The Graveyard

by tfawcus

Go slow, dear life, go slow;
death's knell I hear.
Cold grey stones
in sombre rows,

a chiselled ancestry
of those who've lived
from year to year,
now free from charnel's grasp,
their lives engraved
in brief, in lichened words.

My years, too, are nearly told.
Go slow, dear life, for me;
I fear these monuments,
these ghosts, this final Masonry.

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Recognized

#147
2019

I am experimenting with the use of the spondee in this poem. It is a metrical foot well suited to sombre pieces.

The Poetic Foundation defines a spondee as consisting of two accented syllables. They give, as an example of a spondaic word, 'hog-wild'. They also mention that Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, 'Pied Beauty', is heavily spondaic.

The spondee is not commonly used to any great extent in English verse. The molossus is even rarer. It is a metrical foot consisting of three accented syllables in a row. (e.g. Cold grey stones)

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Spondaic despondency

The Graveyard

by tfawcus

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