The Sheep In The Ruins Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: A BCDDEEFFFGHII DJKLFFGGMNG OPKQJRG DSTUDVWGGG KDJDVX TR EGYZA2NFFB2DC2D2E2E2 F2G KGG2 GDC2FFK H2I2GGGGTJ2K2 RRR| for Learned and Augustus Hand | A |
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| You my friends and you strangers all of you | B |
| Stand with me a little by the walls | C |
| Or where the walls once were | D |
| The bridge was here the city further | D |
| Now there is neither bridge nor town | E |
| A doorway where the roof is down | E |
| Opens on a foot worn stair | F |
| That climbs by three steps into empty air | F |
| What foot went there | F |
| Nothing in this town that had a thousand steeples | G |
| Lives now but these flocks of sheep | H |
| Grazing the yellow grasses where the bricks lie dead beneath | I |
| Dogs drive them with their brutal teeth | I |
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| Can none but sheep live where the walls go under | D |
| Is man s day over and the sheep s begun | J |
| And shall we sit here like the mourners on a dunghill | K |
| Shrilling with melodious tongue | L |
| Disfiguring our faces with the nails of our despair | F |
| What dust is this we sift upon our hair | F |
| Because a world is taken from us as the camels from the man of Uz | G |
| Shall we sit weeping for the world that was | G |
| And curse God and so perish | M |
| Shall monuments be grass and sheep inherit them | N |
| Shall dogs rule in the rubble of the arches | G |
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| Consider Oh consider what we are | O |
| Consider what it is to be a man | P |
| He who makes his journey by the glimmer of a candle | K |
| Who discovers in his mouth between his teeth a word | Q |
| Whose heart can bear the silence of the stars that burden | J |
| Who comes upon his meaning in the blindness of a stone | R |
| A girl s shoulder perfectly harmonious | G |
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| - | |
| Even the talk of it would take us days together | D |
| Marvels men have made Oh marvels and our breath | S |
| Brief as it is our death waiting | T |
| Marvels upon marvels Works of state | U |
| The imagination of the shape of order | D |
| Works of beauty the cedar door | V |
| Perfectly fitted to the sill of basalt | W |
| Works of grace | G |
| The ceremony at the entering of houses | G |
| At the entering of lives the bride among the torches in the shrill carouse | G |
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| Works of soul | K |
| Pilgrimages through the desert to the sacred boulder | D |
| Through the mid night to the stroke of one | J |
| Works of grace Works of wonder | D |
| All this have we done and more | V |
| And seen what have we not seen | X |
| - | |
| - | |
| A man beneath the sunlight in his meaning | T |
| A man one man a man alone | R |
| - | |
| - | |
| In the sinks of the earth that wanderer has gone down | E |
| The shadow of his mind is on the mountains | G |
| The word he has said is kept in the place beyond | Y |
| As the seed is kept and the earth ponders it | Z |
| Stones even the stones remember him | A2 |
| Even the leaves his image is in them | N |
| And now because the city is a ruin in the waste of air | F |
| We sit here and despair | F |
| Because the sheep graze in the dying grove | B2 |
| Our day is over | D |
| We must end | C2 |
| Because the talk around the table in the dusk has ended | D2 |
| Because the fingers of the goddesses are found | E2 |
| Like marble pebbles in the gravelly ground | E2 |
| And nothing answers but the jackal in the desert | F2 |
| Because the cloud proposes the wind says | G |
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| - | |
| Because the sheep are pastured where the staring statues lie | K |
| We sit upon the sand in silence | G |
| Watching the sun go and the shadows change | G2 |
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| - | |
| Listen my friends and you all of you strangers | G |
| Listen the work of man the work of splendor | D |
| Never has been ended or will end | C2 |
| Even where the sheep defile the ruined stair | F |
| And dogs are masters even there | F |
| One man s finger in the dust shall trace the circle | K |
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| Even among the ruins shall begin the work | H2 |
| Large in the level morning of the light | I2 |
| And beautiful with cisterns where the water whitens | G |
| Rippling upon the lip of stone and spills | G |
| By cedar sluices into pools and the young builders | G |
| String their plumb lines and the well laid course | G |
| Blanches its mortar in the sun and all the morning | T |
| Smells of wood smoke rope tar horse sweat pitch pine | J2 |
| Men and the trampled mint leaves in the ditch | K2 |
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| One man in the sun alone | R |
| Walks between the silence and the stone | R |
| The city rises from his flesh his bone | R |
Archibald Macleish
(1)
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