His Tuning Of The Night Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABCDE FGCHIJK KGGAL MIGCN OP GEGQ MRGSTCGUC VLGCLC| All night he lies awake tuning the sky | A |
| tuning the night with its fat crackle of static | B |
| with its melancholy love songs crooning | C |
| across the rainy air above Verdun | D |
| the autobahn's blue suicidal dawn | E |
| - | |
| Wherever he lives there is the same unwomaned bed | F |
| the ashtrays overflowing their reproaches | G |
| his stained fingers on the tuning bar fishing | C |
| for her voice in a deep mirrorless pond | H |
| for the tinsel elusive fish | I |
| brighter than pennies in water more wished upon | J |
| the copper colored daughter of the pond god | K |
| - | |
| He casts for her the tuning bar his rod | K |
| but only long dead lovers with their griefs | G |
| haunt him in Piaf's voice | G |
| as if a voice could somehow only die | A |
| when it was sung out utterly | L |
| - | |
| He finally lies down and drowns the light | M |
| but the taste of her rises brackish | I |
| from the long dark water of her illness | G |
| his grief is terrible as drowning | C |
| when he reaches for the radio again | N |
| - | |
| In the daytime you hardly know him | O |
| he walks in a borrowed calm | P |
| - | |
| You cannot sense | G |
| his desperation in the dawn | E |
| when the abracadabras of the birds | G |
| conjure another phantom day | Q |
| - | |
| He favors cities which blaze all night | M |
| hazy mushrooms of light under the blue | R |
| blinking eyes of jets | G |
| But when the lamps across the way go under | S |
| the floorboards settle | T |
| the pipes fret like old men gargling | C |
| he is alone with his mouthful of ghosts | G |
| his tongue bitter with her unmourned death | U |
| the terrible drowning | C |
| - | |
| I watch from my blue window | V |
| knowing he does not trust me | L |
| though I know him as I know my ghosts | G |
| though I know his drowning | C |
| though since that night when all harmony broke for me | L |
| I have been trying to tune the sky | C |
Erica Jong
(1)
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