Peripeteia Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCDECFGHIJKLCMN MJKNKOKNKNKKPMNQKKFN JKKNNJRKKNRKKPK KSKKKTNKNUNQVKNKKKNW X MBNSNYZNMNNTNYA2KNNB 2TNOf course the familiar rustling of programs | A |
My hair mussed from behind by a grand gesture | B |
Of mink A little craning about to see | C |
If anyone I know is in the audience | D |
And as the house fills up | E |
A mild relief that no one there knows me | C |
A certain amount of getting up and down | F |
From my aisle seat to let the others in | G |
Then my eyes wander briefly over the cast | H |
Management stand ins make up men designers | I |
Perfume and liquor ads and rise prayerlike | J |
To the false heaven of rosetted lights | K |
The stucco lyres and emblems of high art | L |
That promise with crude Broadway honesty | C |
Something less than perfection | M |
Two bulbs are missing and Apollo s bored | N |
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And then the cool drawn out anticipation | M |
Not of the play itself but the false dusk | J |
And equally false night when the houselights | K |
Obey some planetary rheostat | N |
And bring a stillness on It is that stillness | K |
I wait for | O |
Before it comes | K |
Whether we like it or not we are a crowd | N |
Foul breathed gum chewing fat with arrogance | K |
Passion opinion and appetite for blood | N |
But in that instant which the mind protracts | K |
From dim to dark before the curtain rises | K |
Each of us is miraculously alone | P |
In calm invulnerable isolation | M |
Neither a neighbor nor a fellow but | N |
As at the beginning and end a single soul | Q |
With all the sweet and sour of loneliness | K |
I as a connoisseur of loneliness | K |
Savor it richly and set it down | F |
In an endless umber landscape a stubble field | N |
Under a lilac electric storm flushed sky | J |
Where in companionship with worthless stones | K |
Mica flecked or at best some rusty quartz | K |
I stood in childhood waiting for things to mend | N |
A useful discipline perhaps One that might lead | N |
To solitary self denying work | J |
That issues in something harmless like a poem | R |
Governed by laws that stand for other laws | K |
Both of which aim through kindred disciplines | K |
At the soul s knowledge and habiliment | N |
In any case in a self granted freedom | R |
The mind lone regent of itself prolongs | K |
The dark and silence mirrors itself delights | K |
In consciousness of consciousness alone | P |
Sufficient nimble touched with a small grace | K |
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Then as it must at last the curtain rises | K |
The play begins Something by Shakespeare | S |
Framed in the arched proscenium it seems | K |
A dream neither better nor worse | K |
Than whatever I shall dream after I rise | K |
With hat and coat go home to bed and dream | T |
If anything more limited more strict | N |
No one will fly or turn into a moose | K |
But acceptable like a dream because remote | N |
And there is after all a pretty girl | U |
Perhaps tonight she ll figure in the cast | N |
I summon to my slumber and control | Q |
In vast arenas limitless space and time | V |
That yield and sway in soft Einsteinian tides | K |
Who is she Sylvia Amelia Earhart | N |
Some creature that appears and disappears | K |
From life from reverie a fugitive of dreams | K |
There on the stage with awkward grace the actors | K |
Beautifully costumed in Renaissance brocade | N |
Perform their duties even as I must mine | W |
Though not as I am always free to smile | X |
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Something is happening Some consternation | M |
Are the knives out Is someone s life in danger | B |
And can the magic cloak and book protect | N |
One has of course real confidence in Shakespeare | S |
And I relax in my plush seat convinced | N |
That prompt as dawn and genuine as a toothache | Y |
The dream will be accomplished provisionally true | Z |
As anything else one cares to think about | N |
The players are aghast Can it be the villain | M |
The outrageous drunks plotting the coup d tat | N |
Are slyer than we thought Or we more innocent | N |
Can it be that poems lie As in a dream | T |
Leaving a stunned and gap mouthed Ferdinand | N |
Father and faery pageant she even she | Y |
Miraculous Miranda steps from the stage | A2 |
Moves up the aisle to my seat where she stops | K |
Smiles gently seriously and takes my hand | N |
And leads me out of the theatre into a night | N |
As luminous as noon more deeply real | B2 |
Simply because of her hand than any dream | T |
Shakespeare or I or anyone ever dreamed | N |
Anthony Evan Hecht
(1)
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