The Birds Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: A BBCCDD EFGGHH IIJJJJKK LLMMNNJJOOPPQQRR SSTTMMJJJJUUJJSSJJEE MMVVPP SSWXBBIIYYZZQQA2A2TT B2B2SSZZPPTo Edmund Gosse | A |
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Within mankind's duration so they say | B |
Khephren and Ninus lived but yesterday | B |
Asia had no name till man was old | C |
And long had learned the use of iron and gold | C |
And ons had passed when the first corn was planted | D |
Since first the use of syllables was granted | D |
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Men were on earth while climates slowly swung | E |
Fanning wide zones to heat and cold and long | F |
Subsidence turned great continents to sea | G |
And seas dried up dried up interminably | G |
Age after age enormous seas were dried | H |
Amid wastes of land And the last monsters died | H |
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Earth wore another face O since that prime | I |
Man with how many works has sprinkled time | I |
Hammering hewing digging tunnels roads | J |
Building ships temples multiform abodes | J |
How for his body's appetites his toils | J |
Have conquered all earth's products all her soils | J |
And in what thousand thousand shapes of art | K |
He has tried to find a language for his heart | K |
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Never at rest never content or tired | L |
Insatiate wanderer marvellously fired | L |
Most grandly piling and piling into the air | M |
Stones that will topple or arch he knows not where | M |
And yet did I this spring think it more strange | N |
More grand more full of awe than all that change | N |
And lovely and sweet and touching unto tears | J |
That through man's chronicled and unchronicled years | J |
And even into that unguessable beyond | O |
The water hen has nested by a pond | O |
Weaving dry flags into a beaten floor | P |
The one sure product of her only lore | P |
Low on a ledge above the shadowed water | Q |
Then when she heard no men as nature taught her | Q |
Flashing around with busy scarlet bill | R |
She built that nest her nest and builds it still | R |
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O let your strong imagination turn | S |
The great wheel backward until Troy unburn | S |
And then unbuild and seven Troys below | T |
Rise out of death and dwindle and outflow | T |
Till all have passed and none has yet been there | M |
Back ever back Our birds still crossed the air | M |
Beyond our myriad changing generations | J |
Still built unchanged their known inhabitations | J |
A million years before Atlantis was | J |
Our lark sprang from some hollow in the grass | J |
Some old soft hoof print in a tussock's shade | U |
And the wood pigeon's smooth snow white eggs were laid | U |
High amid green pines' sunset coloured shafts | J |
And rooks their villages of twiggy rafts | J |
Set on the tops of elms where elms grew then | S |
And still the thumbling tit and perky wren | S |
Popped through the tiny doors of cosy balls | J |
And the blackbird lined with moss his high built walls | J |
A round mud cottage held the thrush's young | E |
And straws from the untidy sparrow's hung | E |
And skimming forktailed in the evening air | M |
When man first was were not the martins there | M |
Did not those birds some human shelter crave | V |
And stow beneath the cornice of his cave | V |
Their dry tight cups of clay And from each door | P |
Peeped on a morning wiseheads three or four | P |
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Yes daw and owl curlew and crested hern | S |
Kingfisher mallard water rail and tern | S |
Chaffinch and greenfinch wagtail stonechat ruff | W |
Whitethroat and robin fly catcher and chough | X |
Missel thrush magpie sparrow hawk and jay | B |
Built those far ages gone in this year's way | B |
And the first man who walked the cliffs of Rame | I |
As I this year looked down and saw the same | I |
Blotches of rusty red on ledge and cleft | Y |
With grey green spots on them while right and left | Y |
A dizzying tangle of gulls were floating and flying | Z |
Wheeling and crossing and darting crying and crying | Z |
Circling and crying over and over and over | Q |
Crying with swoop and hover and fall and recover | Q |
And below on a rock against the grey sea fretted | A2 |
Pipe necked and stationary and silhouetted | A2 |
Cormorants stood in a wise black equal row | T |
Above the nests and long blue eggs we know | T |
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O delicate chain over all the ages stretched | B2 |
O dumb tradition from what far darkness fetched | B2 |
Each little architect with its one design | S |
Perpetual fixed and right in stuff and line | S |
Each little ministrant who knows one thing | Z |
One learn d rite to celebrate the spring | Z |
Whatever alters else on sea or shore | P |
These are unchanging man must still explore | P |
John Collings Squire, Sir
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