Lithe Lyrics

With sounds that gather round the ocean’s shore, the whimsied muse her lithesome being girds in utterances from unfathomed store. Akin to Alice dwelling in absurds the words go round and round in Cheshire grin when off I go on romp of rhyming thirds in artless manner, thus to just begin meandering without foregone design, so lines will somehow write themselves therein while lyric phrases choose to intertwine in threes, as Dante Alighieri’s do for epic opus ‘Comedy Divine’. I turn to Chaucer as the first who drew upon the terza rima for his scheme in English, joining poets in the queue, then on to Shelley, later in the stream, who famously composed his ‘West Wind Ode’ which lifts his voice o’er earth as if in dream throughout rhapsodic stanzas onward flowed across the universe as ‘dead thoughts’ tossed like withered leaves, in his romantic mode. And yet my impetus derived from Frost whose tercet rhyme “Acquainted with the Night” delves into darkness when the daytime’s lost. For oft I raise my gaze to starry height when melancholy dims the worldly light. ~ Harley White * * * * * * * * * The form of the poem is Terza Rima, and inspiration derived from the literary works referred to in the poem as well as some others…