Madmen Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCDE FBGHIJ KLMLNLOP QRSEBT LUFVWXEYLZA2LThey say you can jinx a poem | A |
if you talk about it before it is done | B |
If you let it out too early they warn | C |
your poem will fly away | D |
and this time they are absolutely right | E |
- | |
Take the night I mentioned to you | F |
I wanted to write about the madmen | B |
as the newspapers so blithely call them | G |
who attack art not in reviews | H |
but with breadknives and hammers | I |
in the quiet museums of Prague and Amsterdam | J |
- | |
Actually they are the real artists | K |
you said spinning the ice in your glass | L |
The screwdriver is their brush | M |
The real vandals are the restorers | L |
you went on slowly turning me upside down | N |
the ones in the white doctor's smocks | L |
who close the wound in the landscape | O |
and thus ruin the true art of the mad | P |
- | |
I watched my poem fly down to the front | Q |
of the bar and hover there | R |
until the next customer walked in | S |
then I watched it fly out the open door into the night | E |
and sail away I could only imagine | B |
over the dark tenements of the city | T |
- | |
All I had wished to say | L |
was that art was also short | U |
as a razor can teach with a slash or two | F |
that it only seems long compared to life | V |
but that night I drove home alone | W |
with nothing swinging in the cage of my heart | X |
except the faint hope that I might | E |
catch a glimpse of the thing | Y |
in the fan of my headlights | L |
maybe perched on a road sign or a street lamp | Z |
poor unwritten bird its wings folded | A2 |
staring down at me with tiny illuminated eyes | L |
Billy Collins
(1)
Poem topics: , Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
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