On A Friend Recently Dead Poem Rhyme Scheme

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I	A
	-
The stream goes fast	B
When this that is the present is the past	B
'Twill be as all the other pasts have been	C
A failing hill a daily dimming scene	D
A far strange port with foreign life astir	E
The ship has left behind the voyager	E
Will never return to no nor see again	F
Though with a heart full of longing he may strain	G
Back to project himself and once more count	H
The boats the whitened walls that climbed the mount	H
Mark the cathedral's roof the gathered spires	I
The vanes the windows red with sunset's fires	J
The gap of the market place and watch again	F
The coloured groups of women and the men	F
Lounging at ease along the low stone wall	K
That fringed the harbour and there beyond it all	K
High pastures morning and evening scattered with small	K
Specks that were grazing sheep It is all gone	L
It is all blurred that once so brightly shone	M
He cannot now with the old clearness see	N
The rust upon one ringbolt of the quay	N
	-
	-
II	A
	-
And yesterday is dead and you are dead	O
Your duplicate that hovered in my head	O
Thins like blown wreathing smoke your features grow	E
To interrupted outlines and all will go	E
Unless I fight dispersal with my will	P
So I shall do it but too conscious still	P
That when we walked together had I known	M
How soon your journey was to end alone	M
I should not now that you have gone from view	Q
Be gathering derelict odds and ends of you	Q
But in the intense lucidity of pain	G
Your likeness would have burnt into my brain	G
I did not know lovable and unique	R
As volatile as a bubble and as weak	R
You sat with me and my eyes registered	S
This thing and that and sluggishly I heard	S
Your voice remembering here and there a word	S
	-
	-
III	A
	-
So in my mind there's not much left of you	Q
And that disintegrates but while a few	Q
Patches of memory's mirror still are bright	T
Nor your reflected image there has quite	T
Faded and slipped away it will be well	U
To search for each surviving syllable	V
Of voice and body and soul And some I'll find	W
Right to my hand and some tangled and blind	W
Among the obscure weeds that fill the mind	W
A pause	X
I plunge my thought's hooked resolute claws	X
Deep in the turbid past Like drowned things in the jaws	X
Of grappling irons your features to the verge	Y
Of conscious knowledge one by one emerge	Y
Can I not make these scattered things unite	T
I knit my brows and clench my eyelids tight	T
And focus to a point Streams of dark pinkish light	T
Convolve and now spasmodically there flit	Z
Clear pictures of you as you used to sit	Z
The way you crossed your legs stretched in your chair	E
Elbow at rest and tumbler in the air	E
Jesting on books and politics and worse	A2
And still good company when most perverse	A2
Capricious friend	B2
Here in this room not long before the end	B2
Here in this very room six months ago	E
You poised your foot and joked and chuckled so	E
Beyond the window shook the ash tree bough	C2
You saw books pictures as I see them now	C2
The sofa then was blue the telephone	M
Listened upon the desk and softly shone	M
Even as now the fire irons in the grate	D2
And the little brass pendulum swung a seal of fate	D2
Stamping the minutes and the curtains on window and door	E
Just moved in the air and on the dark boards of the floor	E
These same discreetly coloured rugs were lying	E2
And then you never had a thought of dying	E2
	-
	-
IV	Q
	-
You are not here and all the things in the room	F2
Watch me alone in the gradual growing gloom	F2
The you that thought and felt are I know not where	E
The you that sat and drank in that arm chair	E
Will never sit there again	F
For months you have lain	G
Under a graveyard's green	D
In some place abroad where I've never been	C
Perhaps there is a stone over you	Q
Or only the wood and the earth and the grass cover you	Q
But it doesn't much matter for dead and decayed you lie	A
Like a million million others who felt they would never die	A
Like Alexander and Helen the beautiful	V
And the last collier hanged for murdering his trull	V
All done with and buried in an equal bed	O
	-
	-
V	Q
	-
Yes you are dead like all the other dead	O
You are not here but I am here alone	M
And evening falls fusing tree water and stone	M
Into a violet cloth and the frail ash tree hisses	G2
With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain	G
And a steamer softly puffing along the river passes	H2
Drawing a file of barges and silence falls again	F
And a bell tones and the evening darkens and in sparse rank	I2
The greenish lights well out along the other bank	I2
I have no force left now the sights and sounds impinge	J2
Upon me unresisted like raindrops on the mould	K2
And striving not against my melancholy mood	L2
Limp as a door that hangs upon one failing hinge	J2
Limp with slack marrowless arms and thighs I sit and brood	L2
On death and death and death And quiet thin and cold	K2
Following of this one friend the hopeless helpless ghost	M2
The weak appealing wraiths of notable men of old	K2
Who died pass through the air and then host after host	M2
Innumerable overwhelming without form	N2
Rolling across the sky in awful silent storm	N2
The myriads of the undifferentiated dead	O
Whom none recorded or of whom the record faded	O2
O spectacle appallingly sublime	P2
I see the universe one long disastrous strife	Q
And in the staggering abysses of backward and forward time	P2
Death chasing hard upon the heels of creating life	Q
And I I see myself as one of a heap of stones	Q2
Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over	E
Onward and never returning leaving no mark behind	W
There's nothing to hope for Blank cessation numbs my mind	W
And I feel my heart thumping gloomy against its cover	E
My heavy belly hanging from my bones	Q2
	-
	-
VI	A
	-
Below in the dark street	R2
There is a tap of feet	R2
I rise and angrily meditate	D2
How often I have let of late	D2
This thought of death come over me	Q
How often I will sit and backward trace	S2
The deathly history of the human race	S2
The ripples of men who chattered and were still	P
Known and unknown older and older until	P
Before man's birth I fall shivering and aghast	B
Through a hole in the bottom of the remotest past	B
Till painfully my spirit throws	T2
Her giddiness off and then as soon	U2
As I recover and try to think again	F
Life seems like death and all my body grows	T2
Icily cold and all my brain	G
Cold as the jagged craters of the moon	U2
And I wonder is it not strange that I	A
Who thus have heard eternity's black laugh	Q
And felt its freezing breath	V2
Should sometimes shut it out from memory	Q
So as to play quite prettily with death	V2
And turn an easy epitaph	Q
	-
I can hear a voice whispering in my brain	G
Why this is the old futility again	F
Criminal day by day	W2
Your own life is ebbing swiftly away	W2
And what have you done with it	Z
Except to become a maudlin hypocrite	Z
Yes I know I know	E
One should not think of death or the dead overmuch but one's mind's made so	E
That at certain times the roads of thought all lead to death	V2
And false reasoning clouds one's soul as a window with breath	V2
Is clouded in winter's air	E
And all the faith one may have	Q
Lies useless and dead as a body in the grave	Q

John Collings Squire, Sir

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