On A Friend Recently Dead Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: A BBCDEEFGHHIJFFKKKLMN N A OOEEPPMMQQGGRRSSS A QQTTUVWWWXXXYYTTTZZE EA2A2B2B2EEC2C2MMD2D 2EEE2E2 Q F2F2EEFGDCQQAAVVO Q OMMG2GH2FI2I2J2K2L2J 2L2K2M2K2M2N2N2OO2P2 QP2QQ2EWWEQ2 A R2R2D2D2QS2S2PPBBT2U 2FT2GU2AQV2QV2Q GFW2W2ZZEEV2V2EQQI | A |
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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 |
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II | A |
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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 |
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III | A |
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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 |
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IV | Q |
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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 |
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V | Q |
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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 |
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VI | A |
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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 |
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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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