you had but the brain--
 But much yet remains to be said.

"In one moment I've seen what has hitherto been
 Enveloped in absolute mystery,
And without extra ...Read more of this...
by Carroll, Lewis
...ent you'll look solemn.
"So all this time he's been alive -
In realms of rhyme a second-rater . . .
But gad! to live to ninety-five:
Let's toast his ghost - a sherry, waiter!"...Read more of this...
by Service, Robert William
..., 
Lightly to the warrior stept, 
Took the face-cloth from the face; 
Yet she neither moved nor wept. 

Rose a nurse of ninety years, 
Set his child upon her knee-- 
Like summer tempest came her tears-- 
'Sweet my child, I live for thee.'...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...spake Sir Richard Grenville: 'I know you are no coward; 
You fly them for a moment to fight with them again. 
But I've ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore. 
I should count myself the coward if I left them, my Lord Howard, 
To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.' 

So Lord Howard passed away with five ships of war that day, 
Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven; 
But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land 
Very car...Read more of this...
by Tennyson, Alfred Lord
...f red paint

Beneath the kitchen windowsill and on a faded page the number for

Your long-gone neighbour, Lilly Clarke, ninety if she lives at all,

The memory of a lilac tree, the Anderson shelter hidden by the fence,

And the incomer’s invitation to call again and then and then...



We were wrong from the beginning, you always said, wrong

To be together, wrong to go away or perhaps, as Hobsbaum said,

‘It was the place’s fault. If we’d made it to Haworth as we

Dreamed, s...Read more of this...
by Tebb, Barry

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Book: Reflection on the Important Things