The Sea-cat Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABBACCDDEEFFGHHGBBDD IIFFJJJKBKBLMLMNNOPO PQLQL| It's not for us to understand | A |
| How life on earth began to be | B |
| How forms that lived within the sea | B |
| Should leave the water for the land | A |
| Or how Satan alone may trace | C |
| The dark enigma of this race | C |
| When feline variants so far | D |
| Removed as tabs and tigers are | D |
| Preferred when they had left the shore | E |
| The jungle and the kitchen floor | E |
| That this uncouth primordial cat | F |
| Should keep his native habitat | F |
| Yet here he was and one might find | G |
| In crouch and slink and instant spring | H |
| Upon a living moving thing | H |
| The common genus of his kind | G |
| But there were qualities which he | B |
| Derived not from his family tree | B |
| No leopard lynx or jaguar | D |
| Could match this cat from Zanzibar | D |
| For whiskers that from ear to chin | I |
| Ran round to decorate his grin | I |
| And something wilder yet than that | F |
| Lay in the nature of this cat | F |
| It's said that mariners by night | J |
| When near a dangerous coast line might | J |
| Recover bearings from the light | J |
| Of some strange thing that swam and gleamed | K |
| A Salamander it might be | B |
| They said or Lucifer that streamed | K |
| His fiery passage through the sea | B |
| But in this banquet place not one | L |
| Of all the revellers could fail | M |
| To solve the riddle when Tom spun | L |
| A vast ecliptic as his tail | M |
| A fiery comet and his fur | N |
| Electrified each banqueter | N |
| So the three beldams there agreed | O |
| No alien could invade the hall | P |
| If one of such a fighting breed | O |
| Were placed upon the fortress wall | P |
| For who they asked of mortal creatures | Q |
| Could claim more fearful derivation | L |
| Than Tom with his Satanic features | Q |
| And his spontaneous conflagration | L |
E. J. Pratt
(1)
Poem topics: , Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
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