Solar Eclipse
Siegfried Sassoon 1886 (Matfield) – 1967 (Heytesbury)
Observe these blue solemnities of sky
Offering for the academes of after-ages
A mythologic welkin freaked with white!
Listen : one tiny tinkling rivulet
Accentuates the super-sultry stillness
That drones on ripening landscapes which imply
Serene Parnassus plagued with amorous goats.
* * * *
Far down the vale Apollo has pursued
The noon-bedazzled nymph whose hunted heart
Holds but the trampling panic whence it fled,
And now the heavens are piled with darkening trouble
And counter-march of clouds that troop intent
Fire-crested into conflict.
Daphne turns
At the wood's edge in bronze and olive gloom:
Sickness assails the sun whose blazing disc
Dwindles : the Eden of those auburn slopes
Lours in the tarnished copper of eclipse.
Yet virgin in her god-impelled approach
To Graeco-Roman ravishment, she waits
While the unsated python slides to crush
Her lust-eluding fleetness. Envious Jove
Rumbles Olympus. All the classic world
Leans breathless toward the legend she creates.
From thunderous vapour smites the immortal beam . . .
Then, crowned with fangs of foliage, flames the god.
* * * *
' Apollo ! ' ... Up the autumn valley echoes
A hollow shout from nowhere. Daphne's limbs
Lapse into laureldom : green-shadowed flesh
Writhes aborescent; glamour obscures her gaze
With blind and bossed distortion. She escapes.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 07, 2023
- 1:02 min read
- 88 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | AXB BXAX XXXXXXXXXXX XCXXXC XX XXXXX |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 1,297 |
Words | 207 |
Stanzas | 4 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 16, 6, 8 |
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"Solar Eclipse" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 30 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/34928/solar-eclipse>.
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