Necrological Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABAB CDEA FGFG HCHC ICIC IJIJ CCCC IIII IKIK| The friar had said his paternosters duly | A |
| And scourged his limbs and afterwards would have slept | B |
| But with much riddling his head became unruly | A |
| He arose from the quiet monastery he crept | B |
| - | |
| Dawn lightened the place where the battle had been won | C |
| The people were dead it is easy he thought to die | D |
| These dead remained but the living were all gone | E |
| Gone with the wailing trumps of victory | A |
| - | |
| The dead men wore no raiment against the air | F |
| Bartholomew's men had spoiled them where they fell | G |
| In defeat the heroes' bodies were whitely bare | F |
| The field was white like meads of asphodel | G |
| - | |
| Not all were white some gory and fabulous | H |
| Whom the sword had pierced and then the grey wolf eaten | C |
| But the brother reasoned that heroes' flesh was thus | H |
| Flesh fails and the postured bones lie weather beaten | C |
| - | |
| The lords of chivalry lay prone and shattered | I |
| The gentle and the bodyguard of yeomen | C |
| Bartholomew's stroke went home but little it mattered | I |
| Bartholomew went to be stricken of other foemen | C |
| - | |
| Beneath the blue ogive of the firmament | I |
| Was a dead warrior clutching whose mighty knees | J |
| Was a leman who with her flame had warmed his tent | I |
| For him enduring all men's pleasantries | J |
| - | |
| Close by the sable stream that purged the plain | C |
| Lay the white stallion and his rider thrown | C |
| The great beast had spilled there his little brain | C |
| And the little groin of the knight was spilled by a stone | C |
| - | |
| The youth possessed him then of a crooked blade | I |
| Deep in the belly of a lugubrious wight | I |
| He fingered it well and it was cunningly made | I |
| But strange apparatus was if for a Carmelite | I |
| - | |
| Then he sat upon a hill and bowed his head | I |
| As under a riddle and in deep surmise | K |
| So still that he likened himself unto those dead | I |
| Whom the kites of Heaven solicited with sweet cries | K |
John Crowe Ransom
(1)
Poem topics: , Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
Submit Spanish Translation
Submit German Translation
Submit French Translation
Write your comment about Necrological poem by John Crowe Ransom
Best Poems of John Crowe Ransom