The Man Against The Sky Poem Rhyme Scheme

Recent Interactions*

This poem was read 8 times,

This poem was added to the favorite list by 0 members,

This poem was voted by 0 members.

(* Interactions only in the last 7 days)

New Poems

Wonderful Women
by Umaru Kanneh Boima
Freedom To Scratch In Peace
by Olute Aete
Happy New Year
by Felix Menda
Human Beings
by Dana Graslie
Lust
by Wisdom Greatness
An Isolated Tree's Song
by Sayeed Abubakar
A Strange Boy
by Sayeed Abubakar
O Soil
by Sayeed Abubakar
No War, No War-monger
by Sayeed Abubakar
Night's Town
by Sayeed Abubakar

Popular Poets

1. Emily Dickinson(2414 poems)
2. Madison Julius Cawein(1231 poems)
3. Ella Wheeler Wilcox(1136 poems)
4. William Wordsworth(1016 poems)
5. Robert Burns(986 poems)
6. Edgar Albert Guest(945 poems)
7. Thomas Moore(849 poems)
8. Robert Service(831 poems)

Edwin Arlington Robinson

The Man Against The Sky Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis

Write your comment about The Man Against The Sky poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Recent Interactions*

New Poems

Popular Poets

Between me and the sunset like a dome	A
Against the glory of a world on fire	B
Now burned a sudden hill	C
Bleak round and high by flame lit height made higher	B
With nothing on it for the flame to kill	C
Save one who moved and was alone up there	D
To loom before the chaos and the glare	D
As if he were the last god going home	A
Unto his last desire	B
Dark marvelous and inscrutable he moved on	E
Till down the fiery distance he was gone	F
Like one of those eternal remote things	G
That range across a man's imaginings	G
When a sure music fills him and he knows	G
What he may say thereafter to few men	H
The touch of ages having wrought	I
An echo and a glimpse of what he thought	I
A phantom or a legend until then	H
For whether lighted over ways that save	J
Or lured from all repose	G
If he go on too far to find a grave	J
Mostly alone he goes	G
	-
Even he who stood where I had found him	K
On high with fire all round him	K
Who moved along the molten west	L
And over the round hill's crest	L
That seemed half ready with him to go down	M
Flame bitten and flame cleft	N
As if there were to be no last thing left	N
Of a nameless unimaginable town	M
Even he who climbed and vanished may have taken	O
Down to the perils of a depth not known	P
From death defended though by men forsaken	O
The bread that every man must eat alone	P
He may have walked while others hardly dared	Q
Look on to see him stand where many fell	R
And upward out of that as out of hell	R
He may have sung and striven	O
To mount where more of him shall yet be given	O
Bereft of all retreat	S
To sevenfold heat	S
As on a day when three in Dura shared	Q
The furnace and were spared	Q
For glory by that king of Babylon	E
Who made himself so great that God who heard	T
Covered him with long feathers like a bird	T
	-
Again he may have gone down easily	U
By comfortable altitudes and found	V
As always underneath him solid ground	V
Whereon to be sufficient and to stand	W
Possessed already of the promised land	W
Far stretched and fair to see	U
A good sight verily	U
And one to make the eyes of her who bore him	K
Shine glad with hidden tears	G
Why question of his ease of who before him	K
In one place or another where they left	N
Their names as far behind them as their bones	G
And yet by dint of slaughter toil and theft	N
And shrewdly sharpened stones	G
Carved hard the way for his ascendency	U
Through deserts of lost years	G
Why trouble him now who sees and hears	G
No more than what his innocence requires	G
And therefore to no other height aspires	G
Than one at which he neither quails nor tires	G
He may do more by seeing what he sees	G
Than others eager for iniquities	G
He may by seeing all things for the best	L
Incite futurity to do the rest	L
	-
Or with an even likelihood	X
He may have met with atrabilious eyes	G
The fires of time on equal terms and passed	Y
Indifferently down until at last	Y
His only kind of grandeur would have been	Z
Apparently in being seen	A2
He may have had for evil or for good	X
No argument he may have had no care	D
For what without himself went anywhere	D
To failure or to glory and least of all	U
For such a stale flamboyant miracle	U
He may have been the prophet of an art	B2
Immovable to old idolatries	G
He may have been a player without a part	B2
