The Art Of Drowning Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCDE FGHIJ KLMNOP CQRSBT FUVWKX| I wonder how it all got started this business | A |
| about seeing your life flash before your eyes | B |
| while you drown as if panic or the act of submergence | C |
| could startle time into such compression crushing | D |
| decades in the vice of your desperate final seconds | E |
| - | |
| After falling off a steamship or being swept away | F |
| in a rush of floodwaters wouldn't you hope | G |
| for a more leisurely review an invisible hand | H |
| turning the pages of an album of photographs | I |
| you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat | J |
| - | |
| How about a short animated film a slide presentation | K |
| Your life expressed in an essay or in one model photograph | L |
| Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash | M |
| Your whole existence going off in your face | N |
| in an eyebrow singeing explosion of biography | O |
| nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned | P |
| - | |
| Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance | C |
| here some bolt of truth forking across the water | Q |
| an ultimate Light before all the lights go out | R |
| dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage | S |
| But if something does flash before your eyes | B |
| as you go under it will probably be a fish | T |
| - | |
| a quick blur of curved silver darting away | F |
| having nothing to do with your life or your death | U |
| The tide will take you or the lake will accept it all | V |
| as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom | W |
| leaving behind what you have already forgotten | K |
| the surface now overrun with the high travel of clouds | X |
Billy Collins
(1)
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