At The Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: A BBBBBBCC DDBBEEFFG HHIIDDDD JKK LLF DDDDDD MMDDDDDD GGGGDDNNOMPPMMMMQQMMDECEMBER | A |
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I SUPPOSE it's myself that you're making allusion to | B |
And bringing the sense of dismay and confusion to | B |
Of course some must speak they are always selected to | B |
But pray what's the reason that I am expected to | B |
I'm not fond of wasting my breath as those fellows do | B |
That want to be blowing forever as bellows do | B |
Their legs are uneasy but why will you jog any | C |
That long to stay quiet beneath the mahogany | C |
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Why why call me up with your battery of flatteries | D |
You say 'He writes poetry ' that 's what the matter is | D |
'It costs him no trouble a pen full of ink or two | B |
And the poem is done in the time of a wink or two | B |
As for thoughts never mind take the ones that lie uppermost | E |
And the rhymes used by Milton and Byron and Tupper most | E |
The lines come so easy at one end he jingles 'em | F |
At the other with capital letters he shingles 'em | F |
Why the thing writes itself and before he's half done with it | G |
He hates to stop writing he has such good fun with it ' | - |
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Ah that is the way in which simple ones go about | H |
And draw a fine picture of things they don't know about | H |
We all know a kitten but come to a catamount | I |
The beast is a stranger when grown up to that amount | I |
A stranger we rather prefer should n't visit us | D |
A felis whose advent is far from felicitous | D |
The boy who can boast that his trap has just got a mouse | D |
Must n't draw it and write underneath 'hippopotamus' | D |
Or say unveraciously 'This is an elephant ' | - |
Don't think let me beg these examples irrelevant | J |
What they mean is just this that a thing to be painted well | K |
Should always be something with which we're acquainted well | K |
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You call on your victim for 'things he has plenty of | L |
Those copies of verses no doubt at least twenty of | L |
His desk is crammed full for he always keeps writing 'em | F |
And reading to friends as his way of delighting 'em ' | - |
I tell you this writing of verses means business | D |
It makes the brain whirl in a vortex of dizziness | D |
You think they are scrawled in the languor of laziness | D |
I tell you they're squeezed by a spasm of craziness | D |
A fit half as bad as the staggering vertigos | D |
That seize a poor fellow and down in the dirt he goes | D |
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And therefore it chimes with the word's etytology | M |
That the sons of Apollo are great on apology | M |
For the writing of verse is a struggle mysterious | D |
And the gayest of rhymes is a matter that's serious | D |
For myself I'm relied on by friends in extremities | D |
And I don't mind so much if a comfort to them it is | D |
'T is a pleasure to please and the straw that can tickle us | D |
Is a source of enjoyment though slightly ridiculous | D |
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I am up for a something and since I 've begun with it | G |
I must give you a toast now before I have done with it | G |
Let me pump at my wits as they pumped the Cochituate | G |
That moistened it may be the very last bit you ate | G |
Success to our publishers authors and editors | D |
To our debtors good luck pleasant dreams to our creditors | D |
May the monthly grow yearly till all we are groping for | N |
Has reached the fulfilment we're all of us hoping for | N |
Till the bore through the tunnel it makes me let off a sigh | O |
To think it may possibly ruin my prophecy | M |
Has been punned on so often 't will never provoke again | P |
One mild adolescent to make the old joke again | P |
Till abstinent all go to meeting society | M |
Has forgotten the sense of the word inebriety | M |
Till the work that poor Hannah and Bridget and Phillis do | M |
The humanized civilized female gorillas do | M |
Till the roughs as we call them grown loving and dutiful | Q |
Shall worship the true and the pure and the beautiful | Q |
And preying no longer as tiger and vulture do | M |
All read the 'Atlantic' as persons of culture do | M |
Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1)
Poem topics: , Print This Poem , Rhyme Scheme
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