The Naked And The Nude Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: AABBCC DDEEFF GGHHII JJKKAA| For me the naked and the nude | A |
| By lexicographers construed | A |
| As synonyms that should express | B |
| The same deficiency of dress | B |
| Or shelter stand as wide apart | C |
| As love from lies or truth from art | C |
| - | |
| Lovers without reproach will gaze | D |
| On bodies naked and ablaze | D |
| The Hippocratic eye will see | E |
| In nakedness anatomy | E |
| And naked shines the Goddess when | F |
| She mounts her lion among men | F |
| - | |
| The nude are bold the nude are sly | G |
| To hold each treasonable eye | G |
| While draping by a showman's trick | H |
| Their dishabille in rhetoric | H |
| They grin a mock religious grin | I |
| Of scorn at those of naked skin | I |
| - | |
| The naked therefore who compete | J |
| Against the nude may know defeat | J |
| Yet when they both together tread | K |
| The briary pastures of the dead | K |
| By Gorgons with long whips pursued | A |
| How naked go the sometimes nude | A |
Robert Graves
(2)
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Howard Stein: The last line of the poem is given with an error: Graves's word is not "sometimes"; it is "sometime"--a word meaning "formerly" ("at one time"). In other words, in the (assumed) afterlife, the formerly nude are (a) stripped of their former pretentiousness, and (b) punished for it (by the Gorgons with their "long whips").
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