Bookish

Lewis the poet was a master of rhyme. He was especially good at internal rhyme: something your brain registers as you read, even if your eye and ear don't. Many of his poems are dense with rhymes, as dense as plumcake. Take, for example, the poem I just posted: “The Day with a White Mark." I read this poem many times without stopping to notice how much is going on besides the obvious ABCB pattern. This is my crude attempt to show the rhyme (italics) and alliteration (underlined), and I'm sure there's much I've missed, to say nothing of what those particular sounds do to the speed, the emotion, the sense of the lines. The more you look the more you see, and it all leads to the question: how on earth do you write a poem like this?

All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness:
Was it an elf in the blood? or a bird in the brain? or even part
Of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud uplifted wave
Of a journeying angel’s transit roaring over and through my heart?

Who knows if ever it will come again, now the day closes?
No-one can give me, or take away, that key. All depends
On the elf, the bird, or the angel. I doubt if the angel himself
Is free to choose when sudden heaven in man begins or ends.

My garden’s spoiled, my holidays are cancelled, the omens harden;
The plann’d and unplann’d miseries deepen; the knots draw tight.
Reason kept telling me all day my mood was out of season.
It was, too. In the dark ahead the breakers only are white.

Yet I –I could have kissed the very scullery taps. The colour of
My day was like a peacock’s chest. In at each sense there stole
Ripplings and dewy sprinkles of delight that with them drew
Fine threads of memory through the vibrant thickness of the soul.

As though there were transparent earths and luminous trees should grow there,
And shining roots worked visibly far down below one’s feet,
So everything, the tick of the clock, the cock crowing in the yard
Probing my soil, woke diverse buried hearts of mine to beat,

Recalling either adolescent heights and the inaccessible
Longings and ice-sharp joys that shook my body and turned me pale,
Or humbler pleasures, chuckling as it were in the ear, mumbling
Of glee, as kindly animals talk in a children’s tale.