My Last Afternoon With Uncle Devereux Winslow Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: A BCDCECFGDGHI JKLIIMNOPQ DHKDDRIDJGSKTE QQD KDKGKUQDU DDGVDDKKVI KWKKKVTDDKEV DD KEDKDKEXKTIK KKIDIDDEEEDDDID DEK KKDIDYKK DDDDED VVKDVKXVKKDEDDQDQDKR TTDDDU OKKthe stone porch of my Grandfather s summer house | A |
- | |
I | - |
I won t go with you I want to stay with Grandpa | B |
That s how I threw cold water | C |
on my Mother and Father s | D |
watery martini pipe dreams at Sunday dinner | C |
Fontainebleau Mattapoisett Puget Sound | E |
Nowhere was anywhere after a summer | C |
at my Grandfather s farm | F |
Diamond pointed athirst and Norman | G |
its alley of poplars | D |
paraded from Grandmother s rose garden | G |
to a scary stand of virgin pine | H |
scrub and paths forever pioneering | I |
- | |
- | |
One afternoon in | J |
I sat on the stone porch looking through | K |
screens as black grained as drifting coal | L |
Tockytock tockytock | I |
clumped our Alpine Edwardian cuckoo clock | I |
slung with strangled wooden game | M |
Our farmer was cementing a root house under the hill | N |
One of my hands was cool on a pile | O |
of black earth the other warm | P |
on a pile of lime All about me | Q |
- | |
- | |
were the works of my Grandfather s hands | D |
snapshots of his Liberty Bell silver mine | H |
his high school at Stuttgart am Neckar | K |
stogie brown beams fools gold nuggets | D |
octagonal red tiles | D |
sweaty with a secret dank crummy with ant stale | R |
a Rocky Mountain chaise longue | I |
its legs shellacked saplings | D |
A pastel pale Huckleberry Finn | J |
fished with a broom straw in a basin | G |
hollowed out of a millstone | S |
Like my Grandfather the d cor | K |
was manly comfortable | T |
overbearing disproportioned | E |
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What were those sunflowers Pumpkins floating shoulder high | - |
It was sunset Sadie and Nellie | Q |
bearing pitchers of ice tea | Q |
oranges lemons mint and peppermints | D |
and the jug of shandygaff | - |
which Grandpa made by blending half and half | - |
yeasty wheezing homemade sarsaparilla with beer | K |
The farm entitled Char de sa | D |
in the Social Register | K |
was named for my Grandfather s children | G |
Charlotte Devereux and Sarah | K |
No one had died there in my lifetime | U |
Only Cinder our Scottie puppy | Q |
paralyzed from gobbling toads | D |
I sat mixing black earth and lime | U |
- | |
- | |
II | - |
I was five and a half | - |
My formal pearl gray shorts | D |
had been worn for three minutes | D |
My perfection was the Olympian | G |
poise of my models in the imperishable autumn | V |
display windows | D |
of Rogers Peet s boys store below the State House | D |
in Boston Distorting drops of water | K |
pinpricked my face in the basin s mirror | K |
I was a stuffed toucan | V |
with a bibulous multicolored beak | I |
- | |
- | |
III | - |
Up in the air | K |
by the lakeview window in the billiards room | W |
lurid in the doldrums of the sunset hour | K |
my Great Aunt Sarah | K |
was learning Samson and Delilah | K |
She thundered on the keyboard of her dummy piano | V |
with gauze curtains like a boudoir table | T |
accordionlike yet soundless | D |
It had been bought to spare the nerves | D |
of my Grandmother | K |
tone deaf quick as a cricket | E |
now needing a fourth for Auction | V |
and casting a thirsty eye | - |
on Aunt Sarah risen like the phoenix | D |
from her bed of troublesome snacks and Tauchnitz classics | D |
- | |
- | |
Forty years earlier | K |
twenty auburn headed | E |
grasshopper notes of genius | D |
Family gossip says Aunt Sarah | K |
tilted her archaic Athenian nose | D |
and jilted an Astor | K |
Each morning she practiced | E |
on the grand piano at Symphony Hall | X |
deathlike in the off season summer | K |
its naked Greek statues draped with purple | T |
like the saints in Holy Week | I |
On the recital day she failed to appear | K |
- | |
- | |
IV | - |
I picked with a clean finger nail at the blue anchor | K |
on my sailor blouse washed white as a spinnaker | K |
What in the world was I wishing | I |
A sail colored horse browsing in the bullrushes | D |
A fluff of the west wind puffing | I |
my blouse kiting me over our seven chimneys | D |
troubling the waters | D |
As small as sapphires were the ponds Quittacus Snippituit | E |
and Assawompset halved by the Island | E |
where my Uncle s duck blind | E |
floated in a barrage of smoke clouds | D |
Double barreled shotguns | D |
stuck out like bundles of baby crow bars | D |
A single sculler in a camouflaged kayak | I |
was quacking to the decoys | D |
- | |
- | |
At the cabin between the waters | D |
the nearest windows were already boarded | E |
Uncle Devereux was closing camp for the winter | K |
As if posed for the engagement photograph | - |
he was wearing his severe | K |
war uniform of a volunteer Canadian officer | K |
Daylight from the doorway riddled his student posters | D |
tacked helter skelter on walls as raw as a boardwalk | I |
Mr Punch a water melon in hockey tights | D |
was tossing off a decanter of Scotch | Y |
La Belle France in a red white and blue toga | K |
was accepting the arm of her protector | K |
the ingenu and porcine Edward VII | - |
The pre war music hall belles | D |
had goose necks glorious signatures beauty moles | D |
and coils of hair like rooster tails | D |
The finest poster was two or three young men in khaki kilts | D |
being bushwhacked on the veldt | E |
They were almost life size | D |
- | |
- | |
My Uncle was dying at twenty nine | V |
You are behaving like children | V |
said my Grandfather | K |
when my Uncle and Aunt left their three baby daughters | D |
and sailed for Europe on a last honeymoon | V |
I cowered in terror | K |
I wasn t a child at all | X |
unseen and all seeing I was Agrippina | V |
in the Golden House of Nero | K |
Near me was the white measuring door | K |
my Grandfather had penciled with my Uncle s heights | D |
In he had stopped growing at just six feet | E |
While I sat on the tiles | D |
and dug at the anchor on my sailor blouse | D |
Uncle Devereux stood behind me | Q |
He was as brushed as Bayard our riding horse | D |
His face was putty | Q |
His blue coat and white trousers | D |
grew sharper and straighter | K |
His coat was a blue jay s tail | R |
his trousers were solid cream from the top of the bottle | T |
He was animated hierarchical | T |
like a ginger snap man in a clothes press | D |
He was dying of the incurable Hodgkin s disease | D |
My hands were warm then cool on the piles | D |
of earth and lime | U |
- | |
- | |
a black pile and a white pile | O |
Come winter | K |
Uncle Devereux would blend to the one color | K |
Robert Lowell
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