A Hill Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCDEFGHIJKLMKNOPKQL RSTUVWXYZA2 KB2 C2D2LLE2F2G2H2| In Italy where this sort of thing can occur | A |
| I had a vision once though you understand | B |
| It was nothing at all like Dante's or the visions of saints | C |
| And perhaps not a vision at all I was with some friends | D |
| Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza | E |
| In the early morning A clear fretwork of shadows | F |
| From huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made | G |
| A sort of lucent shallows in which was moored | H |
| A small navy of carts Books coins old maps | I |
| Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints | J |
| Were all on sale The colors and noise | K |
| Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation | L |
| So that even the bargaining | M |
| Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness | K |
| And then where it happened the noises suddenly stopped | N |
| And it got darker pushcarts and people dissolved | O |
| And even the great Farnese Palace itself | P |
| Was gone for all its marble in its place | K |
| Was a hill mole colored and bare It was very cold | Q |
| Close to freezing with a promise of snow | L |
| The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap | R |
| Outside a factory wall There was no wind | S |
| And the only sound for a while was the little click | T |
| Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet | U |
| I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge | V |
| But no other sign of life And then I heard | W |
| What seemed the crack of a rifle A hunter I guessed | X |
| At least I was not alone But just after that | Y |
| Came the soft and papery crash | Z |
| Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth | A2 |
| - | |
| And that was all except for the cold and silence | K |
| That promised to last forever like the hill | B2 |
| - | |
| Then prices came through and fingers and I was restored | C2 |
| To the sunlight and my friends But for more than a week | D2 |
| I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen | L |
| All this happened about ten years ago | L |
| And it hasn't troubled me since but at last today | E2 |
| I remembered that hill it lies just to the left | F2 |
| Of the road north of Poughkeepsie and as a boy | G2 |
| I stood before it for hours in wintertime | H2 |
Anthony Evan Hecht
(1)
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