A Familiar Letter - To Several Correspondents Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: ABAB CDED EFGH IJIJ IKIK ELEL MIMI NMNM OPOP QRQR AIAI MSMS MTMT MUMU MMMM VWVW MXMX VIVI YMYM VZVZ| Yes write if you want to there's nothing like trying | A |
| Who knows what a treasure your casket may hold | B |
| I'll show you that rhyming's as easy as lying | A |
| If you'll listen to me while the art I unfold | B |
| - | |
| Here's a book full of words one can choose as he fancies | C |
| As a painter his tint as a workman his tool | D |
| Just think all the poems and plays and romances | E |
| Were drawn out of this like the fish from a pool | D |
| - | |
| You can wander at will through its syllabled mazes | E |
| And take all you want not a copper they cost | F |
| What is there to hinder your picking out phrases | G |
| For an epic as clever as Paradise Lost | H |
| - | |
| Don't mind if the index of sense is at zero | I |
| Use words that run smoothly whatever they mean | J |
| Leander and Lilian and Lillibullero | I |
| Are much the same thing in the rhyming machine | J |
| - | |
| There are words so delicious their sweetness will smother | I |
| That boarding school flavor of which we 're afraid | K |
| There is lush is a good one and swirl another | I |
| Put both in one stanza its fortune is made | K |
| - | |
| With musical murmurs and rhythmical closes | E |
| You can cheat us of smiles when you've nothing to tell | L |
| You hand us a nosegay of milliner's roses | E |
| And we cry with delight Oh how sweet they do smell | L |
| - | |
| Perhaps you will answer all needful conditions | M |
| For winning the laurels to which you aspire | I |
| By docking the tails of the two prepositions | M |
| I' the style o' the bards you so greatly admire | I |
| - | |
| As for subjects of verse they are only too plenty | N |
| For ringing the changes on metrical chimes | M |
| A maiden a moonbeam a lover of twenty | N |
| Have filled that great basket with bushels of rhymes | M |
| - | |
| Let me show you a picture 'tis far from irrelevant | O |
| By a famous old hand in the arts of design | P |
| 'T is only a photographed sketch of an elephant | O |
| The name of the draughtsman was Rembrandt of Rhine | P |
| - | |
| How easy no troublesome colors to lay on | Q |
| It can't have fatigued him no not in the least | R |
| A dash here and there with a hap hazard crayon | Q |
| And there stands the wrinkled skinned baggy limbed beast | R |
| - | |
| Just so with your verse 't is as easy as sketching | A |
| You can reel off a song without knitting your brow | I |
| As lightly as Rembrandt a drawing or etching | A |
| It is nothing at all if you only know how | I |
| - | |
| Well imagine you've printed your volume of verses | M |
| Your forehead is wreathed with the garland of fame | S |
| Your poems the eloquent school boy rehearses | M |
| Her album the school girl presents for your name | S |
| - | |
| Each morning the post brings you autograph letters | M |
| You'll answer them promptly an hour is n't much | T |
| For the honor of sharing a page with your betters | M |
| With magistrates members of Congress and such | T |
| - | |
| Of course you're delighted to serve the committees | M |
| That come with requests from the country all round | U |
| You would grace the occasion with poems and ditties | M |
| When they've got a new schoolhouse or poor house or pound | U |
| - | |
| With a hymn for the saints and a song for the sinners | M |
| You go and are welcome wherever you please | M |
| You're a privileged guest at all manner of dinners | M |
| You've a seat on the platform among the grandees | M |
| - | |
| At length your mere presence becomes a sensation | V |
| Your cup of enjoyment is filled to its brim | W |
| With the pleasure Horatian of digitmonstration | V |
| As the whisper runs round of That's he or That Is him | W |
| - | |
| But remember O dealer in phrases sonorous | M |
| So daintily chosen so tunefully matched | X |
| Though you soar with the wings of the cherubim o'er us | M |
| The ovum was human from which you were hatched | X |
| - | |
| No will of your own with its puny compulsion | V |
| Can summon the spirit that quickens the lyre | I |
| It comes if at all like the Sibyl's convulsion | V |
| And touches the brain with a finger of fire | I |
| - | |
| So perhaps after all it's as well to be quiet | Y |
| If you've nothing you think is worth saying in prose | M |
| As to furnish a meal of their cannibal diet | Y |
| To the critics by publishing as you propose | M |
| - | |
| But it's all of no use and I 'm sorry I've written | V |
| I shall see your thin volume some day on my shelf | Z |
| For the rhyming tarantula surely has bitten | V |
| And music must cure you so pipe it yourself | Z |
Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1)
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A Familiar Letter - To Several Correspondents is a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes. This page includes the poem text, poet information, related topics, comments, and similar poems.
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