Marginalia Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCDEFGH I JJKLFF MNCOFP QRSF TU VBFW FXYZA2 BB2JXCBC2 D2E2J FF2G2BBFH2EI2J2C K2PL2M2| Sometimes the notes are ferocious | A |
| skirmishes against the author | B |
| raging along the borders of every page | C |
| in tiny black script | D |
| If I could just get my hands on you | E |
| Kierkegaard or Conor Cruise O'Brien | F |
| they seem to say | G |
| I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head | H |
| - | |
| Other comments are more offhand dismissive | I |
| 'Nonsense ' 'Please ' 'HA ' | - |
| that kind of thing | J |
| I remember once looking up from my reading | J |
| my thumb as a bookmark | K |
| trying to imagine what the person must look like | L |
| why wrote 'Don't be a ninny' | F |
| alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson | F |
| - | |
| Students are more modest | M |
| needing to leave only their splayed footprints | N |
| along the shore of the page | C |
| One scrawls 'Metaphor' next to a stanza of Eliot's | O |
| Another notes the presence of 'Irony' | F |
| fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal | P |
| - | |
| Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers | Q |
| Hands cupped around their mouths | R |
| 'Absolutely ' they shout | S |
| to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin | F |
| 'Yes ' 'Bull's eye ' 'My man ' | - |
| Check marks asterisks and exclamation points | T |
| rain down along the sidelines | U |
| - | |
| And if you have managed to graduate from college | V |
| without ever having written 'Man vs Nature' | B |
| in a margin perhaps now | F |
| is the time to take one step forward | W |
| - | |
| We have all seized the white perimeter as our own | F |
| and reached for a pen if only to show | X |
| we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages | Y |
| we pressed a thought into the wayside | Z |
| planted an impression along the verge | A2 |
| - | |
| Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria | B |
| jotted along the borders of the Gospels | B2 |
| brief asides about the pains of copying | J |
| a bird signing near their window | X |
| or the sunlight that illuminated their page | C |
| anonymous men catching a ride into the future | B |
| on a vessel more lasting than themselves | C2 |
| - | |
| And you have not read Joshua Reynolds | D2 |
| they say until you have read him | E2 |
| enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling | J |
| - | |
| Yet the one I think of most often | F |
| the one that dangles from me like a locket | F2 |
| was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye | G2 |
| I borrowed from the local library | B |
| one slow hot summer | B |
| I was just beginning high school then | F |
| reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room | H2 |
| and I cannot tell you | E |
| how vastly my loneliness was deepened | I2 |
| how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed | J2 |
| when I found on one page | C |
| - | |
| A few greasy looking smears | K2 |
| and next to them written in soft pencil | P |
| by a beautiful girl I could tell | L2 |
| whom I would never meet | M2 |
| 'Pardon the egg salad stains but I'm in love ' | - |
Billy Collins
(1)
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