THE rooted liberty of flowers in breeze Is theirs, by national luck impulsive, terse, Tethered, uncaptured, rules obeyed "at ease," Time-strengthened laws of verse. Or they are like our seasons that admit Inflexion, not infraction: Autumn hoar, Winter more tender than our thoughts of it, But a year's steadfast four; Redundant syllables of Summer rain, And displaced accents of authentic Spring; Spondaic clouds above a gusty plain With dactyls on the wing. Not Common Law, but Equity, is theirs -- Our metres; play and agile foot askance, And distant, beckoning, blithely rhyming pairs, Unknown to classic France; Unknown to Italy. Ay, count, collate, Latins! with eye foreseeing on the time, And numbered fingers, and approaching fate On the appropriate rhyme. Nay, nobly our grave measures are decreed: Heroic, Alexandrine with the stay, Deliberate; or else like him whose speed Did outrun Peter, urgent in the break of day. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...THE WHITE RABBIT by KAREN SWENSON THE MASACRE AT SCIO by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT LINES FROM A MANUSCRIPT - 1807-8 by SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE BOSTON NURSERY RHYME: RHYME FOR A GEOLOGICAL BABY by FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS COOK BELVOIR CASTLE; WRITTEN AT THE REQUEST OF DUCHESS OF RUTLAND by GEORGE CRABBE TO A MISSAL OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY by HENRY AUSTIN DOBSON WASHINGTON'S HEADQUARTERS by HENRY NEHEMIAH DODGE |