To A Musician Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABA ABAB BCBC BDBD DEE FBFB GHGH IJIJ KLKL MNMN BNB OPOP QBQB RSRS BSB BTBT UVUV BWBW BBBB XYZY A2B2A2B2| Musician with the bent and brooding face | A |
| White brow and thunderous eyes you are not playing | B |
| Merely the music that dead hand did trace | A |
| - | |
| Musician with the lifted resolute face | A |
| And scornful smile about your closed mouth straying | B |
| And hand that moves with swift or fluttering grace | A |
| It is not that man's music you are playing | B |
| - | |
| The grave and merry tunes he made you are playing | B |
| Each march and dirge and dance he made endures | C |
| But changed and mastered and these things you're saying | B |
| These joys and sorrows are not his but yours | C |
| - | |
| You take those notes of his you seize and fling | B |
| His music as a dancer flings her veil | D |
| Toss it and twist it mould it make it sing | B |
| Whisper shout savagely lament and wail | D |
| - | |
| Rush like a hurricane pause and faint and fail | D |
| And as I watch my body and soul are bound | E |
| Helpless immovable in thongs of sound | E |
| - | |
| Lonely and strange musician standing there | F |
| Your bent ear listening to your own soul speaking | B |
| I hear vibrating on the smitten air | F |
| The crying of your suffering and your seeking | B |
| - | |
| Agonised raptured frustrate you are haunted | G |
| Pursued beset beleaguered filled possessed | H |
| By all you are all things you have lost and wanted | G |
| Things clear too clear things only to be guessed | H |
| - | |
| I do not know what earlier scenes you knew | I |
| What sweet reproachful memories you hold | J |
| Of broken dreams you had before you grew | I |
| So conscious and so lonely and so old | J |
| - | |
| I do not know what women's words have taught | K |
| Your heart and only dimly know by name | L |
| The many wandering cities where you have sought | K |
| Splendour and found the hollowness of fame | L |
| - | |
| Or where your sad and gentle reveries pass | M |
| To family and home who have for signs | N |
| Of all your childhood only the imagined grass | M |
| Of a bright steppe the wind running in lines | N |
| - | |
| And only some old fairy tale of sleighing | B |
| Dark snow deep forests endless turning pines | N |
| Bells tinkling and wolves howling and hounds baying | B |
| - | |
| Vague is your past yet as your violin sings | O |
| Its wildness held in desperate control | P |
| I know them all that world of bygone things | O |
| That have left their wounds and wonders in your soul | P |
| - | |
| Out in all weathers you have been my friend | Q |
| Climbed into dawn stood solitary and stark | B |
| Against the ashen quiet of twilight's end | Q |
| Brooded beneath the night's unanswering dark | B |
| - | |
| Through battering tempests you have blindly won | R |
| And lived and found a medicine for your scars | S |
| In resolution taken from the sun | R |
| And consolation from the unsleeping stars | S |
| - | |
| And here in this crowded place an hour staying | B |
| Your dim orchestra measuring off your bars | S |
| So pale and proud you stand your secrets flaying | B |
| - | |
| Resolving the tangle pouring through your song | B |
| All your deep ache for Beauty calm above | T |
| Your bitter silent anger and the strong | B |
| Ferocity and tenderness of your love | T |
| - | |
| Loud challenges and sweet and cynic laughter | U |
| Movements of joy spontaneous and pure | V |
| Remorse and the dull grief that glimmers after | U |
| The obstinate sins you know you will not cure | V |
| - | |
| I see you subtly lying soberly weighing | B |
| Gross questions jesting at the things you hate | W |
| In apathy and wild despair and praying | B |
| Bowed down before the shadowy knees of Fate | W |
| - | |
| And fearfully behind the visible groping | B |
| And standing by the heart's bottomless pit and shrinking | B |
| Who have known the lure and mockery of hoping | B |
| The comic terrible uselessness of thinking | B |
| - | |
| O gay and passionate gloomy and serene | X |
| Your quivering fingers laugh and weep and curse | Y |
| For all the phantoms you have ever been | Z |
| Yet would you wish another universe | Y |
| - | |
| Let peace come if it will your last long note | A2 |
| Dies on the quiet breast of space and now | B2 |
| They clap I see again your square frock coat | A2 |
| Dark foreign fiddler you have stopped you bow | B2 |
John Collings Squire, Sir
(1)
Poem topics: , Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
Submit Spanish Translation
Submit German Translation
Submit French Translation
Write your comment about To A Musician poem by John Collings Squire, Sir
Best Poems of John Collings Squire, Sir