Insomnia Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis

Rhyme Scheme: AA BCBCDDEFFE GHGHIIJKKJ LALAJJMBBM JNJNCCOBBP QJQJRRSLLS TUTUJJJVVJ WAWAJJLLLXL YLZLJJLA2A2L B2C2B2C2 JNJJN A2QA2QLLA2A2A2 FVFVKKC2JJC2 A2JA2JD2D2JQQJ LLLLA2A2A2A2A2A2 C2E2C2E2JJLVVL CJCJVVJLLJ QLQLJJLA2A2L F2A2F2A2A2A2C2QQC2 QLQLVVFLLF CJCJQQJVVJ JG2JG2VVJLLJ A2JA2JH2H2FJJJ I2CI2CJJQVVQ JJJJVVVLLV AJAJJJA2JJA2 A2VA2VLLC2QQC2 A2QA2QCCQQQQ JMJMLLQJJQ LJLJJJJJJJ A2CA2CA2A2LLLL AC2A A2A2A2QQA2

Sleepless himself to give to others sleep	A
He giveth His beloved sleep	A
	-
	-
I heard the sounding of the midnight hour	B
The others one by one had left the room	C
In calm assurance that the gracious power	B
Of Sleep's fine alchemy would bless the gloom	C
Transmuting all its leaden weight to gold	D
To treasures of rich virtues manifold	D
New strength new health new life	E
Just weary enough to nestle softly sweetly	F
Into divine unconsciousness completely	F
Delivered from the world of toil and care and strife	E
	-
Just weary enough to feel assured of rest	G
Of Sleep's divine oblivion and repose	H
Renewing heart and brain for richer zest	G
Of waking life when golden morning glows	H
As young and pure and glad as if the first	I
That ever on the void of darkness burst	I
With ravishing warmth and light	J
On dewy grass and flowers and blithe birds singing	K
And shining waters all enraptured springing	K
Fragrance and shine and song out of the womb of night	J
	-
But I with infinite weariness outworn	L
Haggard with endless nights unblessed by sleep	A
Ravaged by thoughts unutterably forlorn	L
Plunged in despairs unfathomably deep	A
Went cold and pale and trembling with affright	J
Into the desert vastitude of Night	J
Arid and wild and black	M
Foreboding no oasis of sweet slumber	B
Counting beforehand all the countless number	B
Of sands that are its minutes on my desolate track	M
	-
	-
And so I went the last to my drear bed	J
Aghast as one who should go down to lie	N
Among the blissfully unconscious dead	J
Assured that as the endless years flowed by	N
Over the dreadful silence and deep gloom	C
And dense oppression of the stifling tomb	C
He only of them all	O
Nerveless and impotent to madness never	B
Could hope oblivion's perfect trance for ever	B
An agony of life eternal in death's pall	P
	-
But that would be for ever without cure	Q
And yet the agony be not more great	J
Supreme fatigue and pain while they endure	Q
Into Eternity their time translate	J
Be it of hours and days or countless years	R
And boundless aeons it alike appears	R
To the crushed victim's soul	S
Utter despair foresees no termination	L
But feels itself of infinite duration	L
The smallest fragment instant comprehends the whole	S
	-
The absolute of torture as of bliss	T
Is timeless each transcending time and space	U
The one an infinite obscure abyss	T
The other an eternal Heaven of grace	U
Keeping a little lamp of glimmering light	J
Companion through the horror of the night	J
I laid me down aghast	J
As he of all who pass death's quiet portal	V
Malignantly reserved alone immortal	V
In consciousness of bale that must for ever last	J
	-
I laid me down and closed my heavy eyes	W
As if sleep's mockery might win true sleep	A
And grew aware with awe but not surprise	W
Blindly aware through all the silence deep	A
Of some dark Presence watching by my bed	J
The awful image of a nameless dread	J
But I lay still fordone	L
And felt its Shadow on me dark and solemn	L
And steadfast as a monumental column	L
And thought drear thoughts of Doom and heard the bells chime	X
One	L
	-
And then I raised my weary eyes and saw	Y
By some slant moonlight on the ceiling thrown	L
And faint lamp gleam that Image of my awe	Z
Still as a pillar of basaltic stone	L
But all enveloped in a sombre shroud	J
Except the wan face drooping heavy browed	J
With sad eyes fixed on mine	L
Sad weary yearning eyes but fixed remorseless	A2
Upon my eyes yet wearier that were forceless	A2
To bear the cruel pressure cruel unmalign	L
	-
Wherefore I asked for what I knew too well	B2
ominous midnight Presence What art Thou	C2
Whereto in tones that sounded like a knell	B2
'I am the Second Hour appointed now	C2
To watch beside thy slumberless unrest '	-
Then I Thus both unlike alike unblest	J
For I should sleep you fly	N
Are not those wings beneath thy mantle moulded	J
Hour unfold those wings so straitly folded	J
And urge thy natural flight beneath the moonlit sky	N
	-
	-
'My wings shall open when your eyes shall close	A2
In real slumber from this waking drear	Q
Your wild unrest is my enforced repose	A2