Annoyed that even the sun should have the skies	G
For such a flaming way to advertise	G
He may have been a painter sick at heart	B2
With Nature's toiling for a new surprise	G
He may have been a cynic who now for all	U
Of anything divine that his effete	S
Negation may have tasted	C2
Saw truth in his own image rather small	U
Forbore to fever the ephemeral	U
Found any barren height a good retreat	S
From any swarming street	S
And in the sun saw power superbly wasted	C2
And when the primitive old fashioned stars	G
Came out again to shine on joys and wars	G
More primitive and all arrayed for doom	D2
He may have proved a world a sorry thing	E2
In his imagining	E2
And life a lighted highway to the tomb	D2
	-
Or mounting with infirm unsearching tread	F2
His hopes to chaos led	F2
He may have stumbled up there from the past	Y
And with an aching strangeness viewed the last	Y
Abysmal conflagration of his dreams	G
A flame where nothing seems	G
To burn but flame itself by nothing fed	F2
And while it all went out	G2
Not even the faint anodyne of doubt	G2
May then have eased a painful going down	M
From pictured heights of power and lost renown	M
Revealed at length to his outlived endeavor	B
Remote and unapproachable forever	B
And at his heart there may have gnawed	H2
Sick memories of a dead faith foiled and flawed	H2
And long dishonored by the living death	I2
Assigned alike by chance	G
To brutes and hierophants	G
And anguish fallen on those he loved around him	K
May once have dealt the last blow to confound him	K
And so have left him as death leaves a child	J2
Who sees it all too near	K2
And he who knows no young way to forget	L2
May struggle to the tomb unreconciled	J2
Whatever suns may rise or set	L2
There may be nothing kinder for him here	M2
Than shafts and agonies	G
And under these	G
He may cry out and stay on horribly	U
Or seeing in death too small a thing to fear	K2
He may go forward like a stoic Roman	O
Where pangs and terrors in his pathway lie	U
Or seizing the swift logic of a woman	O
Curse God and die	U
	-
Or maybe there like many another one	O
Who might have stood aloft and looked ahead	F2
Black drawn against wild red	F2
He may have built unawed by fiery gules	G
That in him no commotion stirred	T
A living reason out of molecules	G
Why molecules occurred	T
And one for smiling when he might have sighed	N2
Had he seen far enough	O2
And in the same inevitable stuff	O2
Discovered an odd reason too for pride	N2
In being what he must have been by laws	G
Infrangible and for no kind of cause	G
Deterred by no confusion or surprise	G
He may have seen with his mechanic eyes	G
A world without a meaning and had room	D2
Alone amid magnificence and doom	D2
To build himself an airy monument	P2
That should or fail him in his vague intent	Q2
Outlast an accidental universe	G
To call it nothing worse	G
Or by the burrowing guile	U
Of Time disintegrated and effaced	Q2
Like once remembered mighty trees go down	M
To ruin of which by man may now be traced	Q2
No part sufficient even to be rotten	O
And in the book of things that are forgotten	O
Is entered as a thing not quite worth while	U
He may have been so great	Q2
That satraps would have shivered at his frown	M
And all he prized alive may rule a state	Q2
No larger than a grave that holds a clown	M
He may have been a master of his fate	Q2
And of his atoms ready as another	B
In his emergence to exonerate	Q2
His father and his mother	B
He may have been a captain of a host	Q2
Self eloquent and ripe for prodigies	G
Doomed here to swell by dangerous degrees	G
And then give up the ghost	Q2
Nahum's great grasshoppers were such as these	G
Sun scattered and soon lost	Q2
	-
Whatever the dark road he may have taken	O
This man who stood on high	U
And faced alone the sky	U
Whatever drove or lured or guided him	K
A vision answering a faith unshaken	O
An easy trust assumed of easy trials	G
A sick negation born of weak denials	G
A crazed abhorrence of an old condition	O
A blind attendance on a brief ambition	O
Whatever stayed him or derided him	K
His way was even as ours	G
And we with all our wounds and all our powers	G
Must each await alone at his own height	Q2
Another darkness or another light	Q2
And there of our poor self dominion reft	Q2
If inference and reason shun	O
Hell Heaven and Oblivion	O
May thwarted will perforce precarious	G
But for our conservation better thus	G
