By A Child's Bed
Duncan Campbell Scott 1862 (Ottawa) – 1947
She breathèd deep,
And stepped from out life's stream
Upon the shore of sleep;
And parted from the earthly noise,
Leaving her world of toys,
To dwell a little in a dell of dream.
Then brooding on the love I hold so free,
My fond possessions come to be
Clouded with grief;
These fairy kisses,
This archness innocent,
Sting me with sorrow and disturbed content:
I think of what my portion might have been;
A dearth of blisses,
A famine of delights,
If I had never had what now I value most;
Till all I have seems something I have lost;
A desert underneath the garden shows,
And in a mound of cinders roots the rose.
Here then I linger by the little bed,
Till all my spirit's sphere,
Grows one half brightness and the other dead,
One half all joy, the other vague alarms;
And, holding each the other half in fee,
Floats like the growing moon
That bears implicitly
Her lessening pearl of shadow
Clasped in the crescent silver of her arms.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 53 sec read
- 119 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABACCB DDXXXXXCXXXEE FXFGDXDXG |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 916 |
Words | 176 |
Stanzas | 3 |
Stanza Lengths | 6, 13, 9 |
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"By A Child's Bed" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/8328/by-a-child's-bed>.
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