Five Criticisms - Iv Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: A BCDECD FFGHIIGGHH JKLKMMJL NIOINBBPBPOQO QEQRRSTUURRVWVWXJSYY VSZZDD| On Certain Realists | A |
| - | |
| You with the quick sardonic eye | B |
| For all the mockeries of life | C |
| Beware in this dark masque of things that seem | D |
| Lest even that tragic irony | E |
| Which you discern in this our mortal strife | C |
| Trick you and trap you also with a dream | D |
| - | |
| Last night I saw a dead man borne along | F |
| The city streets passing a boisterous throng | F |
| That never ceased to laugh and shout and dance | G |
| And yet and yet | H |
| For all the poison bitter minds might brew | I |
| From themes like this I knew | I |
| That the stern Truth would not permit her glance | G |
| Thus to be foiled by flying straws of chance | G |
| For her keen eyes on deeper skies are set | H |
| And laws that tragic ironists forget | H |
| - | |
| She saw the dead man's life from birth to death | J |
| All that he knew of love and sin and pain | K |
| Success and failure not as this world sees | L |
| His doubts his passions inner loss and gain | K |
| And borne on darker tides of constant law | M |
| Beyond the margin of this life she saw | M |
| All that had left his body with the breath | J |
| These things to her were still realities | L |
| - | |
| If any mourned for him unseen | N |
| She saw them too | I |
| If none she'd not pretend | O |
| His clay were colder or his God less true | I |
| Or that his grave at length would be less green | N |
| She'd not deny | B |
| The boundless depths of her eternal sky | B |
| Brooding above a boundless universe | P |
| Because he seemed to man's unseeing eye | B |
| Going a little further to fare worse | P |
| Nor would she assume he lacked that unseen friend | O |
| Whom even the tragic ironists declare | Q |
| Were better than the seen in his last end | O |
| - | |
| Oh then beware beware | Q |
| Lest in the strong name of reality | E |
| You mock yourselves anew with shapes of air | Q |
| Lest it be you agnostics who re write | R |
| The fettering creeds of night | R |
| Affirm you know your own Unknowable | S |
| And lock the wing d soul in a new hell | T |
| Lest it be you lip worshippers of Truth | U |
| Who break the heart of youth | U |
| Lest it be you the realists who fight | R |
| With shadows and forget your own pure light | R |
| Lest it be you who with a little shroud | V |
| Snatched from the sightless faces of the dead | W |
| Hoodwink the world and keep the mourner bowed | V |
| In dust real dust with stones real stones for bread | W |
| Lest as you look one eighth of an inch beneath | X |
| The yellow skin of death | J |
| You dream yourselves discoverers of the skull | S |
| That old memento mori of our faith | Y |
| Lest it be you who hunt a flying wraith | Y |
| Through this dissolving stuff of hill and cloud | V |
| Lest it be you who at the last annul | S |
| Your covenant with your kind | Z |
| Lest it be you who darken heart and mind | Z |
| Sell the strong soul in bondage to a dream | D |
| And fetter us once more to things that seem | D |
Alfred Noyes
(1)
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