The Singing-woman From The Wood's Edge Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: AAAA BBAA CCDD EECC EE FFGG EEHH EEII EEAA JJWhat should I be but a prophet and a liar | A |
Whose mother was a leprechaun whose father was a friar | A |
Teethed on a crucifix and cradled under water | A |
What should I be but the fiend's god daughter | A |
- | |
And who should be my playmates but the adder and the frog | B |
That was got beneath a furze bush and born in a bog | B |
And what should be my singing that was christened at an altar | A |
But Aves and Credos and Psalms out of the Psalter | A |
- | |
You will see such webs on the wet grass maybe | C |
As a pixie mother weaves for her baby | C |
You will find such flame at the wave's weedy ebb | D |
As flashes in the meshes of a mer mother's web | D |
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But there comes to birth no common spawn | E |
From the love of a priest for a leprechaun | E |
And you never have seen and you never will see | C |
Such things as the things that swaddled me | C |
- | |
After all's said and after all's done | E |
What should I be but a harlot and a nun | E |
- | |
In through the bushes on any foggy day | F |
My Da would come a swishing of the drops away | F |
With a prayer for my death and a groan for my birth | G |
A mumbling of his beads for all that he was worth | G |
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And there sit my Ma her knees beneath her chin | E |
A looking in his face and a drinking of it in | E |
And a marking in the moss some funny little saying | H |
That would mean just the opposite of all that he was praying | H |
- | |
He taught me the holy talk of Vesper and of Matin | E |
He heard me my Greek and he heard me my Latin | E |
He blessed me and crossed me to keep my soul from evil | I |
And we watched him out of sight and we conjured up the devil | I |
- | |
Oh the things I haven't seen and the things I haven't known | E |
What with hedges and ditches till after I was grown | E |
And yanked both ways by my mother and my father | A |
With a Which would you better and a Which would you rather | A |
- | |
With him for a sire and her for a dam | J |
What should I be but just what I am | J |
Edna St. Vincent Millay
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