Sketch Of A Political Character Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: AABBCCDDEEFFGG HHIJKKLLMMNNOOPPQQCC RR EESS| There is a race of men who master life | A |
| Their victory being inversely as their strife | A |
| Who capture by refraining from pursuit | B |
| Shake not the bough yet load their hands with fruit | B |
| The earth's high places who attain to fill | C |
| By most indomitably sitting still | C |
| While others full upon the fortress hurled | D |
| Lay fiery siege to the embattled world | D |
| Of such rude arts their natures feel no need | E |
| Greatly inert they lazily succeed | E |
| Find in the golden mean their proper bliss | F |
| And doing nothing never do amiss | F |
| But lapt in men's good graces live and die | G |
| By all regretted nobody knows why | G |
| - | |
| Cast in this fortunate Olympian mould | H |
| The admirable behold | H |
| Whom naught could dazzle or mislead unless | I |
| 'Twere the wild light of fatal cautiousness | J |
| Who never takes a step from his own door | K |
| But he looks backward ere he looks before | K |
| When once he starts it were too much to say | L |
| He visibly gets farther on his way | L |
| But all allow he ponders well his course | M |
| For future uses hoarding present force | M |
| The flippant deem him slow and saturnine | N |
| The summed up phlegm of that illustrious line | N |
| But we his honest adversaries who | O |
| More highly prize him than his false friends do | O |
| Frankly admire that simple mass and weight | P |
| A solid Roman pillar of the State | P |
| So inharmonious with the baser style | Q |
| Of neighbouring columns grafted on the pile | Q |
| So proud and imperturbable and chill | C |
| Chosen and matched so excellently ill | C |
| He seems a monument of pensive grace | R |
| Ah how pathetically out of place | R |
| - | |
| Would that some call he could not choose but heed | E |
| Of private passion or of public need | E |
| At last might sting to life that slothful power | S |
| And snare him into greatness for an hour | S |
William Watson
(1)
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