Limitations
Siegfried Sassoon 1886 (Matfield) – 1967 (Heytesbury)
If you could crowd them into forty lines!
Yes; you can do it, once you get a start;
All that you want is waiting in your head,
For long-ago you’ve learnt it off by heart.
. . . .
Begin: your mind’s the room where you have slept,
(Don’t pause for rhymes), till twilight woke you early.
The window stands wide-open, as it stood
When tree-tops loomed enchanted for a child
Hearing the dawn’s first thrushes through the wood
Warbling (you know the words) serene and wild.
You’ve said it all before: you dreamed of Death,
A dim Apollo in the bird-voiced breeze
That drifts across the morning veiled with showers,
While golden weather shines among dark trees.
You’ve got your limitations; let them sing,
And all your life will waken with a cry:
Why should you halt when rapture’s on the wing
And you’ve no limit but the cloud-flocked sky?...
But some chap shouts, ‘Here, stop it; that’s been done!’—
As God might holloa to the rising sun,
And then relent, because the glorying rays
Remind Him of green-glinting Eden days,
And Adam’s trustful eyes as he looks up
From carving eagles on his beechwood cup.
Young Adam knew his job; he could condense
Life to an eagle from the unknown immense....
Go on, whoever you are; your lines can be
A whisper in the music from the weirs
Of song that plunge and tumble toward the sea
That is the uncharted mercy of our tears.
. . . .
I told you it was easy! ... Words are fools
Who follow blindly, once they get a lead.
But thoughts are kingfishers that haunt the pools
Of quiet; seldom-seen: and all you need
Is just that flash of joy above your dream.
So, when those forty platitudes are done,
You’ll hear a bird-note calling from the stream
That wandered through your childhood; and the sun
Will strike the old flaming wonder from the waters....
And there’ll be forty lines not yet begun.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 26, 2023
- 1:38 min read
- 149 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABCB XDEFEF XGHG IJIJ KKLLMM NNDADX OCOXPKPKHK |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,856 |
Words | 327 |
Stanzas | 7 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 7, 4, 4, 6, 6, 11 |
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"Limitations" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 1 Jun 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/34900/limitations>.
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