The Lighthouse Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: A BCDEBBFBGHI A JBBKLMNF A OPQRPSTQUVQWC N XYEZCA2NYYQ| i | A |
| - | |
| Impatient with spring's incendiary budding we longed for the | B |
| irreconcilable tossing of summer's phenomenal vowels brief cawing | C |
| from gulls on the pilings to divide and overturn May's minor successes | D |
| that profusion of greens rubbing against the loosened pane We | E |
| watched as an afternoon was laid over the afternoons like rain on the | B |
| sea Renting one of the many clattering skiffs in which to reach the | B |
| peninsula we traversed an idea of space and saturation all the way | F |
| out to where the phosphorous shards of early evening grew hard with a | B |
| deepening friction Occasionally the lacunae between stars would glow | G |
| dimly stars that became under different names each night our ardent | H |
| relief a cool and continuous wake left by scores of April violets | I |
| - | |
| ii | A |
| - | |
| More than a pyrrhic discovery clusters of Queen Anne's lace | J |
| through which the wind inscribes a muted text Salt air burns the | B |
| last of winter's damp cordwood to ash The weathervane spins inside a | B |
| set of parallel winds By our road the heavy monody of goldenrod | K |
| The first June lily opened its whitest furl the field itself in | L |
| an hour of heliotropic origin After that we liked the way the tight | M |
| equation of waves went on finishing nothing among the many drifts of | N |
| seaweed swaying all day at the fray | F |
| - | |
| iii | A |
| - | |
| Of the types of inflorescence she liked compound umbel and corymb | O |
| best wild carrot and cherry variation of structuring root | P |
| pith and stem What became of the leaky skiff its aluminum tuned to | Q |
| thinness by this water's relentless logarithm The days themselves | R |
| became fractions of polished metal tuneless numbers as the acute | P |
| and accurate boat was worn away by reference and by our other forms | S |
| of luminous inquiry The bay dispersed the heat of our instincts | T |
| until the boat became the question of a transparency gained through | Q |
| travel So long exposed to those elemental particulars the boat is | U |
| hard to conceive of moving as it does between one ideal shore | V |
| and another just an inference of relation with seldom a trace to | Q |
| be spoken of Then just an open sea to hold the boat's oscillations | W |
| the echoes of its cold burning song | C |
| - | |
| iv | N |
| - | |
| It was the effort of sifting through August's scattered abeyance that | X |
| awakened our love of autumn's delay that voice of its tonal | Y |
| gesture in a phonemic drift through which vowels were only so many | E |
| moorings boats in the harbor Every so often the gulls' pitch | Z |
| reduced the day's amplitude to fractions of its blue equation leaving | C |
| the wooden piles of consonants with which our nights were built Not | A2 |
| the view but the window glass long past molten was our perspective | N |
| on this sea's refracting tones Outside a wind's thin tremolo | Y |
| through dunes would light or delay our sleep We knew how suddenly | Y |
| the idea of a more distant paradise leaves you | Q |
Jocelyn Emerson
(1)
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