The Room Beneath the Rafters
Ella Wheeler Wilcox 1855 (Janesville) – 1919
Sometimes when I have dropped asleep,
Draped in soft luxurious gloom,
Across my drowsy mind will creep
The memory of another room,
Where resinous knots in roofboards made
A frescoing of light and shade,
And sighing poplars brushed their leaves
Against the humbly sloping eaves.
Again I fancy in my dreams
I'm lying in my trundle-bed.
I seem to see the bare old beams
And unhewn rafters overhead;
The hornet's shrill falsetto hum
I hear again, and see him come
Forth from his mud-walled hanging house,
Dressed in his black and yellow blouse.
There, summer dawns, in sleep I stirred,
And wove into my fair dream's woof
The chattering of a martin bird,
Or rain-drops pattering on the roof.
Or, half awake, and half in fear,
I saw the spider spinning near
His pretty castle, where the fly
Should come to ruin by and by.
And there I fashioned from my brain
Youth's shining structures in the air,
I did not wholly build in vain,
For some were lasting, firm and fair.
And I am one who lives to say
My life has held more good than gray,
And that the splendor of the real
Surpassed my early dream's ideal.
But still I love to wander back
To that old time and that old place;
To thread my way o'er Memory's track,
And catch the early morning's grace
In that quaint room beneath the rafter,
That echoed to my childish laughter;
To dream again the dreams that grew
More beautiful as they came true.
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 1:19 min read
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Quick analysis:
Scheme | ABABCCDD EFEFGGHH IJIJKKLL MNMNOOPP QRQRSSTT |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,390 |
Words | 256 |
Stanzas | 5 |
Stanza Lengths | 8, 8, 8, 8, 8 |
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"The Room Beneath the Rafters" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 29 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/10893/the-room-beneath-the-rafters>.
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