The Heremite Toad Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABAB CDCD DEDE FGFG HIHJ GKGK GDGD HAHA LHLH MHMH| A human skull in a church yard lay | A |
| For the church was a wreck and the tombstones old | B |
| On the graves of their dead were rotting away | A |
| To the like of their long watched mould | B |
| - | |
| And an heremite toad in this desolate seat | C |
| Had made him an hermitage long agone | D |
| Where the ivy frail with its delicate feet | C |
| Could creep o'er his cell of bone | D |
| - | |
| And the ground was dark and the springing dawn | D |
| When it struck from the tottering stones of each grave | E |
| A glimmering silver the dawn drops wan | D |
| This skull and its ivy would lave | E |
| - | |
| - | |
| - | |
| The night her crescent had thinly hung | F |
| From a single star o'er the shattered wall | G |
| And its feeble light on the stone was flung | F |
| Where I sat to hear him call | G |
| - | |
| And I heard this heremite toad as he sate | H |
| In the gloom of his ghastly hermitage | I |
| To himself and the gloom all hollowly prate | H |
| Like a misanthropic sage | J |
| - | |
| O beauty is well and is wealth to all | G |
| But wealth without beauty makes fair | K |
| And beauty with wealth brings wooers tall | G |
| Whom she snares in her golden hair | K |
| - | |
| Tho' beauty be well and be wealth to all | G |
| And wealth without beauty draw men | D |
| Beauty must come to the vaulted wall | G |
| And what is wealth to her then | D |
| - | |
| This skeleton face was beautiful erst | H |
| These sockets could mammonites sway | A |
| So she barter'd her beauty for gold accurs'd | H |
| But both have vanished away | A |
| - | |
| But beauty is well when the mind it reveals | L |
| More beautiful is than the head | H |
| For beauty and wealth the tomb congeals | L |
| But the mind grows lovelier dead | H |
| - | |
| And he blinked at the moon from his grinning cell | M |
| And the darnels and burdocks around | H |
| Bowed down in the night and I murmured Well | M |
| For I deemed his judgment sound | H |
Madison Julius Cawein
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