Madmen Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCDE FBGHIJ KLMLNLOP QRSEBT LUFVWXEYLZA2L| They 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)
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