Ere I move hence you must not know me here	Q
Could not your wings fan slumber through my brain	L
Soothing away its weariness and pain	L
'Your Sleep must stir my wings	A2
Sleep and I bear you gently on my pinions	A2
Athwart my span of hollow night's dominions	A2
Whence hour on hour shall bear to morning's golden springs '	-
	-
That which I ask of you you ask of me	F
weary Hour thus standing sentinel	V
Against your nature as I feel and see	F
Against my own your form immovable	V
Could I bring Sleep to set you on the wing	K
What other thing so gladly would I bring	K
Truly the Poet saith	C2
If that is best whose absence we deplore most	J
Whose presence in our longings is the foremost	J
What blessings equal Sleep save only love and death	C2
	-
I let my lids fall sick of thought and sense	A2
But felt that Shadow heavy on my heart	J
And saw the night before me an immense	A2
Black waste of ridge walls hour by hour apart	J
Dividing deep ravines from ridge to ridge	D2
Sleep's flying hour was an aerial bridge	D2
But I whose hours stood fast	J
Must climb down painfully each steep side hither	Q
And climb more painfully each steep side thither	Q
And so make one hour's span for years of travail last	J
	-
Thus I went down into that first ravine	L
Wearily slowly blindly and alone	L
Staggering stumbling sinking depths unseen	L
Shaken and bruised and gashed by stub and stone	L
And at the bottom paven with slipperiness	A2
A torrent brook rushed headlong with such stress	A2
Against my feeble limbs	A2
Such fury of wave and foam and icy bleakness	A2
Buffeting insupportably my weakness	A2
That when I would recall dazed memory swirls and swims	A2
	-
How I got through I know not faint as death	C2
And then I had to climb the awful scarp	E2
Creeping with many a pause for panting breath	C2
Clinging to tangled root and rock jut sharp	E2
Perspiring with faint chills instead of heat	J
Trembling and bleeding hands and knees and feet	J
Falling to rise anew	L
Until with lamentable toil and travel	V
Upon the ridge of and sand and gravel	V
I lay supine half dead and heard the bells chime Two	L
	-
And knew a change of Watchers in the room	C
Without a stir or sound beside my bed	J
Only the tingling silence of the gloom	C
The muffled pulsing of the night's deep dread	J
And felt an Image mightier to appal	V
And looked the moonlight on the bed foot wall	V
And corniced ceiling white	J
Was slanting now and in the midst stood solemn	L
And hopeless as a black sepulchral column	L
A steadfast shrouded Form the Third Hour of the night	J
	-
The fixed regard implacably austere	Q
Yet none the less ineffably forlorn	L
Something transcending all my former fear	Q
Came jarring through my shattered frame outworn	L
I knew that crushing rock could not be stirred	J
I had no heart to say a single word	J
But closed my eyes again	L
And set me shuddering to the task stupendous	A2
Of climbing down and up that gulf tremendous	A2
Unto the next hour ridge beyond hope's farthest ken	L
	-
Men sigh and plain and wail how life is brief	F2
Ah yes our bright eternities of bliss	A2
Are transient rare minute beyond belief	F2
Mere star dust meteors in Time's Night abyss	A2
Ah no our black eternities intense	A2
Of bale are lasting dominant immense	A2
As Time which is their breath	C2
The memory of the bliss is yearning sorrow	Q
The memory of the bale clouds every morrow	Q
Darkening through nights and days into the night of Death	C2
	-
No human words could paint my travail sore	Q
In the thick darkness of the next ravine	L
Deeper immeasurably than that before	Q
When hideous agonies unheard unseen	L
In overwhelming floods of torture roll	V
And horrors of great darkness drown the soul	V
To be is not to be	F
In memory save as ghastliest impression	L
And chaos of demoniacal possession	L
I shuddered on the ridge and heard the bells chime Three	F
	-
And like a pillar of essential gloom	C
Most terrible in stature and regard	J
Black in the moonlight filling all the room	C
The Image of the Fourth Hour evil starred	J
Stood over me but there was Something more	Q
Something behind It undiscerned before	Q
More dreadful than Its dread	J
Which overshadowed It as with a fateful	V
Inexorable fascination hateful	V
A wan and formless Shade from regions of the dead	J
	-
I shut my eyes against that spectral Shade	J
Which yet allured them with a deadly charm	G2
And that black Image of the Hour dismayed	J
By such tremendous menacing of harm	G2
And so into the gulf as into Hell	V
Where what immeasurable depths I fell	V
With seizures of the heart	J
