The Need To Love Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABAB CDCD EEEE FGFG EEEE HIHI JKJK CLCM ENEN OPOP QRQS| The need to love that all the stars obey | A |
| Entered my heart and banished all beside | B |
| Bare were the gardens where I used to stray | A |
| Faded the flowers that one time satisfied | B |
| - | |
| Before the beauty of the west on fire | C |
| The moonlit hills from cloister casements viewed | D |
| Cloud like arose the image of desire | C |
| And cast out peace and maddened solitude | D |
| - | |
| I sought the City and the hopes it held | E |
| With smoke and brooding vapors intercurled | E |
| As the thick roofs and walls close paralleled | E |
| Shut out the fair horizons of the world | E |
| - | |
| A truant from the fields and rustic joy | F |
| In my changed thought that image even so | G |
| Shut out the gods I worshipped as a boy | F |
| And all the pure delights I used to know | G |
| - | |
| Often the veil has trembled at some tide | E |
| Of lovely reminiscence and revealed | E |
| How much of beauty Nature holds beside | E |
| Sweet lips that sacrifice and arms that yield | E |
| - | |
| Clouds window framed beyond the huddled eaves | H |
| When summer cumulates their golden chains | I |
| Or from the parks the smell of burning leaves | H |
| Fragrant of childhood in the country lanes | I |
| - | |
| An organ grinder's melancholy tune | J |
| In rainy streets or from an attic sill | K |
| The blue skies of a windy afternoon | J |
| Where our kites climbed once from some grassy hill | K |
| - | |
| And my soul once more would be wrapped entire | C |
| In the pure peace and blessing of those years | L |
| Before the fierce infection of Desire | C |
| Had ravaged all the flesh Through starting tears | M |
| - | |
| Shone that lost Paradise but if it did | E |
| Again ere long the prison shades would fall | N |
| That Youth condemns itself to walk amid | E |
| So narrow but so beautiful withal | N |
| - | |
| And I have followed Fame with less devotion | O |
| And kept no real ambition but to see | P |
| Rise from the foam of Nature's sunlit ocean | O |
| My dream of palpable divinity | P |
| - | |
| And aught the world contends for to mine eye | Q |
| Seemed not so real a meaning of success | R |
| As only once to clasp before I die | Q |
| My vision of embodied happiness | S |
Alan Seeger
(1)
Poem topics: , Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
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