Bel Canto Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABACABDD EFEGEGHI JKJLJLMM JJJNJJJJ LOLOLOPP QRQOQOHH SJSJHJOO TUTVTUHH JIJIVIJJ WHWHWHII IHIHTJHH XIXIXIHH LYLYLYHH IQJQJQII LHHZLHA2A2 QUQB2QUHH HXC2XC2XII LILILIJXThe sun is high the seaside air is sharp | A |
And salty light reveals the Mayan School | B |
The Irish hope their names are on the harp | A |
We see the sheep's advertisement for wool | C |
Boulders are here to throw against a tarp | A |
From which comes bursting forth a puzzled mule | B |
Perceval seizes it and mounts it then | D |
The blood dimmed tide recedes and then comes in again | D |
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Fateful connections that we make to things | E |
Whose functioning's oblivious to our lives | F |
How sidewise news of light from darkness springs | E |
How blue bees buzz from big blooms back to hives | G |
And make the honey while the queen bee sings | E |
Leadbelly in arrangements by Burl Ives | G |
How long ago I saw the misted pine trees | H |
And hoped no matter how to get them into poetry | I |
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Stendhal at fifty gazing as it happened | J |
On Rome from the Janiculum decided | K |
That one way he could give his life a stipend | J |
Was to suspend his being Amour's fighter | L |
And get to know himself Here he had ripened | J |
Accomplished loved and lived was a great writer | L |
But never had explored in true detail | M |
His childhood and his growing up So he set sail | M |
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Composing La Vie de Henry Brulard | J |
But in five hundred pages scarcely got | J |
Beyond his seventeenth year for it is hard | J |
To take into account what happens here | N |
And fit it all onto an index card | J |
Even one moment of it is too hot | J |
Complex and cannibalistically connected | J |
To every other which is what might be expected | J |
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Sterne's hero has a greater problem never | L |
Getting much past his birth I've had a third one | O |
My autobiography if I should ever | L |
Start out to write it quickly seems a burden | O |
An I will do that the next time endeavor | L |
Whatever life I do write's an absurd one | O |
As if some crazy person with a knife | P |
Cut up and made a jigsaw puzzle of a life | P |
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In any case a life that's hardly possible | Q |
In the conditions that we really live in | R |
Where easy flying leaps to inaccessible | Q |
Mountainy places where love is a given | O |
And misery if there infinitesimal | Q |
Are quite the norm Here none by pain is driven | O |
That is not curable by the romanza | H |
That's kept in readiness to finish any stanza | H |
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Whatever then I see at this late stage of | S |
My life I may or may not have stayed ignorant | J |
Of that great book I've strained to write one page of | S |
Yet always hoping my page was significant | J |
Be it or not for me and for the ages | H |
I leave it as it is Yet as a figurant | J |
Who has not stopped I'm writing in addition | O |
More lines to clarify my present disposition | O |
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One person in a million finds out something | T |
Perhaps each fifty years and that is knowledge | U |
Newton Copernicus Einstein are cunning | T |
The rest of us just rise and go to college | V |
With no more hope to come home with the bunting | T |
Than a stray dachshund going through the village | U |
However what a treat our small successes | H |
Of present and of past at various addresses | H |
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To be in all those places where I tarried | J |
Too little or too late or bright and early | I |
To love again the first woman I married | J |
To marvel at such things as melancholy | I |
Sophistication drums a baby carriage | V |
A John Cage concert heard at Alice Tully | I |
How my desire when young to be a poet | J |
Made me attentive and oblivious every moment | J |
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Do you remember Oceanview the Fair | W |
The heights above the river The canoes | H |
The place we beached them and the grass was bare | W |
Those days the sandbars gave our knees a truce | H |
The crooked line of pantry shelves with pear | W |
And cherry jam And Pancho with his noose | H |
Do you remember Full and Half and Empty | I |
Do you remember sorrow standing in the entry | I |
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Do you remember thought and talking plainly | I |
Michel and I went walking after Chartres | H |
Cathedral had engaged our spirits mainly | I |
By giving us an insight into Barthes | H |
Michel said he was capable of feigning | T |
Renewed intentions of the soul's deep part | J |
Like this cathedral's artificial forces | H |
That press a kind of artless thought into our faces | H |
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And yet The moor is dark beneath the moon | X |
The porcupine turns over on its belly | I |
And new conceptions rap at the cocoon | X |
Civilization dealing with us fairly | I |
For once releases its Erectheion | X |
Of understanding which consoles us nearly | I |
Later we study certain characteristics | H |
That may give us a better chance with the statistics | H |
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How much I'd like to live the whole thing over | L |
But making some corrections as I go | Y |
To be a better husband and a father | L |
Be with my babies on a sled in snow | Y |
By twenty I'd have understood my mother | L |
And by compassion found a way to know | Y |
What separates the what I started out as | H |
From what I sometimes wished I was when in the mountains | H |
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To be once more the one who what was worthy | I |
Of courtship courted it was quite as stressful | Q |
As trying to er as they say give birth to | J |
A poem and as often unsuccessful | Q |
But it was nice to be sublime and flirty | J |
With radiant girls and in some strange way restful | Q |
I could be everything I wasn't usually | I |
And then to get somebody else to feel it mutually | I |
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In poems the same problem or a similar | L |
Desire of course not only to do old things | H |
But things unheard of yet by nuns or visitors | H |
And of the melancholy finch be co finch | Z |
In singing songs with such a broad parameter | L |
That seamstresses would stare forget to sew things | H |
Astronauts quit the sky athletes the stadium | A2 |
To hear them and the rest of what they hear be tedium | A2 |
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Such wild desires I think it's recognizable | Q |
Are part and parcel of the Human Image | U |
And in a way I'd say no less predictable | Q |
Than Popeye's feelings for a can of spinach | B2 |
Yet if we're set on course by the Invisible | Q |
All pre determined what about the language | U |
That teases me each morning with its leanings | H |
Toward the Unprogrammed Altitudes beyond its meanings | H |
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Are you O particles O atoms nominatives | H |
Like Percevals and Stendhals set in motion | X |
By some Ordaining Will that is definitive | C2 |
Is this invading chill and high emotion | X |
This tendency to know one is regenerative | C2 |
Is this all tidal take home like the ocean | X |
Be what you may my thanks for your society | I |
Through the long life I've had your jokes and your variety | I |
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The warmth you've shown in giving me a temperature | L |
That I can live with and the strength you've shared with me | I |
In arms and legs and for your part in literature | L |
What can I say It is as if life stared at me | I |
And kissed my lips and left it as a signature | L |
Thank you for that and thank you for preparing me | I |
For love itself and friendship its co agent | J |
Thank you for being this and for its inspiration | X |
Kenneth Koch
(1)
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