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O World! O Life! O Time! On whose last steps I climb, Trembling at that where I had stood before; When will return the glory of your prime? No more -Oh, never more! Out of the day and night A joy has taken flight: Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight No more -Oh, never more! Poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Lament at first made me think of oh poor me poor me! He may have been thinking that while he was writing it but he sure gave it a poetic flair. There are two stanzas both containing five lines. I like this congruity because when looking at the poem its like you looking at one side of the mirror and the other. The lines even almost perfectly match in legth with the corresponding other side of the poem. All the lines match in iambic pentamiter except the third lines. In the first stanza it is ten and in the second stanza on line three it is nine. The first lines in both stanzas have six syllables, the second six, the third off, the fourth have ten, and the last have six. I wonder why only the third lines are not matching? Maybe Percy believes what the Native Americans believed when they were making a piece of art work. The Native Americans would make one mistake because they thought the soul of the piece could not escape if it was pefect. Maybe Percy believes they same thing happens to his poems, that the soul, the essence of his poem will be trapped if he does not make one little mistake. Another interesting thing about this work is the rhyme scheme. It follows a, a, b, a, b in both stanzas, I have never before seen a poem follow quite that pattern where the one a line gets repeated three times instead of the usual two.
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