Whose each clutch seemed the end of all pulsation	L
And tremors of exanimate prostration	L
Are horrors in my soul that never can depart	J
	-
If I for hope or wish had any force	A2
It was that I might rush down sharply hurled	J
From rock to rock until a mangled corse	A2
Down with the fury of the torrent whirled	J
The fury of black waters and white foam	H2
To where the homeless find their only home	H2
In the immense void Sea	F
Whose isles are worlds surrounding unsurrounded	J
Whose depths no mortal plummet ever sounded	J
Beneath all surface storms calm in Eternity	J
	-
Such hope or wish was as a feeble spark	I2
A little lamp's pale glimmer in a tomb	C
To just reveal the hopeless deadly dark	I2
And wordless horrors of my soul's fixed doom	C
Yet some mysterious instinct obstinate	J
Blindly unconscious as a law of Fate	J
Still urged me on and bore	Q
My shattered being through the unfeared peril	V
Of death less hateful than the life as sterile	V
I shuddered on the ridge and heard the bells chime Four	Q
	-
The Image of that Fifth Hour of the night	J
Was blacker in the moonlight now aslant	J
Upon its left than on its shrouded right	J
And over and behind It dominant	J
The shadow not Its shadow cast its spell	V
Most vague and dim and wan and terrible	V
Death's ghastly aureole	V
Pregnant with overpowering fascination	L
Commanding by repulsive instigation	L
Despair's envenomed anodyne to tempt the Soul	V
	-
I closed my eyes but could not longer keep	A
Under that Image and most awful Shade	J
Supine in mockery of blissful sleep	A
Delirious with such fierce thirst unalloyed	J
Of all worst agonies the most unblest	J
Is passive agony of wild unrest	J
Trembling and faint I rose	A2
And dressed with painful efforts and descended	J
With furtive footsteps and with breath suspended	J
And left the slumbering house with my unslumbering woes	A2
	-
Constrained to move through the unmoving hours	A2
Accurst from rest because the hours stood still	V
Feeling the hands of the Infernal Powers	A2
Heavy upon me for enormous ill	V
Inscrutable intolerable pain	L
Against which mortal pleas and prayers are vain	L
Gaspings of dying breath	C2
And human struggles dying spasms yet vainer	Q
Renounce defence when Doom is the Arraigner	Q
Let impotence of Life subside appeased in Death	C2
	-
I paced the silent and deserted streets	A2
In cold dark shade and chillier moonlight grey	Q
Pondering a dolorous series of defeats	A2
And black disasters from life's opening day	Q
Invested with the shadow of a doom	C
That filled the Spring and Summer with a gloom	C
Most wintry bleak and drear	Q
Gloom from within as from a sulphurous censer	Q
Making the glooms without for ever denser	Q
To blight the buds and flowers and fruitage of my year	Q
	-
Against a bridge's stony parapet	J
I leaned and gazed into the waters black	M
And marked an angry morning red and wet	J
Beneath a livid and enormous rack	M
Glare out confronting the belated moon	L
Huddled and wan and feeble as the swoon	L
Of featureless despair	Q
When some stray workmen half asleep but lusty	J
Passed urgent through the rainpour wild and gusty	J
I felt a ghost already planted watching there	Q
	-
As phantom to its grave or to its den	L
Some wild beast of the night when night is sped	J
I turned unto my homeless home again	L
To front a day only less charged with dread	J
Than that dread night and after day to front	J
Another night of what would be the brunt	J
I put the thought aside	J
To be resumed when common life unfolded	J
In common daylight had my brain remoulded	J
Meanwhile the flaws of rain refreshed and fortified	J
	-
The day passed and the night and other days	A2
And other nights and all of evil doom	C
The sun hours in a sick bewildering haze	A2
The star hours in a thick enormous gloom	C
With rending lightnings and with thunder knells	A2
The ghastly hours of all the timeless Hells	A2
Bury them with their bane	L
I look back on the words already written	L
And writhe by cold rage stung by self scorn smitten	L
They are so weak and vain and infinitely inane	L
	-
'How from those hideous Malebolges deep	A
I ever could win back to upper earth	C2
Restored to human nights of blessed sleep	A
And healthy waking with the new day's birth '	-
How do men climb back from a swoon whose stress	A2
Crushing far deeper than all consciousness	A2
Is deep as deep death seems	A2
Who can the steps and stages mete and number	Q
By which we re emerge from nightly slumber	Q
Our poor vast petty life is one dark maze of dreams	A2

James Thomson - (bysshe Vanolis)

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