Have no misgiving left	Q2
Of doing yet what here we leave undone	O
Or if unto the last of these we cleave	R2
Believing or protesting we believe	R2
In such an idle and ephemeral	U
Florescence of the diabolical	U
If robbed of two fond old enormities	G
Our being had no onward auguries	G
What then were this great love of ours to say	G
For launching other lives to voyage again	H
A little farther into time and pain	S2
A little faster in a futile chase	G
For a kingdom and a power and a Race	G
That would have still in sight	Q2
A manifest end of ashes and eternal night	Q2
Is this the music of the toys we shake	T2
So loud as if there might be no mistake	T2
Somewhere in our indomitable will	U
Are we no greater than the noise we make	T2
Along one blind atomic pilgrimage	U2
Whereon by crass chance billeted we go	V2
Because our brains and bones and cartilage	U2
Will have it so	V2
If this we say then let us all be still	U
About our share in it and live and die	Q2
More quietly thereby	Q2
	-
Where was he going this man against the sky	Q2
You know not nor do I	Q2
But this we know if we know anything	E2
That we may laugh and fight and sing	E2
And of our transience here make offering	E2
To an orient Word that will not be erased	Q2
Or save in incommunicable gleams	G
Too permanent for dreams	G
Be found or known	P
No tonic and ambitious irritant	Q2
Of increase or of want	Q2
Has made an otherwise insensate waste	Q2
Of ages overthrown	P
A ruthless veiled implacable foretaste	Q2
Of other ages that are still to be	U
Depleted and rewarded variously	U
Because a few by fate's economy	U
Shall seem to move the world the way it goes	G
No soft evangel of equality	U
Safe cradled in a communal repose	G
That huddles into death and may at last	Q2
Be covered well with equatorial snows	G
And all for what the devil only knows	G
Will aggregate an inkling to confirm	W2
The credit of a sage or of a worm	W2
Or tell us why one man in five	X2
Should have a care to stay alive	X2
While in his heart he feels no violence	G
Laid on his humor and intelligence	G
When infant Science makes a pleasant face	G
And waves again that hollow toy the Race	G
No planetary trap where souls are wrought	Q2
For nothing but the sake of being caught	Q2
And sent again to nothing will attune	Y2
Itself to any key of any reason	O
Why man should hunger through another season	O
To find out why 'twere better late than soon	Y2
To go away and let the sun and moon	Y2
And all the silly stars illuminate	Q2
A place for creeping things	G
And those that root and trumpet and have wings	G
And herd and ruminate	Q2
Or dive and flash and poise in rivers and seas	G
Or by their loyal tails in lofty trees	G
Hang screeching lewd victorious derision	O
Of man's immortal vision	O
	-
Shall we because Eternity records	G
Too vast an answer for the time born words	G
We spell whereof so many are dead that once	G
In our capricious lexicons	G
Were so alive and final hear no more	Z2
The Word itself the living word no man	A3
Has ever spelt	Q2
And few have ever felt	Q2
Without the fears and old surrenderings	G
And terrors that began	A3
When Death let fall a feather from his wings	G
And humbled the first man	A3
Because the weight of our humility	Q2
Wherefrom we gain	S2
A little wisdom and much pain	S2
Falls here too sore and there too tedious	G
Are we in anguish or complacency	Q2
Not looking far enough ahead	Q2
To see by what mad couriers we are led	Q2
Along the roads of the ridiculous	G
To pity ourselves and laugh at faith	B3
And while we curse life bear it	Q2
And if we see the soul's dead end in death	I2
Are we to fear it	Q2
What folly is here that has not yet a name	C3
Unless we say outright that we are liars	G
What have we seen beyond our sunset fires	G
That lights again the way by which we came	C3
Why pay we such a price and one we give	D3
So clamoringly for each racked empty day	Q2
That leads one more last human hope away	Q2
As quiet fiends would lead past our crazed eyes	G
Our children to an unseen sacrifice	G
If after all that we have lived and thought	Q2
All comes to Nought	Q2
If there be nothing after Now	E3
And we be nothing anyhow	E3
And we know that why live	X2
'Twere sure but weaklings' vain distress	G
To suffer dungeons where so many doors	G
Will open on the cold eternal shores	G
That look sheer down	M
To the dark tideless floods of Nothingness	G
Where all who know may drown	M