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
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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…
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