A Ballad Of Pikeville Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCCDDEEFFGG HH IIJJKKGG IILL MMNNOOPPEEQQRRSSKKTT| Down in Southern Arizona where the Gila monster thrives | A |
| And the 'Mescalero ' gifted with a hundred thousand lives | B |
| Every hour renounces one of them by drinking liquid flame | C |
| The assassinating wassail that has given him his name | C |
| Where the enterprising dealer in Caucasian hair is seen | D |
| To hold his harvest festival upon his village green | D |
| While the late lamented tenderfoot upon the plain is spread | E |
| With a sanguinary circle on the summit of his head | E |
| Where the cactuses or cacti lift their lances in the sun | F |
| And incautious jackass rabbits come to sorrow as they run | F |
| Lived a colony of settlers old Missouri was the State | G |
| Where they formerly resided at a prehistoric date | G |
| - | |
| Now the spot that had been chosen for this colonizing scheme | H |
| Was as waterless believe me as an Arizona stream | H |
| - | |
| The soil was naught but ashes by the breezes driven free | I |
| And an acre and a quarter were required to sprout a pea | I |
| So agriculture languished for the land would not produce | J |
| And for lack of water whisky was the beverage in use | J |
| Costly whisky hauled in wagons many a weary weary day | K |
| Mostly needed by the drivers to sustain them on their way | K |
| Wicked whisky King of Evils Why O why did God create | G |
| Such a curse and thrust it on us in our inoffensive state | G |
| - | |
| Once a parson came among them and a holy man was he | I |
| With his ailing stomach whisky wouldn't anywise agree | I |
| So he knelt upon the mesa and he prayed with all his chin | L |
| That the Lord would send them water or incline their hearts to gin | L |
| - | |
| Scarcely was the prayer concluded ere an earthquake shook the land | M |
| And with copious effusion springs burst out on every hand | M |
| Merrily the waters gurgled and the shock which gave them birth | N |
| Fitly was by some declared a temperance movement of the earth | N |
| Astounded by the miracle the people met that night | O |
| To celebrate it properly by some religious rite | O |
| And 'tis truthfully recorded that before the moon had sunk | P |
| Every man and every woman was devotionally drunk | P |
| A half a standard gallon says history per head | E |
| Of the best Kentucky prime was at that ceremony shed | E |
| O the glory of that country O the happy happy folk | Q |
| By the might of prayer delivered from Nature's broken yoke | Q |
| Lo the plains to the horizon all are yellowing with rye | R |
| And the corn upon the hill top lifts its banners to the sky | R |
| Gone the wagons gone the drivers and the road is grown to grass | S |
| Over which the incalescent Bourbon did aforetime pass | S |
| Pikeville that's the name they've given in their wild romantic way | K |
| To that irrigation district now distills statistics say | K |
| Something like a hundred gallons out of each recurrent crop | T |
| To the head of population and consumes it every drop | T |
Ambrose Bierce
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